The 1952 film of “Singin’ in the Rain” ranks 10th on the American Film Institute’s guide to the 100 Greatest American Movies of All Time, topping all other musicals on the list. It’s not surprising therefore that a new stage adaptation of the classic has caught the attention of Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, who plans to transfer it to Broadway next fall.The show is currently at Paris’s Théâtre du Châtelet through January 15, its second run there since opening last March. The theater, under the artistic direction of Jean-Luc Choplin, is quickly becoming an out-of-town tryout for Broadway — “An American in Paris” had its world premiere there before taking New York by storm earlier this year, earning 12 Tony nominations. It remains among the top grossers at the Palace Theatre.The stage adaptation of “Singin’ in the Rain” has been directed by Canadian-born Robert Carsten, choreographed by Stephen Mear, and designed by Anthony Powell. The production stars Brits Dan Burton, Daniel Crossley, and Clare Halse in the roles memorably created by Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds, respectively. It is not clear whether the show will be recast when it transfers to Broadway. But Weinstein told the New York Times that his desire to bring “Singin’ in the Rain” to Broadway has been longstanding. It was sparked decades ago when, as a student, he saw the film and it upended his snobbery toward musicals. He recalled, “This was great art, as good as any European filmmaker that I was idolizing at the time, like Bergman and Fellini.”He was not alone in that assessment — the film was cited as a favorite by auteurs as Francois Truffaut and Alain Resnais. Set in Hollywood in 1927, the musical comedy — directed by Kelly and Stanley Donen and written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green — is a satiric valentine to movie-making. The travails are set in motion when the advent of talkies threatens to destroy the careers of those whose voices can’t match their onscreen persona. The iconic moment in the film is when Gene Kelly sings the title song while euphorically splashing around in sheets of rain. That number was re-created in a 1985 Broadway adaptation of the film, directed and choreographed by Twyla Tharp. Although it ran for about a year, the production was not greeted with enthusiasm, especially by Frank Rich, then theater critic of the New York Times, who complained that Tharp had, “…. failed to meet—indeed, even to consider—the central challenge of transposing a quintessentially cinematic work to the theater.” He noted that “Singin’ in the Rain” was, as he put it, “a fantasy movie about the dream factory of movies. Once transposed to the stage in realistic terms, the fantasy evaporates even as the rain pours down.”That “central challenge” has doomed other stage adaptations of quintessentially cinematic films such as “Saturday Night Fever,” “Urban Cowboy,” “Ghost” and “Rocky.” But it seems that Carsen and his team has been able to allay at least Weinstein’s reservations.
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