“It doesn’t confuse people’s minds and bodies.”

Have you noticed how almost none of the reviews of the Footloose film remake have bothered to mention that, between the original 1984 Kevin Bacon movie and the new Kenny Wormald one, Footloose was also a long-running Broadway musical? This is an egregious oversight, since some of the elements which have been ballyhooed as virtues of the Hollywood remake were present in that stage adaptation. This includes a deeper appreciation of the car-crash tragedy which sets the town of Beaumont into mourning and leads to the ban on dancing which so frustrates the impetuous Ren.
The musical had a long gestation, which included a production at Bridgeport’s Downtown Cabaret Theatre in 1996, over two years before the show opened on Broadway. Footloose’s first London production was rather recent, beginning as a tour in 2004 then settling into a West End run from 2006-07.
There was a 10th anniversary U.S. revival tour which played the Shubert in New Haven just three years ago.
I have fond memories of the stage Footloose, particularly the tour which came to the Shubert in late 1999 (having played Hartford’s Bushnell earlier that year). It featured Christian Borle, now an acknowledged Broadway commodity, as Ren’s pal Willard. Borle had come through the Shubert in 1996 in a non-Equity production of West Side Story, as a most animated Riff. Footloose was an Equity tour which landed Borle on Broadway as Willard for the show’s final months in New York.
Footloose was part of a wave of musicals-based-on-movies which engulfed Broadway in the mid-1990s. (Others included Big, High Society, Victor/Victoria and Whistle Down the Wind).
Funny sort of snobbery, to ignore all that in connection with the Footloose film remake, wouldn’t you say?