Stasi Spy Play ‘The Lives of Others’ Gives Cinema New Life on Stage

If you fancied seeing a Broadway show at the moment, and wanted to see something that’s based on a familiar cinematic IP, you certainly are spoilt for choice. There are such long-running productions as “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” and “The Lion King,”but also new shows including a musical based on the 1987 Joel Schumacher film “The Lost Boys” and “A Few Good Men,” which was, to be fair, originally based on Aaron Sorkin’s 1989 play, but is far better known in its cinematic incarnation, complete with a demonic Jack Nicholson’s Colonel Nathan Jessup bellowing “You can’t handle the truth!” If your tastes run to rather fluffier and more tuneful concoctions than Mr. Sorkin’s “West Wing” star Bradley Whitford giving his own version of Colonel Jessup, you can head to Lincoln Center. Alternatively, you can wait until next year, when “Paddington: The Musical”makes a trepidatious and no doubt marmalade-fueled journey across the Atlantic. They join a crowded and often all-singing, all-dancing selection that includes everything from “Beetlejuice”and “Back to the Future”in recent years, and which, next year, will include the likes of “10 Things I Hate About You,” an adaptation of Prince’s “Purple Rain” film and even, slightly bizarrely, a Lin-Manuel Miranda version of the cult Walter Hill picture “The Warriors.”All are musicals, perhaps because producers might be nervous about turning films into straight plays, and also because there is a certain bang-for-buck that comes with a selection of songs being performed on stage that helps to justify the increasingly outrageous ticket prices on and off-Broadway. If you were more interested in seeing a straight theatrical adaptation of a modern-day cinematic classic, then you would have to do a reverse “Paddington” and head to London, where Robert Icke’s adaptation of Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s Oscar-winning “The Lives of Others,” with Stephen Dillane and Keira Knightley, is currently wowing audiences.Yet this is an anomaly, too. London has its own share of film-inspired musicals coming up in 2027, including “The Greatest Showman” — which I could have sworn already existed as a stage show of some kind — and a British version of the short-lived Broadway production of Nicholas Sparks’s “The Notebook.” On and on it goes, with the big successes running for decades and the true failures being talked about in hushed tones. The Trevor Nunn-directed “Gone with the Wind” from 2008 was one of the greatest flops on the London stage, and who can forget the notorious ”Carrie: The Musical,” which misguidedly originated with the RSC, of all companies, in 1988 and subsequently went down with all hands on deck when it headed to Broadway later that year.The reason why Mr. Icke’s “The Lives of Others” is unusually good is not just because it doesn’t feature any songs (although there are a few David Bowie instrumental numbers on the soundtrack) but because the director, and his cast, take the original screenplay seriously, adding enough meta-theatrical twists to mean that it feels like a play in its own right rather than a karaoke version of the original film. Yet it might also help that there is now a relative level of unfamiliarity with Mr. von Donnersmarck’s picture. “The Lives of Others” certainly had its champions when it was released in 2007, with William F. Buckley calling it, “the best movie I ever saw…I felt the impulse to rush out into the street and drag passersby in to watch the story unfold.”German-language films about Stasi surveillance in the Eighties, even Oscar-winning ones, tend to have less mainstream reach than the likes of “Paddington” and “Beetlejuice.” While the play has been heavily marketed around its creator’s name, even to the extent of having it billed as ‘Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s “The Lives of Others,” it is more likely that the audiences selling out the 1500-seater Adelphi Theater (top ticket price around $380, still a bargain when compared to some of the outrageous Broadway fleecing that regularly goes on) have turned up to see Knightley, who gives a thoroughly accomplished and frequently searing performance that suggests that her next phase as an actress will be rather more interesting to watch than it was during her ingenue days.My only real reservation about Robert Icke’s play was that it should have been performed in a smaller venue, thereby building up a greater sense of intensity and claustrophobia, but this is not usually an option for big, starry vehicles. When Cate Blanchett returned to the London stage earlier this year, she chose a quasi-cinematic adaptation to appear in at the National Theater, but it was a rather bizarre and not wholly successful mash-up of Sophocles’ “Electra” and Ingmar Bergman’s film “Persona,” which won points for originality and lost them again for incomprehensibility.But Blanchett’s appearance in the National’s Lyttelton theater, before sold-out audiences of 890 people a night, at least demonstrated that her commitment was to the play, rather than to making money. It would have been the easiest thing in the world for her to sell out something far more commercial and unchallenging in a bigger space, but she should be given credit for embracing a dark, difficult cinematic adaptation, rather than the usual fare. Although to be honest, if you’re contemplating casting a double Academy Award-winning actress in something like “Paddington,” priorities have become extremely skewed somewhere along the way.There have been outstanding film-to-play adaptations over the past few years, including “Network,” in which Ivo van Hove managed the difficult task of updating Paddy Chayevsky’s classic anti-media satire to our not-so-brave new world, helped immeasurably by Bryan Cranston’s typically committed and charismatic performance in the lead. For my money, it even managed to erase memories of Peter Finch’s Oscar-winning turn in the 1976 original. But for every successful version of a film, which manages to interrogate and even better its progenitor, there is a lackluster adaptation that does absolutely nothing to transform the storyline on stage.I remember a rash of utterly indifferent versions of plays like “When Harry Met Sally” and, yes, “A Few Good Men” a few years ago, and these things have not improved significantly recently, either. Despite the casting of Billy Crudup and Denise Gough, a stage adaptation of “High Noon” withered and died in London at the beginning of 2026, suggesting that that was one that really should have been allowed to remain in the Golden Age of Hollywood, rather than being dragged so indifferently and disappointingly into the present day.“The Lives of Others” has thrillingly demonstrated, as “Network” did, that there is real potential for great actors and directors to rethink films in theatrical terms, and that this can be every bit as exciting and revelatory as the originals were when they premiered. Yet as we move inexorably into an era of streaming slop and companies desperate to rip off existing successes, it seems inevitable that we are going to suffer through more and more musicals that never needed to take to the stage, many of which serve as desecrations of the films that inspired them in the first place.Film and theater should be close cousins, but this incestuous yoking of the two can only lead to further grief for audiences.

Stasi Spy Play ‘The Lives of Others’ Gives Cinema New Life on Stage

Stasi Spy Play ‘The Lives of Others’ Gives Cinema New Life on Stage

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