Which of the ten Oscar nominees for best film this year would work best (and worst) adapted for the Broadway stage? It’s a year of at least a few clear answers, given that one of the movies revolves around the greatest play ever written, and another prizes engine noise over dialogue. But thinking about the stage potential for each of these films could sharpen our understanding of the qualities that make for good theater, even if those qualities are largely absent in more of this year’s nominees than last year’s. Many of the supposed front-runners bombard moviegoers with jittery spectacle rather than emotional intimacy, physical vulnerability, or quiet imagination. But this in itself is worth thinking about; might it be telling us something about the state of the world?
The ranking below is in part the results of a poll I conducted last month. In case this isn’t obvious, the ranking is in order of how well people believe these films could be adapted for the stage, not in their likelihood of Oscar wins.
1. Hamnet as a play
“Hamnet” is already a play. The movie is an adaptation of the 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell, “Hamnet: A Novel of the Plague,” which is also the source for a stage version by The Royal Shakespeare Company, currently on a U.S. tour to Chicago, Washington and San Francisco. A stage version seemed inevitable, since it is the story of the death of William Shakespeare’s 11-year-old son Hamnet, which great tragedy “Hamlet,” excerpts from which are performed in the final moments of the movie. What makes this story especially fresh is that it’s told from the point of view of Hamnet’s mother, portrayed by Jessie Buckley, nominated for best actress.
2. Sinners as a musical
Straight plays about vampires have not fared well on Broadway, and few polltakers promoted the idea of a stage play based on “Sinners,” a “vampire western” set in the 1930s Jim Crow South. But it got the most votes by far in the poll for a Broadway musical adaptation. This surprised me, because of all the practical challenges that would be involved (the identical twin protagonists, supernatural fight scenes, all the blood.) But it’s true that the music in the movie composed by Ludwig Göransson — gospel, juke-joint blues, folk music — is more than just the (Oscar-nominated) score. The music, and the musicians who create it, are a central element of the movie. The young blues prodigy Samuel “Sammie” Moore (Miles Caton) is arguably the main character. In the very first line (in voiceover), we’re told: “There are legends of people born with the gift of making music so true it can pierce the veil between life and death.”
3. Sentimental Value as a play
In this beautifully acted, quiet family drama, one of the main characters is Nora (portrayed by Oscar nominated best actress Renate Reinsve), a talented and successful stage actress, but one who suffers great levels of anxiety, as we witness when she comes up with all sorts of lame excuses (eg her dress is too tight) for delaying her entrance on stage in her latest play, prompting cast and crew to surround her, support her and gently (literally) push her onto the stage. That scene would be delectably meta-theatrical if “Sentimental Value” were adapted as a play.
Much of the rest of the “Sentimental Values” takes place in the house where Nora and her sister grew up, where her father Gustav (Stellan Skarsgård), a renowned film director, wants to film his latest movie, with a resentful Nora as his star.
4. Bugonia as a play
This was a popular choice for an adaptation, possibly because it already resembles one with just three characters in a confined space, two of them engaged in psychological combat, Teddy (Jesse Plemons) having kidnapped high-powered pharmaceutical CEO Michelle (Emma Stone), in order to save the human race, since he’s figured out she is an alien. It would be hard to pull of the ending, though, and they wouldn’t be able to shave Michelle’s hair off every night (A wig wouldn’t be the same.)
5. Marty Supreme as a musical
“Marty Supreme” was the second choice after “Sinners” as a potential Broadway musical: Timothee Chalamet’s skillful and electrifying performance as Marty Mauser, a hustling table tennis player in 1950’s New York, could translate on stage with the right casting. And it’s easy to see the table tennis matches as vigorously choreographed dance numbers. But I think the frenzied, edgy, violent film would have to be toned down, and trimmed.
6. Secret Agent
I suspect the theatergoers who took the poll simply didn’t get a chance to see this Brazilian thriller about an ordinary man in an authoritarian state, although one commented: “Not sure how they’d handle the leg sequence” — there is a gory scene of a leg found inside a shark — “but everything else has an air of theatricality and the script is very tight.”
7. Train Dreams
This critically lauded film about the unremarkable life of a decent man, adapted from a novella by Denis Johnson, didn’t get much attention in the poll one way or another. Nobody thought it would make a good play; a few thought it could work as a musical. The title song, a wistful folk tune, has been nominated for an Academy Award. I could see a “Train Dreams” adaptation working as a song cycle Off-Broadway.
8. Frankenstein
Prognosticators see the best chance for Oscar wins in Guillermo del Toro’s film to be in design (production, costume, makeup and hair), which suggests that this version of Mary Shelley’s horror story is all about the visuals. The story is familiar enough that one should never say never. Indeed, “Frankenstein” has already been on Broadway, in 1981. It closed on opening night.
9. One Battle After Another
It seems somehow telling that the reported front-runner is viewed in the poll as being unworkable as either a play or a musical. Is this because of the difficulty in mounting the relentless cartoonish sex and violence on stage? Is it because he relies more on images and sensations than words and ideas?
10. F1
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