The theatre is one of the few places where truly anything can happen. We suspend our disbelief long enough to go on a journey with the characters, and we don’t need realism in order to take us on the ride.
When word got out that recent Marymount Manhattan College graduate Cathy Thomas was to mount a full-scale Broadway production of the 1986 Jim Henson epic musical Labyrinth, the New York theatre crowd called it impossible, but ‘impossible’ was a word that Ms. Thomas did not know. In fact, when I asked her about the reaction she said, “What does that mean?”
Ms. Thomas went on to explain, “If they could make The Lord of the Rings and Carrie into successful musicals, then why not Labyrinth? Besides, it already is a musical. The trick is bringing it to the stage.”
It would seem that if adapting the screen musical to the stage is Ms. Thomas’s only worry, she has little to worry about. The original cult classic movie about a teenage girl who must save her younger brother after making a dubious pact with a goblin was written by Terry Jones and scored by David Bowie. She has brought in to adapt the script and score some of Broadway’s current brightest. Adapting the movie script for the stage will be a joint effort between playwright Doug Wright, who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his play I Am My Own Wife before adapting Disney’s The Little Mermaid, and Thomas Meehan, who originally penned the book to Annie but more recently has collaborated on The Producers, Young Frankenstein and Bombay Dreams. Filling in the gaps in the score is Broadway newcomer, Tony Award winner Duncan Sheik.
“How could we possibly go wrong?” Ms. Thomas asks.
I was lucky enough to catch a reading of this new musical with an all-star Broadway cast, including Michael McGrath, Ernie Sabella and Annie Golden. I was chatting with Ms. Thomas before the performance. I asked her the question I’m sure we had all been anticipating: Who was going to play Jareth, King of the Goblins, the role made famous by David Bowie in the original movie? I was told I’d just have to wait and see like everyone else, which led me to believe she had possibly gotten Bowie himself to come back for the stage version.
What a surprise we all got when who should leap onto the stage singing a new Duncan Sheik song—I won’t give the hilarious title away for you—but the one and only Johnny Depp. Ms. Thomas confided in me afterwards that when she first saw Depp in Sweeney Todd she thought his singing voice had been dubbed by Bowie. “When I found out that it was his own voice,” she said, “everything just clicked!”
As this is a project still in development, I can’t say much. But don’t worry, theatre-goers, Depp gives a performance comparable to Bowie’s original and can, in fact, fill a theatre with his voice. As for the quality of the new script and updated score, I enjoyed myself, but you’ll have to wait and see, as Cathy Thomas would say, “like everybody else.”
This article was written for The Marymount Monitor's April Fools issue.
2 comments:
A small but vital point -- LORD OF THE RINGS and CARRIE have not been made into successful musicals. Both lost millions. In the case of LABYRINTH, what has to be asked is how well this cinematic property will adapt to the musical stage.
It was performed as a stage musical back in 1999 in Shepparton, Australia, so it CAN be done.
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