The Last Five Years is the latest musical to hit the big screen, but if the current trend of movie-musicals continues, it won’t be the last. We take a look at this new release and a few other shows that deserve a film adaptation.
The Last Five Years, released in cinemas today, is an surprising choice to be gaining traction as the next big movie-musical, for a variety of reasons. It has a cult following in the musical theater community, but 90% of the general movie-going public wouldn’t have ever heard of it. It’s been produced onstage around the world, but it only ever made it to Off-Broadway in New York. The show’s writer, Jason Robert Brown, is a Tony Award-winner, but he’s no household name. None of its songs have ever been covered on Glee.
But most interestingly, it has a format that seems near-impossible to transfer into a film and have it remain engaging – The Last Five Years tells the story of a couple, Cathy and Jamie, showing the story of their relationship from different perspectives – Jamie’s in chronological order and Cathy’s in reverse, with the lead characters only performing together once, in the middle – at their wedding.
The aforementioned couple are portrayed by Anna Kendrick, who’s fresh off of yet another singing role in the rather more high profile Into The Woods, and Broadway darling Jeremy Jordan, known onscreen most notably as Jimmy Collins in Smash. The movie – directed and adapted by Richard LaGravenese, who fell in love with the show after hearing the original cast album – takes liberties with the musical’s unique format, providing more character interaction in scenes where a live audience was left to imagine the scenario taking place.
Anna Kendrick singing in movies equals a surefire hit, and The Last Five Years snagged her early. Kendrick took this role in 2012, before Into The Woods, even before her mainstream breakout Pitch Perfect was released in cinemas, and her co-star Jeremy Jordan is a joy to watch in any medium – get ready to swoon as he shows off his classic leading man qualities in cinematic high definition. This movie is going to work.
But all this has got us thinking about the genre from here on out. People are becoming more and more eager for movie-musical adaptations, and it seems like the little guys are carving out a space for themselves and proving that they can do this, too, just as much as the big names can. The Last Five Years had a budget of under $5 million, compared to the $61 million spent on Tom Hooper’s Les Miserables – the possibilities are opening up in terms of viable ways to create a musical film. So the big question is: what’s next? What musical theater show, big or small, should make it to the movies as soon as possible?
Next Page: Our musical-to-movie adaptation top 5 wishlist
Bare
Like The Last Five Years, Bare never made it to Broadway proper, but it has developed a cult following due to its phenomenal cast album and a lot of YouTube bootlegs. Following a 2000 Los Angeles debut and a 2004 run Off-Broadway, it has been revived consistently around the world, particularly picking up speed in – no pun intended – the last five years. Bare is set in a Catholic boarding school attended by Peter and Jason, two well-liked boys who are best friends, roommates, and, secretly, in love. The musical opens with their established relationship and follows what happens when everything falls to pieces during their senior year. It’s slightly outdated in today’s post-Glee world, stuffing every teen issue you can think of into two acts, but the story is genuinely heartbreaking and the music is phenomenal and very raw.
Bare was redeveloped in 2012, into a book musical (spoken dialogue interspersed with songs) with significant plot changes, but the original sung-through version (known as Bare: A Pop Opera) has remained more popular, because frankly, it’s better. It wouldn’t take much to shift the heavy-handed attitude into something realistic for a 2015 movie, or there’s also the option of setting the movie in the time of its original writing, the late ’90s. With the right casting and chemistry for Peter and Jason, it’s an opportunity to showcase some incredible young talent, and it also features a good handful of interesting female roles. If a studio played their cards right, this could turn into a whole The Fault In Our Stars situation and become Tumblr’s most beloved sad romance of the year.
In The Heights
New York and Broadway have always gone hand in hand. So many shows are inspired by life in the city that will one day host them – from West Side Story to Rent, to The Last Five Years itself. In The Heights joins these ranks as a worthy contender – the “heights” in question are Washington Heights, home to a large Latin American population and the setting of this unique New York story. In The Heights premiered Off-Broadway in 2007 and moved to Broadway in 2008, but the show’s composer, Lin-Manuel Miranda, had been working on it since 1999 while still in college. Miranda also joined the original cast as the show’s lead character and narrator, Usnavi, the owner of a bodega who dreams of returning to the Dominican Republic where he was born.
The plot doesn’t focus on a major event, it’s more understated than that. It’s a snapshot of people’s lives, of their culture, their dreams, and of the wins and losses that life hands to the Washington Heights neighborhood, or barrio, over a three-day period. We get to know a whole host of local immigrant families – the majority of Heights characters are Hispanic, and realistically slip in and out of Spanish in both dialogue and song, all looked over by the neighborhood matriarch, Abuela Claudia. The score is fast-paced, containing strong elements of rap and salsa – it’s a truly modern take on musical theater. For a long time, it’s been a stuffy and safe genre, and In The Heights is one of the shows that has really shaken things up in recent years, and pushed boundaries. A movie of In The Heights would not only be one of the most diverse and dynamic possible options, it would also be the most socially relevant.
La Cage Aux Folles
La Cage Aux Folles was originally written as a French non-musical play in 1973, and the play itself has been made into films both in French, and in English, as The Birdcage. Yeah, this is that story, but trust us, no matter how wonderful Nathan Lane and the late, great Robin Williams are in the 1996 comedy, the Broadway adaptation is better. La Cage Aux Folles, the musical, takes place in Saint-Tropez rather than Miami, but the basics are the same – Georges, a nightclub owner and Albin, his partner and the club’s leading drag performer, are faced with a few dilemmas when Georges’s son brings his fiancee, and her extremely conservative parents, home to meet the family.
The score, by veteran Broadway composer Jerry Herman, features some matchless numbers, including the empowering and defiant “I Am What I Am,” and the scenes range from slapstick hilarity to (temporary) devastation. Any movie adaptation of La Cage would need to be larger-than-life, glitzy, fun and heartwarming. Like Bare, this is a story about queer issues and tolerance, but you’d leave the cinema after this one feeling like you’ve been given a big hug, rather than a knife to the gut. By the way, John Barrowman has done the role of Albin in The West End, and, because he doesn’t age, he’d certainly still be up to scratch for a movie version.
Spring Awakening
Yes, it’s another show about Sad Teen Issues, but this one’s a period drama! Spring Awakening is a dark production dealing with issues including puberty, sexuality, abuse, abortion and mental health in a small town in 19th century Germany. The lead roles of Wendla and Melchior were originated by Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff in 2006, with Pitch Perfect’s Skylar Astin also part of the original cast.
Spring Awakening is a graphic and potentially triggering exploration of what happens when young adults are treated like children and left in the dark about what is happening in their minds and bodies – this kind of repression and naivety was likely quite common for the time, and in this circumstance, it has tragic results. An adaptation of this musical would have the freedom to get rough and heavy, and it shouldn’t shy away from that – this film should horrify people.
One of this musical’s most unusual aspects is the juxtaposition of its historical setting and its modern rock score. The songs are contemporary and quite fantastic, and this contrast of eras generally influences other aspects of the show, such as costuming, choreography and language. This could be an opportunity for a director, cinematographer or designer to do something really creative and original. A good Spring Awakening movie would be Oscar bait for sure.
The Book of Mormon
This is the big one. The blockbuster, the moneymaker, the smash hit of the season. All that jazz. The Book of Mormon has been a huge hit since its premiere in 2011 – it won nine Tony Awards, it was the fastest selling Broadway cast album in iTunes history, and it’s still impossible to get discount tickets to. It’s become an instant Broadway classic and a household name, and it’s a likely candidate for a film adaptation.
In case you live under a rock, The Book of Mormon is a satirical comedy about two young Mormon missionaries – golden boy Elder Price and hopeless case Elder Cunningham – who get sent to war-torn, AIDS-ridden Uganda on their mission and attempt to convert the African community that they meet. Things go about as well as you would expect. This show is offensive, irreverent, sweet, uplifting, very very clever and very very funny. It’s both utterly tongue-in-cheek and weirdly genuine, and the Mormon church itself has lodged no complaints about the musical, a fact that shocked the media but apparently did not surprise the show’s creators, Matt Stone and Trey Parker.
Making The Book of Mormon into a movie might be a little more sensitive than staging the musical, given the trend of injecting a bit more realism into film adaptations, but we’d suggest they can that concept and stick to all-out farce. Given that Stone and Parker are best known for creating South Park, we don’t imagine this would be a problem for them. The pair have previously announced that they are working on turning the book into a screenplay, but there’s no recent news, so who knows if a movie is legitimately in the pipeline? We hope it is.