When Documentaries Go Broadway

I guess it is a real tribute to documentary film making that people love the stories and characters so much that they want to adapt them into Broadway musicals, like the Maysil Brothers’ cult favorite Grey Gardens. Being of the same age and sensibility as Trey Parker, musicals strike me as the ultimate parody of anything.  That said, I am now open to negotiations to turn my doc FREE FOR ALL! into a musical theater piece, with songs and dance numbers about voter disenfranchisement.  Ken Blackwell would have a solo, and Matt Damschroeder would get his own dance number.

As reported by Variety, yet another doc is being re-imagined for the stage: Hands on a Hard Body, the great doc from the late 90’s that covers an annual competition in Texas where contestants have to stand touching a pickup truck for days on end, and the last person touching it wins the truck.  This film was ably made by some college-aged kids for $37,000 who endured through the competition to film the contestants as they peeled away.  This challenge is far more grueling than you would imagine, and the characters are much richer than the Texas types this premise would allow them to come off as.   I recommend the doc as a modern equivalent of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? but with a happier ending.