west side story - The Screengrab

Yesterday's Hits: Fiddler on the Roof (1971, Norman Jewison)

In some ways, it isn’t hard to determine why Norman Jewison’s big-screen adaptation of Fiddler on the Roof was a hit. From the time sound was introduced to the cinema, musicals were one of Hollywood’s most popular and enduring genres. But while most musicals of the 1930s and 1940s were frothy entertainments, the fifties saw an increase in musicals that tackled more serious material. And the record-breaking initial Broadway run of Fiddler on the Roof made a film version inevitable, and its status as the top-grossing movie of 1971 was practically pre-ordained.

Cutting Up "Sweeney Todd"

Although a handful of Stephen Sondheim's musicals have been staged for TV (including a Showtime transcription of Sweeney Todd that featured the original Broadway cast member Angela Lansbury, the new Tim Burton-directed Sweeney Todd will only mark the third time that a show for which Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics has been turned into a movie. The first, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, directed by Richard Lester in 1966, was made before Sondheim fully developed his personal style in the early 1970s with such musicals as Follies and Company, and the 1978 A Little Night Music, directed by Harold Prince, was a thorough waste of everyone's time. Even though the original show was based on a movie, Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night, the film version was flat and stagebound, a problem unlikely to recur under Beetlejuice's creator. Sondheim himself, speaking to Jesse Green in the New York Times, makes it clear that he has no use for those earlier movies, nor even for the more highly regarded movies Gypsy and West Side Story, both based on stage musicals for which he wrote the lyrics.