“She’s extremely prepared…a very hard worker,” he continues. “You never get to a rehearsal and have to fill the time. She has it all very well planned out so you feel her strength and her smarts all the time.”
Stroman was excited to approach filmmaking. With the eye of a seasoned stage director and choreographer, she loved the introduction of a camera into the mix. She notes, “In the theater, the audience sees everything in a wide shot; on film, I am able to use the close-up to tell the story more immediately and in a more intimate way. Plus, getting a close-up on the humorous faces of Nathan, Matthew, Gary and Roger heightens the comedy even more.”
Jonathan Sanger, who early in his career worked for Brooks as an assistant director on High Anxiety before joining him to produce such films under Brooksfilms’ banner as the Academy Award®-nominated Frances and The Elephant Man, was invited to see the play on Broadway soon after it opened. He knew that the original movie had such a devoted cult following that many fans were reluctant to see it in another version.
“But to my immense surprise,” recalls Sanger, “the musical was even better. So I told Mel that if it winds up becoming a movie again, I’d like to help him produce it. And one day Brooks called and said, ‘Get your track shoes on, and let’s talk about how we can do this on film.’” Brooks and writing partner Meehan began working on a screenplay. While the structure of a movie is traditionally three acts, Broadway musicals are constructed in only two acts. Meehan explains that just as he and Brooks had taken Brooks’ original three-act screenplay and fashioned it into a two-act Broadway musical, with the new film he and Brooks “had to take it all apart and reconstruct it all over again.”
Meehan shares, “The big end of Act One is the ‘little old lady land’ with all those ladies in their walkers…and the big rousing dance number. Now that number is in the middle of the picture [“Along Came Bialy”]. We don’t come to a big orgasmic finish to send the curtains down, because the show is still rolling.”
Meehan feels that expanding the production to the big screen gives the production a previously unexplored breadth. “When you take it off the stage and put it in movies, you can do a lot more things in terms of places. This movie doesn’t just take place in offices and in the theaters, it takes place out in Central Park and on Fifth Avenue in New York. It gives it more room to breathe.”
For the film, Brooks wrote two original songs that were not in the Broadway play: “You’ll Find Your Happiness in Rio,” which is briefly heard as background music during the brief glimpses of Leo and Ulla frolicking together in paradise as Max sits in his jail cell; and “There’s Nothing Like a Show on Broadway,” performed by Broderick and Lane and heard over the end credits, with the actors still very much in their characters of Leo and Max—the former, full of unabashed excitement and joy at his newfound career in show business, and the latter, hilariously acidic and world-weary after having to weather decades of the theater’s ups and downs.
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