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Leap of Faith's long, hard road to Broadway
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"Leap of Faith's" long, hard road to Broadway
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By Alex Ben Block
Fri Sep 24, 2010 2:36am EDT
LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Screenwriter Janus "Jannie" Cercone sums up the difference between working in film and live theater: "Movies are for pussies. Musicals are hard."
Cercone and her husband, Michael Manheim, know what they are talking about. They have taken their 1992 movie "Leap of Faith," which she wrote and Manheim co-produced for Paramount, and made it into a stage musical starring Brooke Shields and Raul Esparza. Now in previews, it opens October 3 at the Ahmanson in Los Angeles, perhaps on the way to Broadway.
Manheim remembered being on the movie's set in Texas when a gospel choir was rehearsing a scene in a church where the lead character, Jonas Nightengale (Steve Martin), was about to preach.
"Jannie and I turned to each other and said, 'This should be a musical,'" Manheim recalled.
It wasn't, and the movie wasn't successful at the box office or with critics. But the idea of a musical was planted. It wasn't until 2000 that they got serious about fulfilling that dream.
Their first call was to longtime friend and composer Alan Menken ("Beauty and the Beast," "Little Mermaid"), who with eight Oscars has more than any other living person. A veteran of theater ("Little Shop of Horrors"), he's also been nominated twice for Tonys.
The three had taken a memorable trip to New Orleans in the mid-1990s to research a movie project that never came to fruition, but they returned determined to one day do something built around their love of gospel music. So when Cercone, who once worked as a classical violinist, called about making "Leap of Faith" into a musical, Menken quickly agreed.
"In our very first meeting," Cercone said, "Alan said, 'You know musicals take about 10 years.' I thought he was kidding. 'Yeah, right. You're so funny.' And here we are 10 years later."
For this Hollywood power couple, the experience was not only long, it also involved a steep learning curve. "In movies as a producer, I'm used to being the first one in and the last one out," Manheim said, "and being equally involved from a creative and business standpoint.
"In the theater, the traditional role of the producer is focused on the business functions of securing the money and the theater. In movies, the credit for the person who does the functions of theater producer would be executive producer -- somebody who puts the money together and key business components but isn't involved in the creative part at all. Ask a lot of people who have Tonys for producing what they did, and the answer is they wrote a check. Period."
Cercone and Menken began shaping the musical's concept with a lyricist in Canada, but she dropped out after a year because of scheduling conflicts. At Cercone's urging, Menken called frequent collaborator Glenn Slater and asked him to watch the 1992 movie and then meet in New York with the couple.
"This whole marriage was made in an afternoon," Menken said.
Not everything went as smoothly. Manheim had to clear the rights, which were split between Cercone, as screenwriter, and Paramount. At first, he couldn't even get the studios' attention. "They didn't think it was in their corporate interests to bend down and pick up the few shekels that might be thrown off from the musical," Manheim said. "This was before the success of 'Wicked.'"
When he did engage Paramount, new problems arose. "They were trying to figure out what position to have in terms of musical theater," Manheim said, "and they were figuring it out on our project, which is not a fun position to be in. They saw every single thing as a precedent."
Manheim realized he needed help, starting with a theater attorney in New York, and he reached out to other experienced theater producers. He teamed up with the Endgame Entertainment group in Los Angeles, led by James D. Stern and Douglas Meyer, and the Frankel Group in New York, which includes Richard Frankel, Steven Baruch, Marc Routh and Thomas Viertel.
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