I had a very interesting discussion about theater and film the other day. My parents and I were talking about Little Shop of Horrors and, specifically, about the ending of the musical versus the ending of the (1986) movie. In the musical, the story ends with the main characters getting eaten by the plant and everybody dying. The movie was originally going to end the same way, but audience reactions were so negative that they were forced to shoot a happy ending where the plant is destroyed and the main characters survive. Frank Oz, who directed the movie, later said something I think is very interesting:
I learned a lesson: in a stage play, you kill the leads and they come out for a bow — in a movie, they don’t come out for a bow, they’re dead. They’re gone and so the audience lost the people they loved, as opposed to the theater audience where they knew the two people who played Audrey and Seymour were still alive. They loved those people, and they hated us for it.
That’s a real gem of a thought in and of itself, a really interesting consequence of the fact that theater is alive in a way that film isn’t. A stage play always ends with a tangible reminder that it’s all just fiction, just a performance, and this serves to gently return the audience to the real world. Movies don’t have that, which really changes the way you’re affected by the story’s conclusion. Neat!
But here’s what’s really cool: I asked my dad (who is a dramaturge) what he had to say about it, and he pointed out that there is actually an equivalent technique in film: the blooper reel. When a movie plays bloopers while the credits are rolling, it’s accomplishing the exact same thing: it reminds you that the characters are actually just played by actors, who are alive and well and probably having a lot of fun, even if the fictional characters suffered. How cool is that!?
Now I’m really fascinated by the possibility of using bloopers to lessen the impact of a tragic ending in a tragicomedy…
I think that makes a lot of sense. I once had a colleague who suggested that the best way to end Hamlet would be for the play to end, the lights to come up, and everyone remain on stage, dead, except for Fortinbras, who takes his curtain call alone.
Everyone she ever brings up this ending to has been shocked and dismayed and really uncomfortable with it, and I bet this is partly why (I’m sure some of it too is that they were mostly actors, and actors like taking curtain calls).
I once saw a performance that deliberately reversed this — Der Kaiser Von Atlantis was an opera originally composed in the Terezin camp (it got as far as the dress rehearsal before the guards noticed it was about a cruel emperor whose behaviour finally drives Death to go on strike). The production I saw ended with the final chorus, the cast coming out and taking their bows — and then the backdrop collapsed and guards were pointing rifles at the actors and ordering them off the stage.
Mooncustafer 