" When Tom Stoppard created a play a few years ago out of his Academy Award-winning script for “Shakespeare in Love,” the best picture Oscar winner from 1998, he quickly realized that doing the adaptation was a mistake.
“I didn’t want the gig, but thought I should go for it because nice colleagues wanted me to do it,” recalled Mr. Stoppard, the four-time Tony Award-winning playwright of “The Coast of Utopia” and “The Real Thing,” among other works. “I moved the movie pieces around a bit, to no particular effect, before I came clean.”
Mr. Stoppard was only the latest writer to face one of the toughest challenges in theater: turning an honored and beloved film, and one with an indelible central performance (in this case by Gwyneth Paltrow, who won an Oscar for best actress), into a stage work that is just as good, or better. The box-office struggles of the screen-to-stage adaptations of “Rocky” and “Bullets Over Broadway,” two musicals now on Broadway, are only the latest examples. Other popular adaptations, like “Kinky Boots” and “Once,” don’t have the cinematic pedigree of “Shakespeare in Love.”
Fonte: The New York Times /imagem: Johan Persson/Disney
