For a long while, it seemed as though the Broadway-to-Hollywood pipeline, with a few exceptions, flowed one way. A musical would debut on the stage and then eventually make its way to film. It’s what happened with the Rodgers and Hammerstein classics of the mid-century like Carousel and South Pacific and eventually Best Picture winner The Sound of Music. My Fair Lady ditched Julie Andrews for Audrey Hepburn and won the Oscar in 1965. Bob Fosse reimagined Cabaret for the cinema in 1972, and his version with Liza Minnelli became in many ways the definitive interpretation of Kander and Ebb’s show, also winning the Academy Award.
But the movie musical waned in popularity and the pipeline started flowing in the other direction. Broadway became overloaded with musicals based on movies: Legally Blonde and Groundhog Day, Grey Gardens and Mrs. Doubtfire, Kinky Boots and The Full Monty. It almost felt like an epidemic for theater fans. Regardless of the quality — and they varied widely in quality — the musicals based on movies had the sheen of desperation. Please come to the theater, they seemed to shout, it’s just like that thing you like but with songs.
And thus begets another phenomenon: the movie musical based on a musical based on a movie. It happened with Mel Brooks’s 1967 The Producers, which was turned into a beloved Tony-winning musical and then a panned 2005 movie musical. Now, however, we have gotten two of these in rapid succession: The Color Purple, which hit theaters on Christmas, and Tina Fey’s Mean Girls, which debuts on January 12. Confusingly, both of these films are titled the same as their cinematic predecessors, but make no mistake, they are packed with singing and dancing.
On paper, The Color Purple and Mean Girls couldn’t be more different, regardless of their Broadway roots. One, based on the Alice Walker novel, is the story of Celie (Fantasia Barrino-Taylor in the 2024 film), a Black woman at the turn of the 20th century in Georgia who suffers abuse at the hands of her father and husband, but over decades comes into her own. The other is about a nasty clique at a high school in........