Cinematic Theatre: ‘Once’ and Film to Stage Adaptations

There is a tendency to think of the flow of adaptation as going only one way, to think of film as sucking up all the narratives it can get its hands on from novels, comic books, and stage productions in order to turn them into films. Recently, however, the exchange has increasingly gone the other way, with films serving as the basis for Broadway stage adaptations. Tony Perucci relies on the financial and cultural forces that are often cited to explain film’s tendency toward adaptation, that the familiarity of the adapted work can help sell tickets, since the “stage adaptation of a film can borrow the cultural capital of its source film, just as film and stage adaptations” of literary works make similar use of their sources.

If screen to stage adaptations rely on an appeal to the familiarity of the stories and styles of their sources, then some measure of fidelity becomes a major selling point in trying to encourage audiences to see the stage version by promising to recreate something of the experience of the film. Because of the different strengths and weaknesses of each medium, however, delivering on that promise can lead to as many stylistic and formal difficulties as when the flow of adaptation goes the other way.