I'd love to see a creative cinematic way for the landscape to change around the characters. (Though I do love the pop-up aesthetic of the original production.)

FOLLIES! The things that the filmmakers could do with different film stocks, filming styles, etc, means that it would actually feel like a MOVIE. This is as opposed to most stage adaptations, which just make me wish I were watching a good production of the original musical.

The verse of The Killers' "Mr. Bright Side" has always sounded like a ripoff of David Bowie's "Queen Bitch" to me.

I admit to being surprised when I heard a film was made—the reaction to the play was basically a shrug of "Well that wasn't great. How'd it get to Broadway?", and I don't think it's had many productions since.

I'm personally not a big Mendes fan (I think he does WAY better with images than he does with characters or ideas), but I certainly know people who'd agree with you.

None, as far as he knows.

The number of great actors who did terrible work in NINE is remarkable. And deeply saddening.

I've only seen a couple of Joshua Logan films, but isn't his filmography commonly regarded as ranging from "undistinguished" to "dreadful"?

Ooooh, Welles and Nichols are both good choices.

As a film, it's pretty much unimpeachable—musically excellent, dramatically intense. Absolutely one of my favorites.

The film of NINE specifically had all of the songs as dream sequences (like the film of CHICAGO), and it was a fecking disaster.

Man, if there were an AVC-style site about theatre, I would LIVE there.

100% agreed on it being one of the great books ever. Between the huge number of vivid characters and the fact that it makes well-known historical events genuinely tense, it's masterful.

If WEST SIDE STORY is happy-sappy, I hesitate to imagine what you think THE MUSIC MAN is.

To be clear: I don't think the choreography is silly, I think it's brilliant and incredibly powerful—in a theatre. I think that the way it's filmed does it no favors, undercutting its power.

NEVER!

I did mean Beymer. Whoops.

I was not aware of that. That's horrible.

1776 or GTFO.

Unpopular opinion: no, it really doesn't. Beymer and Wood give stiff performances, the dubbed singing doesn't have much flavor (Rita Moreno does her own singing, and is a welcome exception), and most crucially, the abstract and stylized dance, which works stunningly well in the theatre, just looks silly when filmed on…