‘Little Miss Sunshine’ May Be Heading to Broadway

Tim Grierson
·Editor
Off to the Great White Way? Fox Searchlight
Off to the Great White Way? Fox Searchlight

Recently, Broadway has become a breeding ground for musicals based on films. In the last 10 years, there have been adaptations of "The Producers," "Sweet Smell of Success," "The Full Monty" "Hairspray," "Young Frankenstein," "Monty Python and the Holy Grail," "The Wedding Singer," "Shrek," and "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels." (Does that list seem long? We actually left a few out.) Now indie movies are getting the legitimate-theater treatment: A musical of "Little Miss Sunshine" is being developed in Southern California that has its sights set on Broadway.

The musical opened for previews in mid-February at the La Jolla Playhouse but will be having its world premiere on Friday. The remake of the Oscar-winning 2006 comedy-drama is being overseen by William Finn and James Lapine, who between the two of them have four Tonys and a Pulitzer. But they don't just want to add songs to the story of the Hoover family, who are driving from New Mexico to Southern California in the hopes of getting daughter Olive to her beauty pageant competition in time, No, they want to, in the words of the Los Angeles Times, "expand the story," which includes adding flashbacks that flesh out the characters' histories:

In one flashback, Richard and Sheryl [the married couple played by Greg Kinnear and Toni Collette in the film] are high school students courting in the VW bus that they would later drive to Redondo Beach. "In the film they're quite contentious with each other," Lapine says, "and I'm sure the original author had his own notion of their back story. We wanted the audience to feel that here is a couple whose romance has gone astray and this trip rekindles the spark."

That "original author," by the way, was Michael Arndt, who won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for his script and (as far as we can tell) doesn't have anything to do with this musical version.

Despite being nominated for Best Picture (and winning the Producers Guild Award), "Little Miss Sunshine" wasn't a gigantic commercial hit, although for an indie it did pretty well, earning just over $100 million worldwide. Still, you'd have to say that the film is well-enough known in popular culture to warrant Finn and Lapine's Broadway aspirations. We'll wait to see what the reviews are, but we have to say that this hardly seems like a fair trade: The world of theater gets a "Little Miss Sunshine," while filmgoers get "Rock of Ages."

'Little Miss Sunshine' musical sheds new light on family [Los Angeles Times]