This weekend, my parents, sister-in-law, and I drove out to Manley, Nebraska to the Lofte Theatre to see a play based on a movie about movies.
It’s easier for actors to portray a character out of a book, I would imagine, than for actors to portray something that has already been acted. The audience is continually comparing the acting in front of them to the original acting. It would be difficult to make a character your own if you were always thinking about the first actor’s facial expression, how they held themselves, or how they inflected a line.
Movies have so many more options for scenes than the stage. For instance, it’s difficult to have a scene with the characters driving down the street in a car on the stage. You can’t jump in a huge puddle of water on the stage, and there’s only one angle that the audience can see the characters.
The stage is so much more genuine than the movies. There’s no second chance if you flub a line. There’s no redo if your singing is flat, and the audience gets to see how nervous you are every time your smile falters. The audience also has the pleasure of knowing that even though this may not be the first time you’ve performed it, you’re performing this time just for them, and that there’ll never be another performance exactly like this one.
There were several parts during the play that I enjoyed much more than the original movie. One was the addition of a song for Lina. Her character spends so much time in the movie being the antagonist that I always considered Cosmo a more amusing character. In the play, her comic relief gives his character a run for his money. One of my favorite lines of hers was, “I’m not going to take this lying down!” as she lounges on a couch in her dressing room.
My beautiful cousin plays a Hollywood party girl hoping to make it big. “Mr. Brown, can you really get me in the movies?” Her contemptuous air after Cosmo’s line offering to meet her outside the movie theater (unless the movie playing is something he’s already seen, in which case she’s on her own) is much more amusing than in the movie.
Rod Phillips is an amalgam, a character spliced together of quite a few characters from the movie in order to save time, lines, and actors. “Rod” is the head of the publicity department for the studio, and “Mr. Phillips” is a director of some kind. My very talented brother landed this role, and made it more hilarious in several occasions without speaking a word.
In one scene, Kathy very inappropriately hugs R.F., the head of the studio, after he decides to give her a job. She steps back and gives him a handshake instead, then steps over to thank Rod, who looks like he’d rather have a hug than a handshake but settles for what he can get.
In the movie, during the scene when Lina strikes back, Rod walks into R.F.’s office with a newspaper and says rather forgettably, “You can’t pull a switch on the publicity department like this, Boss!” Instead of just waltzing in and leading with that, my brother entered from Stage Left and paced back and forth for a bit, making little worried whimpering noises before R.F. demanded to know: “What?!”
The cast isn’t huge, so for the big numbers, most of them had to step up and dance. The choreographer planned it so that often, my cousin and my brother are dancing near one another on stage. When I jokingly asked them afterward if the choreographer directed them that way so that their family members would only have to take one picture to get both of them, their answers were different. “I think, with our heights, we just match,” my cousin said, as my brother interrupted with, “I think it’s because we’re cousins.”
I highly recommend that you get out and see Singin’ In The Rain at the Lofte before it closes. That is, if you can manage to get tickets for it. I can guarantee you’ll enjoy it.
Even if you’re not related to any of the cast.
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