What Were They Thinking: From Stage to Screen Bob Abelman Cleveland Jewish News, The News Herald, The Morning Journal Member, International Association of Theatre Critics “All the world's a stage.” ~ From the 2006 film “As You Like It” New York magazine called it a "tasteless bombardment” and The Hollywood Reporter referred to it as “musical diarrhea.” Despite its box office success – $148 million domestic and $283 million worldwide – most critics of the film version of the Broadway musical “Les Misérables” wrote disparaging reviews. They haven’t been much kinder to NBC’s recent efforts to bring live theater back to the small screen – where it was a mainstay in the 1950s – with recent broadcasts of “The Sound of Music” (“As lifeless as those alpine backdrops,” Variety), “Peter Pan” (“Fails to take flight,” NY Daily News) and “The Wiz” ( “A hot mess,” The Daily Beast). Most of the negative commentary revolved around the intrusion of the camera when going from stage to screen, which The New York Times referred to as the “inability to leave any lily ungilded, to direct a scene without tilting or hurtling or throwing the camera around.” And this isn’t just a problem with musicals, for the history of filmed theater in general doesn’t have a great track record in this regard. Have you seen “Spinning Into Butter” (“A movie taking a fairly interesting premise… and, through sheer incompetence, turning it into an unwatchable mess,” The Washington Times)? The National Theatre in London attempted to bridge this chasm in storytelling modalities by taking a different approach to adapting stage productions for the big screen, called NT Live. For more of this article, go to www.clevelandjewishnews.com/columnists/.