Coming Attractions or “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Sequel”
by joel fishbane
The rate of movie franchises coming out of Hollywood approached critical velocity recently with the announcement that 2011 would feature the most number of sequels, pre-quels and reboots in the history of film. The trend is clearly contagious and any theatre folks who consider the stage to be immune should think again. We humble theatre folks were infected by this craze long before Hollywood was even born.
Consider old man Sophocles, spinning out one Oedipus play after another; consider Shakespeare, who aside from two tetraologies, gave us The Merry Wives of Windsor, his answer to the reboot; here, for those unfamiliar, he plucked Falstaff and friends out of the Henriad and dropped them into Elizabethan England.
The first musical ever to win a Pulitzer Prize – Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing! – received an unsuccessful sequel two years later called Let ‘Em Eat Cake. The show was not only a failure, but also set the stage for seventy years of deplorable song and dance spin-offs. Remember the sequel to Annie? Or the one to Bye Bye Birdie? Don’t worry if you don’t; nobody else does either.
