Les misérables

Lately, it seems that Broadway is running short on original material. It must be serious if they’re borrowing from Hollywood. Perhaps the Big Apple’s former mayor, Rudolph “Rude Boy” Giuliani cleaned up the Theater District a little too well, scouring out all the creativity that made the Great White Way as fun as it was dirty. Now, from recycled music catalogues (ABBA’s Mamma Mia!, Billy Joel’s Movin’ Out, Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons’ Jersey Boys) to bastardized movie treatments (of Titanic, Sunset Boulevard, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Big—Big, for Christ’s sake!), musicals increasingly resemble the backward-looking dreck that already fills our movie screens.

How to stem this downward spiral? It’s going to take more than tap shoes, jazz hands and cheesy smiles. Maybe we need to put the trash back in Times Square. Maybe a little more Amsterdam in New Amsterdam can revive old Breede weg. A little less nice, a little more vice. And Elton John, I love you, but stop fucking with the theater. Until then, watch out for these films that never should, but, alas, likely will, be made into Broadway musicals:

1. The Poseidon Adventure
2. Caligula
3. The Birth of a Nation
4. Logan’s Run (pictured)
5. Adventures in Babysitting
6. Die Hard
7. Mother, Jugs & Speed
8. Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
9. The French Connection
10. Road House