Through the Screen Door: What Happened to the Broadway Musical When it Went to Hollywood

by Thomas S. Hischak

In this personal and opinionated book Tom Hischak takes a close look at what happens when a Broadway musical goes to Hollywood, and less often when Hollywood comes to Broadway.

The musicals discussed range from The Desert Song (1927), the first sound film of a Broadway musical, to Chicago , the 2002 film made from the 1975 Broadway hit. Film musicals that became Broadway shows range from Lili (1953) to Never Gonna Dance (2003). The book assumes a basic familiarity with famous musicals (for example the plot of My Fair Lady is summed up in a sentence or two) but lesser known works are fully explained. One chapter looks at British musicals that were popular in New York and were later filmed with Hollywood connections.

Also included is a Directory that gives credits, names, and songs for both the stage and screen version for all the musicals discussed. Appendices offer statistical data on musicals, and there is an extensive Bibliography.

328 pages, Paperback

First published July 28, 2004

Reviews

[Malcolm Davis]

This is an amusing and informative book showing what Hollywood has done to Broadway musicals.I have seen many of the films mentioned in the book and generally agree with his views.A must read for anyone interested in musicals.

[Russell Sanders]

I’m a lifelong, dyed-in-the-wool theater nerd. My tastes particularly lean to musicals. Couple that with the fact that I drool over anything about Hollywood history, and I become a musical/movie musical nut. And thus, I quickly gravitate to books that promise me a glimpse into theater/movie history. Thomas S. Hischak has provided me with a tailor made concoction, Through the Screen Door: What Happened to the Broadway Musical When It Went to Hollywood. Hischak is a theater professor, so the book is exhaustive and sometimes tedious, but his writing style is such that it moves along quite nicely. I was fascinated by his analyses of early Hollywood movies based on Broadway musicals. He goes to great lengths to tell us just how those movies differed from their source works. As a musical buff, I often wondered why old movie musicals would have the title of a favorite show and maybe a few of the songs from that show, yet the stories would either vary or be entirely different. Hischak covers that! He also discusses huge hit shows that transferred to Hollywood as extremely mediocre or even horrible films. Perhaps the best example of that was the film of Song of Norway. Based on a modestly successful 1940s show, the film was blown all out of proportion, cast badly, and sent on its merry way as an answer to the wildly successful film of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music. But while The Sound of Music soared with audiences, Song of Norway sank like the Titanic. As Hischak goes on to analyze movies that were more or less faithful to their Broadway sources, his opinions don’t often match my own about those films. He trashes the film versions of Camelot, Mame, and to an extent, My Fair Lady, yet I love those films. And yes, I know that almost no critics and few audience members embraced Lucille Ball as Mame, but I adore her performance. What sets this book apart is that it doesn’t read like scholarly research strung together. Yes, the author could not have seen all the stage productions he writes about, but it does seem as if he has viewed and formed his own opinion of each and every one of the films he explores. Through the Screen Door was published in 2004, and it would be interesting to hear the author’s take on the musical films that have come since then. For example, what would he think of Dreamgirls, a film I felt was electric, yet it strayed from its source material somewhat? And would he have liked Nine, Rob Marshall’s supremely boring star-filled lensing of the intimate musical? All books come to an end, but wouldn’t it be fun if we, the readers, could get regular updates from their authors, filling us in on what has happened since the author penned “the end”?