Doubt the play and the movie

I saw Doubt the movie tonight. The theatre was packed! Apparently the run is doing very well at the Maiden Alley Cinema. My first thought was "Where were all these people when we produced the show last November!" Of course we didn't have Meryl Streep or any of the other talented people that are in the movie or the marketing budget of the movie.

It is always interesting for me to watch a movie that has been a stage play and especially one that MHT has produced and I've directed. As I watched the film I was struck by how different the screenplay was from the script. I learned long ago that you have to do things very differently in a film than you do on stage. Small intimate scenes with close ups of characters that work well in a film almost never work onstage. The opposite is true of something videotaped on stage and then watched on television.

I enjoyed the film. The visuals were great. The school hallways and the exterior shots of the school and the neighborhood. A scene with Sister Aloyiusus and Mrs. Mueller shot on the street had some wonderful visual images with wind and leaves and rain. I thought some of the screenplay choices didn't work as well for me as the play script but that is just personal taste. I love the words that the playwright used. Each word was carefully chosen. With a film it is more about the visuals than the words. That was the most apparent. In the opening scene of the play Father Flynn gives his sermon on Doubt. In the film that was background. We tuned out the sermon as we watched Sister Aloyisus prowl the pews and back hand students who were talking or sleeping.

Auditions are next week for the Wizard of Oz. Although we are doing the script based on the screenplay we will be focused on characters and the words, the music and the relationships. That is theatre at its best.