Mean Girls, Clueless, The Devil Wears Prada, Pretty Woman, 10 Things I Hate About You. No, this isn’t a list of the top-rated romantic comedies on IMDb – though add in Bridget Jones’s Diary and it might as well be. What it is, is a list (and by no means an exhaustive one) of romcoms that have been or soon will be turned into a splashy song-and-dance musical.
Every month that list grows – West End announcements that are met with whoops and hurrahs from devout fans who have been waiting all their lives to see Miranda Priestly break out into song. Certainly, it’s a small wonder that Hugh Grant’s devilish book editor is yet to hip-thrust across a stage to some noxious number titled “Is Skirt Off Sick?” – though not for lack of trying. Lily Allen reportedly took a crack at a Bridget Jones musical adaptation back in 2009. Mercifully, it never took off.
The latest romcom to get the musical treatment, however, is decidedly less iconic than its predecessors. Released in 2004, 50 First Dates starred Adam Sandler as a womaniser who falls for Drew Barrymore’s charming art teacher only to discover that she has short-term memory loss. Although a box office success, the film itself was largely forgettable, making its West End debut this September all the more strange.
Granted, this isn’t an altogether new trend. Since the 1950s, musicals based on films such as Billy Elliot and Hairspray have become a beloved genre, but it was the Broadway success of Legally Blonde in 2007 that can-can kicked off a new line of Nineties and Noughties romcom productions. As more and more musicals try to replicate that model, however, it seems original ideas are being pushed to the side.
Hayley Canham was 16 when she wrote her first musical, Medea the Musical: a modern rock-opera adaptation of Euripides’ tragedy (a slightly more cut-throat solution to How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days). She took the show to the Edinburgh Fringe in 2022, where it received a stream of positive reviews. Now, Canham is working on a new musical about the ancient Greek poet Sappho, recently having presented it at BEAM, the UK’s largest showcase of new musical theatre.
BEAM has introduced many of the West End’s much-loved original shows, including the Olivier-winning, Tony-nominated World War II spoof Operation Mincemeat, which transferred to Broadway earlier this year. Canham is holding out hope that her musical will meet a similar fate. Her chances, she knows, are one in a million – or even less. Scrolling through a list of London’s current big-time musicals, the results can be dismaying: based on a movie, based on a movie that’s based on a book, based on a pop star… Original storytelling is hard to find.
But while Canham is eager to see new stories on stage, she is not judgmental of the creatives behind any of these shows, adding that she’d certainly jump at the chance to adapt a romcom. “If I got the movie rights to some huge film, you can bet your bottom dollar that I’m capitalising on that.” Her pick? Richard Curtis’s About Time.
Also returning from BEAM this year is musical-maker and director Evie Press. “It was so joyful to see all of this talent,” she recalls of the industry event. “But the flip side of that is this really bittersweet feeling of, if the right person doesn’t pick this up, it will never see the light of day.” Press’s own work seeks to move and inspire audiences, exploring themes of identity, community and politics in everything from stories of medieval London mayors to supernatural American road trips.
Press doesn’t see this romcom musical boom as necessarily a bad thing, but they do find the industry’s prioritisation of existing IP over new ideas to be disheartening, especially when many of these adaptations tend not to live up to their source material. In a two-star review, which was largely representative of the critical consensus, The Independent branded The Devil Wears Prada “truly diabolical”. Pretty Woman was “shallow” and “outdated”, while Amy Heckerling’s Clueless couldn’t hair-flip its way above three stars.
Reviews aren’t everything, of course. And while theatre writer and drag artist Helena Fox AKA King Hoberon – whose musical Rust, about the mental health crisis, went to Fringe in 2019 – is frustrated that these shows are attracting money over more original endeavours, they are wary of coming across as snobby. “The critics’ view isn’t everything,” Fox says. The Devil Wears Prada may have been panned, but audiences love it.
Looking back to Legally Blonde and its seven Tony nominations, it’s clear that mediocrity is not inherent to the genre. Shows like Mamma Mia!, Grease and Moulin Rouge prove that when done right, the romcom-to-musical pipeline can yield fruitful and fantastic results.
And truly, these shows should be good, with household names like Elton John and “Suddenly I See” singer KT Tunstall behind them. So why are they far from their finest work? “You can tell when a production has been made from producer down, rather than creative down,” theorises Press. So, while the forthcoming 10 Things I Hate About You musical has landed a promising creative duo in pop star Carly Rae Jepsen and Girls creator Lena Dunham, it would not be the first time that a celebrity-fronted musical adaptation has flopped.
Press is keen to remind audiences that theatre exists beyond the waning West End. “We need to change our perception that regional musical theatre or musical theatre that isn’t in the West End is somehow less than, because it’s not.” For them, it all comes down to the question of what we want from it: “Do we want to be challenged or moved or inspired, or do we want to just go and have a mindless fun night out?”
Abbie Freeston, a writer based in Leeds who is currently workshopping her original musical Fantasy World Adventures Mega Park!, is wary that these nostalgia-fuelled productions are just a fad, pointing to 2015’s Off-Broadway jukebox musical adaptation of Cruel Intentions (which transferred to the West End last year) as an example. “The downside to those shows is that maybe they are going to be more short-lived. Once everybody who is a massive fan has been to see it, is that it? Does that creative team drop it and move on?” Freeston wants to encourage theatregoers to broaden their horizons beyond the easy dopamine hit of revisiting a much-loved film.
Matthew Bugg – an actor, writer, composer, and musician who has worked on seven West End shows and several highly reviewed tours – has a different solution. He doesn’t believe that the onus of choosing originality over adaptation should be put on audiences. “I think there’s a fundamental issue where we feel the audience owes us something. They don’t,” he says. “It’s our job to give them the best quality work.”
While his theatre company, Mr Bugg Presents, specialises in creating totally original musicals, he doesn’t see these romcom adaptations as any different from the long-held tradition of opera being adapted from mythology – the reference points have simply changed. Bugg has no problem with adaptations, but he doesn’t think they are the only solution to the theatre’s financial crisis. “For me, the biggest challenge is how we break the stranglehold of production-driven spectacle […] How do we celebrate the small scale, the intimate?” Smaller productions translate to smaller costs.
One small-scale show is Billy Barrett’s After the Act – an experimental musical about the 1988 law that banned the “promotion” of homosexuality in schools, which is currently being staged at the Jerwood Theatre in the Royal Court. Barrett says he was lucky to have his show funded through the Arts Council and commissioned by subsidised theatres. “We were sheltered a little bit from the need to have an immediate commercial return,” he says, adding that he hopes to see further collaboration between the subsidised and commercial sectors in the future.
Others in the industry take a more hardline approach, such as musical theatre maker and opera director Max Mason, who believes that “every theatre with Arts Council funding needs to have a new writing department”. The creator of a musical inspired by a medieval poem and another by a Portuguese translator, Mason is currently the young artist director in residence at the Waterperry Opera Festival in Oxford. As a creative behind such original shows, he says, the influx of the romcom musical suggests “a fear of originality, a fear that the medium can’t speak for itself”.
While Mason doesn’t blame producers or theatres – these are financially fraught times we’re living in, after all – he does want to remind them that the West End’s success is largely down to risk-taking. “How do we expect musical theatre to look in 20, 30, 40 years if we don’t support new writers? It won’t exist, or what it will look like is just endlessly parasitic of successful movies. The musicals that we look back on as the Great British musicals that pioneered the West End are doing something that’s totally original.”
Although adaptations themselves, marquee musicals like Phantom of the Opera and Cats experiment with their source material in new and original ways. The same risks aren’t being taken when translating this recent crop of romcoms to the stage. They may make big bucks, but who will remember Pretty Woman: The Musical in 10 or even five years’ time? We’re months away from 50 First Dates opening in the West End and, yet, already it seems doomed to be instantly forgotten, discarded in the growing graveyard of romcom musical adaptations.
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