The worst slash very very minutely possibly best ideas I could think of while looking at my DVDs and my DVR. Either they would be brilliant or they would be train wrecks. Probably train wrecks, but.
5. Zombieland
Four-person (more if you count the zombie chorus and Bill Murray) casts can be fun. With the exception of Zombie Prom, of which I only know the repeated line “Johnny don’t go to the nuclear plaaaaant,” there are not enough zombie musicals. But I don’t really know how the humor would translate to the stage, what with the survival tips and all. I’m imagining projections and/or asides, which would likely seem cheesy and weird. The cast could be adored easily (cute and sassy romantic leads, wacky adult, spunky young girl, it’s a winning formula in theory), but this could easily be trying way too hard. And speaking of Bill Murray, it wouldn’t be as funny without him actually playing himself, and he wouldn’t, so that joke wouldn’t translate either.
4. Reservoir Dogs
See above re: trying too hard. It could potentially be acceptable, but it would probably be a disaster. The music would have to be rock-esque, but not too modern because it’s a 90s movie, but not too 90s because you wouldn’t want it to seem dated. I’m imagining this without an intermission, mostly because I can’t really figure where the intermission would go, but you would have to cut things out to fit any time frame reasonable for humans to sit in a theater, and it just… the odds are slim.
3. Deadwood
See, and I am all for a stage show about gun battles and Western whores, and my first mental image of this wasn’t a terrible one. I can see everyone having one really great sung monologue or something. But I just can’t imagine what of the plot you could trim down for a stage show without missing something else. And there are, you know, a billion characters, so it would be impossible. I think writing songs for each character would be a fun project, but stringing them all into one stage show would be heinous.
2. Game of Thrones
Well, they made a Lord of the Rings musical, and apparently that worked somewhat decently? I’ve never seen it and haven’t heard from it, but it isn’t completely despised or anything. This is really the same exact problem as the Deadwood musical, though. I can easily imagine songs being written for every single character, and I’m sure that the right composer could manage it, but I just can’t imagine trimming all of this into a stage show. You’d be trimming characters and plots every which way, and that’s the beauty of Game of Thrones. It’s got a thousand and one characters, all of whom deserve their moments. But I’d estimate it as having a… .3% chance of being workable.
1. X-Men
This was actually offhandedly suggested by a classmate of mine. I thought about it, and while again, the odds are so very against (that cast of thousands problem, the Spider-man proven superhero musical difficulty) I would be rooting for whoever undertook this insane project to succeed in a way. If just for the underdogginess of it.
–your fangirl heroine.
