In celebration of Sunday night’s Tony Awards and this year’s celebration of Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday, I have reviewed the three big screen adaptations of Sondheim musicals that have to date been created: 1966’s A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum, 1977’s A Little Night Music and 2007’s Sweeney Todd.
Although Sondheim has written more than a dozen stage shows, only three have ever made it to the big screen and after watching them, I’m not at all surprised why. Sondheim is a very difficult lyricist to perform. His love of verbal acrobatics has daunted many an actor, but pleases many audiences. Yet, when you take actors who’ve mostly performed on the big screen and very limitedly on the stage, you have some tough shoes to fill.
This list encompasses only the shows Sondheim composed himself alone. He worked on productions such as Gypsy and West Side Story, but he was not the sole originator of these shows and therefore are not included in this retrospective. If I had included West Side Story, though, at least the resulting review synopses wouldn’t have been so abjectly disappointing.
A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum
This is probably Sondheim’s most successful adaptation in that it maintains much of the ribald fun of the stage performance. This isn’t one of my favorite Sondheim works, so it’s not surprising I didn’t love the film. But in terms of approachability and faithfulness, it is the strongest of the three.
A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum
A Little Night Music
This is the most surprising choice of an adaptation for Sondheim. Perhaps one of his most dense and sophisticated compositions, A Little Night Music isn’t exactly a universal story, at least not to those who aren’t familiar with the show. Excising most of the best numbers from the stage show and reducing them to simple musical cues assigned to specific characters, the movie does very little to live up to the high expectations of the original source.
Sweeney Todd
This is my favorite Sondheim musical, so it should come as no surprise how much I loathe what Tim Burton has done with it. Removing some of the best music from the stage show and reducing most of the secondary characters to underdeveloped cliches, Burton manages to drain all of the life and blood out of the production as if he were the Demon Barber himself. Yet, it was surprisingly successful, but most people probably don’t know how good it could have been had it been done correctly in the first place.
There are several productions that could make excellent big screen works. Into the Woods comes to mind, but it’s Follies that gets the bulk of the talk when it comes to the next production to make the big screen. However, the show has been in rumors for years and is very unlikely to make the transition. After all, doing a musical about aging Vaudevillian performers is hardly a money-making prospect for youth-starved Hollywood. Yet, with what’s come before, I have little hope of the show being done well even if it does make it to the big screen. Or any Sondheim adaptation for that matter.
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