On Stage & Screen

[rubs forehead] Uh, hi there. I didn't sleep much last night. My original intro was more upbeat. I apologize.

This week I started Don Quixote, which is quite a long book, so aside from comics and illustrated books (and maybe the odd BIONICLE book?), don’t expect my Book Diary to update for a while.

The new adaptation of The Spiderwick Chronicles is now on Roku! Get a look at that if you’ve got the time and the Roku.

I didn’t exactly know what to write this week. I have a plan that one day I will write about Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, but that’s going to take some more work than usual. I made a list of several possible topics, and I ended up settling on this one.

On Stage & Screen

Last weekend I saw the film The Most Reluctant Convert. It is an adaptation of a stage play about C.S. Lewis, in which he talks about his life, and his journey away from and towards Christianity. The words are largely taken from Surprised by Joy, though there are some other sources used. I think it’s a good movie, if you’re interested in the topic, but I also think it’s something that probably works better as a play. I strongly suspect that the movie was made because the play has a very limited range, and the movie will be more accessible to people who don’t have a chance to go to the short list of locations where it’s being staged.

[That, and the people making the film wanted an excuse to go to the real-life locations where Lewis hung out, like the Kilns and Magdalen College.]

[Also, I am immensely surprised how they pronounced ‘Magdalen’. It sounded like ‘Mogdulun’.]

This entire experience made me start thinking about how plays and films are entirely different beasts. Which sounds like a ‘duh’, but you’d be amazed how many people think of plays as being like movies, but on a stage and with lower budget. It’s not–a play is significantly more than that, as an art form that has its own strengths and limitations. There are things that I think work better on stage than screen–live-action musicals, for instance? Sideways talks about this in one of his videos about Disney live-action remakes, but that on stage you’re already suspending your disbelief; whereas on live-action films, which are often trying to look realistic, people breaking into song and dance doesn’t make much sense.

Of course, films can do stuff with special effects like CGI and camera tricks that you can’t do on stage. It’s why you’re more often going to see films cover genres like high fantasy and science-fiction than you are on stage–though stage definitely can do fantasy (one can argue Macbeth is fantasy, after all), it’s just got some limitations.

Does science-fiction theater exist, as a genre? The only example I can think of is a Team Starkid comedy. It must exist. That must be out there. Put that into ‘to research later’.

Again, I understand why so many plays are adapted into film–a lot of people don’t get to the stage theater (sadly), and it’s more accessible. And you have ways to expand that story. What makes me frustrated is seeing how much of the reverse is happening. A lot of the big plays on Broadway that we’re seeing nowadays are stage adaptations of movies. These existing is not a bad thing, but we can’t just make more original plays; we’ve decided that the only thing that works, even in theater, is adaptations of things that people love, even if it’s something from ages ago. Yeah, it’s cool that you saw a film and saw potential there, but can we not come up with anything else?

I want to see really cool ideas on stage–mythology and folklore, history and conspiracy. Can you do dystopia on stage? Murder mysteries are popular on stage, and a little stereotypical, but could you do a heist story? Could you do an original superhero story? A space opera? Could you do something like Canterbury Tales or the Decameron? 

All of these may well exist! But for reasons not entirely clear (probably that they’re difficult to put on), they’re not as well-known. Bump that! We should appreciate the stage more as a medium! We should be pushing for more stage productions! We should be pushing and seeing all the kinds of cool and wonderful things we can do in theater, rather than assuming that film, particularly live-action film, is the best way to tell stories to the public.

—