In no particular order…

Carry On Cowboy and Carry on Cleo. A couple of the Carry On films from the dozens made between 1958 and 1992. These ensemble comedies are a crash course in British Music Hall stylings. Many of them co-star Jim Dale (whose new autobiographical one-man show virtually ignores this huge chunk of his film resume). Carry On Cleo was made on the same sets used for Elizabeth Taylor’s Cleopatra. It was one of the films referenced in Terry Johnson’s play Cleo, Camping, Emmanuelle and Dick, which was about the winding down of the classic era of the Carry On films, .

Top Secret is a Cold War spy comedy starring Oscar Homolka, who worked with Brecht and Max Reinhardt in 1920s Germany, where he was also in the German premieres of several Eugene O’Neill plays.

It’s All Happening, a musical comedy starring Tommy Steele, a theater star and pop star whose big stage hit was Half a Sixpence.

Mystery Men. Based on the absurdist comic book concepts of Bob Burden. The Yale Cabaret turned Burden’s most famous hero, The Flaming Carrot, into a stage play something like 25 years ago. Also, Hank Azaria has done so much in so many media that his many cool stage acting credits tend to be overlooked. (I attended Tufts University at the same time as him, and he was great in everything from Christie in Love to a minor role in The Merchant of Venice.)

Shake It Up!, Dance Academy and First Position. Two series and a full-length film about teen dancer. Shake It Up! is from the Disney Channel, Dance Academy is Australian-made.

Madea’s Witness Protection. The first of Tyler Perry’s Madea films which did not start as a stage play.

That Guy… Who Was In That Thing. Documentary about the difficulties of maintaining a career as a professional actor if you’re not a big star.

Circus Rosaire. A 2008 family-circus drama.

Suave Patria. Two actors are hired for a prank but get ensnared in a con man’s scheme. Typical actors!

 William Shatner’s Gonzo Ballet. Documentary of the creation of a Margo Sappingon performance piece based on Shatner’s album Has Been.

The Devil’s Carnival. A rather theatrical view of damnation, with sins turned into carny acts.

Shakespeare High. Documentary about urban youth entering a Shakespeare competition. Sounds like it’s loaded with cultural and class-based stereotypes.

A Liar’s Autobiography. The story of Monty Python member Graham Chapman. Lest you forget, all those guys came out of student theater groups at Oxford or Cambridge universities.

The Magic Flute. The 2006 Mozart update, set in early 20^th century Europe.

The Goldbergs. The TV version of Gertrude Berg’s classic Jewish family sitcom. Berg had a theater background from the Catskills, where her father ran a resort.

The Chicago 8. The very definition of political theater. This is the dramatization of the trial events following the arrest of Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin et al. at the 1968 Chicago demonstrations.

Private Romeo. The Shakespeare romance, reworked for a present-day all-male military academy. (Guess they could just as easily have called it West Point Story.)

Studio One: The Defender. Golden age of TV drama stuff from 1957, reeking with live-theater values.

The Actresses. Real-life actresses play themselves in a Korean drama about real actresses not getting along at a photo shoot.

Heart of the King. Doc about peculiar Elvis impersonators.

Refuge. Comic drama about hostages, a dead body in the backseat, and some romantic action. Written and directed by old theater hand Mark Medoff.

Collaborator. Martin Donovan directed and stars in this drama about a disillusioned playwright who forsakes Broadway for Hollywood.

1. “Free” from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. About half the songs from the stage musical didn’t make it into Richard Lester’s film version, but this is the most maddening omission. Zero Mostel says the word, then seems about to sing it, but the scene quick-cuts to something else entirely. Could it be that Richard Lester, like great comedy director George S. Kaufman before him, just didn’t like musicals? He seemed to be able to make room for Beatles songs in Hard Day’s Night and Help.

2. “My Blanket and Me” from You’ re a Good Man, Charlie Brown. The animated TV version of the musical is only an hour long, and tends to go for the ensemble tunes (like “Glee Club Rehearsal,” a number which didn’t even make the original Off Broadway soundtrack album). But I can’t help wondering what might have been done with this wonderful Linus solo. It has the same dramatic usefulness as Hysterium’s “I’m Calm” from A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”—which of course was cut from Forum’s film version.

3. “The Madison”, aka “The Madison Time” from Hairspray. The only song from John Water’s original 1988 Hairspray film to make it into the 2002 Broadway musical adaptation. In the Waters film it’s a record by the Philadephia-based Ray Bryant combo. Bryant just died this past June.

4.”The Long Grift” from Hedwig and the Angry Inch. “Look what you’ve done, you gigolo…” The only song in the stage show sung by a member of the backing band rather than Hedwig herself or her sideman Ytzhak, it provides a perfectfully timed respite and fresh perspective mid-show. It’s my favorite song in a show full of great rock songs, and I was devastated when only a few notes of it are heard in the movie. It was especially galling because the film was adapted and directed and scored by the same duo who’d devised the original, John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask. I was able to ask Trask (who sang it in the original Jane St. Theater production) about it, and he had several explanations for why “The Long Grift” wouldn’t work on screen. It’s true that the film has many more voices and characters in it than the stage version, so the thrill of a new one is gone. But, really, what a beautiful song.

5. “Coffee Break” from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. No, it doesn’t further the plot, and it could apply to any musical about any office ever. But they weren’t doing musicals about offices in the 1950s and ‘60s, and this song really set the scene for the entire enterprise. It’s kind of an Act One coffee break in itself, a chance to enjoy the already frenetic pace with a little caffeine boost. It’s a crucial number in a show where even the love duets are shouty and frazzled; what drug are these people on? Coffee.

Maybe punk bands figure Buddy Hackett’s slurring, drooling, pogoing interpretation of “Shipoopi” (replete with simulated-fart dance moves) has already taken the song as far as it could ever go.

Music Man multi-threat Meredith Willson (who wrote the show’s book, lyrics and score) deserves to have more of his tunes hit the rock trail. Beyond wrote the University of Iowa football team fight son and such radio pop hits as “You and I,” “I See the Moon” and “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Chrstmas.” Willson’s mentioned in the current issue of Nostalgia Digest, a magazine devoted to the golden age of radio, as an early Music Director at the major West Coast radio station KFRC in the late 1920s and early ‘30s.

Here are some of the wilder interpretations of Music Man songs I’ve uncovered. Which, unfortunately, are about as wild as a straitlaced River City librarian.

Iowa Stubborn: Jimmy Guiffre. The jazz clarinetist (who died in 2008) did an entire album of freewheeling instrumental interpretations of Music Man tunes. He gets honors here for even bothering with the rangy, misshapen melody of “Iowa Stubborn.”

Trouble: Spanky and Our Gang, the pristine ‘60s harmony pop group beloved by those who thought the Mamas & the Papas needed one less Mama and more Papas, include Harold Hill’s pool-hall rabble-rouser on their debut album, sticking it on side one right before their pure pop singles “Sunday Will Never Be the Same.” (On side two, Spanky & Our Gang cover “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?). “Trouble” is done in a disarmingly straightforward, low-key fashion eschewing the overproduced sweetness the group became known for. It’s a solo male voice backed with the usual chorus of “townsfolk” muttering “Trouble!” The musical backing could be called unorthodox, since it’s a banjo and not an orchestra, but you do feel that an opportunity has been missed here in claiming the song more firmly for a Summer of Love rock audience. (Runners-up: Tyne Daly with Boston Pops; Seth MacFarlane’s blistering parody done for the Writers Guild of America Awards.

Goodnight My Someone: Les Paul and Mary Ford. The guitar icon plays the country-porch lament with bite, while his wife sweetens the vocals. (Runner-up: Jessica Molaskey’s contemporary pop rendition, which gives the tune more of a lonely-in-the-big-city vibe.)

76 Trombones: Dan Zanes did this and several other Music Man songs on one of his kid-friendly Dan Zanes & Friends. I interviewed Zanes about the project last year when he played the International Festival of Arts & Ideas in New Haven, for which trombonists (and other brass-players) from across the state were invited to march about the Green in a “76 Trombones” finale; far fewer than 76 showed up.
In my interview with Zanes, the former Del Fuegos frontman was refreshingly candid about where he felt the project had failed. He’d been offered unusual freedom to rearrange a slew of Broadway standards, hoping that the showtunes fit with the populist folk attitude he’d been pushing for all his family-friendly projects. Many of the songs frustrated his aims, either because they were so character- or plot-connected or because their complex arrangements didn’t strip down easily enough. It’s clear that Zanes felt comfortable with The Music Man; besides making “76 Trombones” the title track of his showtune showcase, he also covers “Goodnight, My Someone” and (as a medley) “Gary, Indiana” and “Wells Fargo Wagon.”

Pick a Little Talk a Little: Title of a Sex and the City episode.

Sadder But Wiser Girl: Again, Seth MacFarlane’s done it (on his forthcoming Music is Better Than Words big-band album).

Good Night Ladies: An arrangement for the Baby Genius series (one of those spurious attempts to stimulate intelligence through cheesy music) puts something of a disco beat to the shouty lullabye.

Shipoopi: There’s a weird, plaintive rendition by Gregg Nestor & Tommy Morgan on their eclectic album Classic Musicals for Harmonica and Guitar. Runner-up: Peter Griffin’s “This calls for a victory tune” rendition on the Patriot Games episode of Seth McFarlane’s series Family Guy, which resurfaced on the live-action Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show special in 2009.

Lida Rose: The only challenge in covering this barbershop quartet standard, apparently, is in upping the number of voices in it. Andy Williams performs it with four young Osmond Brothers (and, once the tune merges into “Sweet and Low”, their then-3-year-old sister Marie) on his variety show 1962. Jerold Ottley does it (and “Will I Ever Tell You”) with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Gary Indiana: Janet Planet makes a cabaret patter song out of it, like The Waters of March flowed through there or something.

Till There Was You: Beatles, yes, but also Rod Stewart (on one of his insufferable American Songbooks), The Smithereens (on their Meet The Beatles remake Meet The Smithereens), Ray Charles…

Sturm und Drang by Friedrich Maximilian Klinger. It’s the work that coined that phrase, in 1776. The play’s actually about the American Revolution.

Dynamo by Eugene O’Neill. Big splashy thunderstorm finale. One of O’Neill’s most underrated works. It underwhelmed the critics at its premiere, and the playwright blamed himself for not having gotten as involved in the production as he had been with previous ones.

Barefoot in the Park by Neil Simon. “I’m going to be shoveling snow in my own living room!”

Three Days of Rain by Richard Greenberg. We all know what that means.

The Tempest by William Shakespeare. “Here’s neither bush nor shrub, to bear off
any weather at all, and another storm brewing. I hear it sing i’ the wind: yond’ same black cloud, yond huge one, looks like a foul bombard that would shed his liquor.”

Porgy and Bess by Ira Gershwin, Dubose Heyward and George Gershwin. The hurricane that bombards Catfish Row at the end of Act 2 has just been bested by the furor arising from Porgy purists upset at some of the changes Diane Paulus and Suzan-Lori Parks have made for their revised version at the ART.

To Gleam It Around, To Show My Shine by Bonnie Lee Moss Rattner. A 1983 play based on Zora Neale Hurston’s Okeechobee Hurrican-struck story Their Eyes Were Watching God. It’s had productions at several college and regional theaters.

Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford. The 1921 movie version of this 1910 George M. Cohan play (based on short stories by George Randolph Chester) was showing at the Knickerbocker Theatre in Washington DC in January of 1922 when the building’s roof collapsed due to snowfall from a blizzard that had raged for over two days. Ninety-eight people died and over a hundred others were injured in the crash. The storm ended up being named after the theater: The Knickerbocker Storm.

The Storm by Ostrovsky. Turned into an opera by Janacek. It’s mostly metaphorical, about tempestuous relationships and personal revelations which resound like thunderbolts, but there is a weather-type storm in there somewhere too.

Irene. The musical comedy based on the James Montgomery play Irene O’Dare was, in its time, the longest running show in Broadway history. Songs from two decades-apart versions of this show—“You Made Me Love You” and “Alice Blue Gown” can be heard this November in the new musical Hello! My Baby at Goodspeed Musicals’ Norma Terris Theatre in Chester.
Another hit song from the show, which you could well be humming Sunday: “There’s Something in the Air.”

Snoopy! The Musical. There’s an animated version of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, but it pales next to the Off Broadway original, having cut half the songs so as to fit a one-hour TV broadcast slot and keeping with the Peanuts TV cartoon tradition of having the characters sound like real kids reading their lines off the page. (A few of the cast members here also appeared in the weekly Charlie Brown & Snoopy Show, during the most prolific period of Peanuts cartoons.) The singing is weak, the performances not as lively as in the classic Clark Gesner-scored stage version with its brilliantly modular set design.
Snoopy! The Musical, on the other hand, only benefits from trims and a consistent style. This long-gestating mutt of a sequel (the Annie Warbucks of its time) had its world premiere in San Francisco in 1975 but didn’t make it to Off Broadway until 1982, with a completely different cast. I saw a Boston try-out of that Off Broadway version, starring David Garrison as Snoopy and Vicki Lewis as Peppermint Patty—both far better than the material they were given to work with. (Lewis, years away from NewsRadio and other glories, was replaced by Lorna Luft shortly after the show went to New York. Some indignity, if that the biggest “name star” they could swing.) The TV rendition succeeds as a brisk, harmless installment in the long, uneven annals of animated Peanuts—more unwieldy than It’s Arbor Day, Charlie Brown, perhaps, but not nearly as far-gone as the Spike-starring It’s the Girl in the Red Truck, Charlie Brown.

Mayhem of the Music Meister! The final episode of the first season of Batman: The Brave and the Bold rated festival rated festival screenings and the release of its eight-song soundtrack, and was nominated for an Emmy. Neil Patrick Harris, still jut entering his mainstream acceptance as a Broadway belter (he’d done Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, but had only just begun hosting all those awards shows). NPH accesses his old Cabaret and Assassins characterizations for a supervillain who mesmerizes the members of the Justice Leagure of America into doing kicklines against their will. The songs are super-catchy, from the style-parody “He Drives Us Bats” (sung by inmates of Arkham Asylum) to “Death Trap,” a suspense song which would work in just about any actual Frank Wildhorn musical.

Cats! It never actually got made (Really Useful Productions ultimately took the easy straight-to-video filmed-stage-show route instead), but the concept of turning Andrew Lloyd Webber’s leg-warmer into a ful-length animated feature was so appealing that it worked its way into the dialogue of John Guare’s Six Degrees of Separation. Which almost made it real.

Shinbone Alley. This is the cat cartoon musical which did get made, against all odds, nearly 15 years after the stage musical on which it’s based had a short run on Broadway, and some 65 years after its lead characters had first been introduced as part of humorist Don Marquis’ daily column in the New York Sun. The film cleverly updates the urban squalor of the original archy & mehitabel newspaper adventures and the 1957 nusical to include the civil unrest and war-consciousness of the early 1970s, which connected it squarely to the Ralph Bakshi adult cartoon features Heavy Traffic and Coonskin released in that same enlightened era. (Bakshi referenced archy & mehitabel as slumdwelling urbanites in one of his films.)

South Park The Movie. Structured just like a real musical. The Book of Mormon’s success was inevitable.

Shakespeare’s Planet by Clifford D. Simak (1976, Berkeley Medallion Books)
The Shakespeare of the book’s title is an impostor, but he’s done more than borrow the playwright’s name. He’s started his own sort of Prospero-esque existence with aliens and robots. Moreover, he’s scrawled his memoirs in the margins of a copy of The Collected Works of William Shakespeare. The venerable Clifford Simak’s prose can be absorbed quickly, but that doesn’t mean it’s not deep. There are lots of comments and tangents that allude to Shakespeare, even though his world—and ours—is long gone in this tale of future survival.

Tomorrow and Tomorrow, by Charles Sheffield (1997; I’ve got the 1998 Bantam Spectra paperback edition).
Charles Sheffield is classified as a writer of “hard science fiction.” That means his plots rely on “hard science,” speculation based on proven theories which govern the world as we know it. For some fiction-lovers, however, it just means they’re hard to get through. This one has a 34-page appendix explaining Big Bang Theory, gravitational force, the stability of protons and even the scientific basis for the existence of God.
Too much like school for me. On the plus side, the title and many of the chapter headings derive from Shakespeare: “Brave New World”; “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments”; “These our actors, as I foretold you…”;

Other headings come from Kipling (“These were never your true love’s eyes”; “There’s trouble in the wind, my boys”), Wilde (“Yet each man kills the thing he loves), Masefield (“A wild call and a clear call”), Huxley (“Brave new world”), Coleridge (“Her lips were red, her looks were free…”), even Wilfred Owen (“Out there, we’ve walked quite friendly up to death”). Oh, and Homer: huge sections of Tomorrow and Tomorrow are labeled “Odyssey” and “Iliad.”

Overall, more physics than Shakes, though all those lit references (uncredited and unexplained, unlike the sciencey parts) give Tomorrow and Tomorrow a polymath quality that’s not just math.

Too Too Solid Flesh by Nick O’Donohoe (1989 TSR Inc.)
A fantastic “science fiction murder mystery” about an android theater troupe created to perform classic drama for jaded Manhattanites of the future. There’s even a character named Capek, referencing the author of the robot play R.U.R.

Actors suffer the same indignities as they do now:

“Simulas killed live acting the way talking film killed silent film, the way color almost killed black and white, the way synth killed live music.” He added bitterly, “Nobody will pay new actors now. “Horatio looked back at Hamlet. “I thought you knew.”
“But our audience.” Hamlet gestured to the seats. “The people who come night after night to see us. Surely there’s still a demand—“
Horatio shook his head. “There’s an old line from a siumula—I think it used to be a movie: ‘Not even Shakespeare could watch Hamlet three nights in a row.’ Some people watch you because they’re LabTeks. The rest probably came because androids are a novelty, or because they want sex. They can’t care about live theater anymore.” He added gently, “I’m sorry, my lord.”
Hamlet dropped his eyes. “I wondered why they hardly ever clapped.”

Almighty Thor: A Norse-god-in-the-modern-world superhero epic released in 2011, yet it’s NOT the Kenneth Branagh Thor. This one is from the director of Mega Shark vs. Crocosaurus.

American: The Bill Hicks Story. Documentary about the late outspoken revolutionary stand-up comic, who is often compared to the late outspoken revolutionary stand-up comic Lenny Bruce.

At the Sinatra Club: Mobster saga set in and around a nightclub.

Circus: Documentary following the Big Apple Circus for an entire season.

Criss Angel Mindfreak: All six seasons are now online, bringing stage magic to the masses.

Joan Rivers—A Piece of Work: I always regret that I never got to see her play Lenny Bruce’s mother in that Lonny Price play.

The Kevin Dunham Show: The erstwhile Sugar Babies attraction, whose theater tours still pack ‘em in, is the most popular broadcast ventriloquist since Edgar Bergen.

Mr Bean—The Whole Bean: As Rowan Atkinson’s long-ago HBO special proved, the Mr. Bean didn’t just revive classic silent movie comedy, it revived the stage vaudeville styles that inspired silent movie comedy.

Ridicule: French indie which would make a fantastic play. It’s about wit used as a weapon in late 18th century French royal courts.

Rock-a-Doodle: Over 20 years before All Shook Up, there was this animated rockabilly-scored musical about a cocksure, foolhardy country singer.

Role/Play: Gay romance concerning an outed, and fired, soap actor.

South Park—A Very Buttery Collection: Anthology of 13 episodes featuring Butters, from the masterminds of the Book of Mormon musical. One of the eps involves tap dancing.

Sumo of the Opera: A Veggie Tales adventure starring Larry the Cucumber in a simultaneous tribute to theater-haunting and pro wrestling.

Vanishing on 7th Street: John Leguizamo gets so much material for his one-man shows from his experiences in Hollywood that you owe to yourself to see him in cheesy horror flicks like this one.

Why Did I Get Married Too?: Tyler Perry’s being making movies for a decade now, but those films still had the patina of the popular stage shows which inspired them. This is one of the first which announces itself as a film rather than a film-based-on-a-play or a play-like film. Because it’s a sequel, and its big name star, Janet Jackson, is not stage-trained (unless you count her pop tours).

Yo Gabba Gabba!: The stage tour of this hipster kids’ show aimed for the same spontaneity and contemporaneity, getting stage-savvy live bands with attitude to jump aboard as special guests. The full-bodied maskwork by the show’s stars is pretty impressive too.

OK, so the last one’s more like a battleground. I enjoy making these lists anyhow.

1.     Cowboy Mouth. This one could be genuinely confusing to clubgoers/theatergoers, since the play the band is named after is a rock-and-roll affair developed by Sam Shepard and Patti Smith that actually gets staged in rock clubs fairly often. That’s what inspired this list, actually.
2.     Angel City: Australian rock band, aka The Angels. Known for the moody metal track “Face the Day” (about not wanting to). Shepard’s play Angel City debuted in 1976. The Angels, who had been around since 1970 in various forms, took the new band name Angel City in 1980 to distinguish themselves from similarly named bands such as Angel.

3.     Buried Child. The title has its own rock resonance since it’s a song by the influential and extremely loud band Swans. There’s a band called Buried Child with five songs (including “Self-Caesarean” and “Crucifiction”), but very little bio info, on Facebook.

4.     True West. Pop band of the Paisley Underground psychedelic pop scene in the early 1980s.

5.     Savage Love. Blues rock trio from Seattle.

6.     Inacoma. There’s a Youtube video of this young Malaysian band playing at the IVM Band Battle in Australia in 2009. Sam Shepard wrote a play called Inacoma in 1977.

7.     Mad Dog Blues. There are Mad Dog Blues Bands Chapel Hill, North Carolina, London, England, and Edmonton, Canada and throughout the known world. Sam Shepard wrote his play Mad Dog Blues in 1971.

8.     Can’t find a band called The God of Hell (one of Shepard’s more recent works, from 2004). But I can’t hear Shepard’s title without ’60s supergroup The Crazy World of Arthur Brown leaping into my brain: “I am the god of hellfire—and I bring you…. Fire!” (Well, what are we expecting the god of hellfire to bring? The communion water?)