Broadway plays that were never adapted as films

This show had so much going for it: the Tonys, a Pulitzer (rare for a musical) and an almost two year run on Broadway. I think the idea that the show was so popular in New York was because it spoke specifically to New Yorkers has some merit, but we also have to look at the fate of movie musicals in general to explain the failure of a film version to materialize. A few splashy shows like Gypsy were still making the trek to Hollywood, but in general that tap was being turned off, so it's also somewhat a question of timing. Even The Sound of Music was a gamble, though a gamble which paid off beyond Twentieth Century-Fox's dreams and briefly rekindled interest in the genre. Fiorello! just wasn't favorably positioned on that timeline, coming as it did at a time when the movie industry's interest in musicals was waning and before its brief resurgence. There were other shows from around that time which in former days would have seemed like a natural bet for a film version but which were overlooked by Hollywood: Lucille Ball's Wildcat (though reviews weren't great) and the Sid Ceasar-driven Little Me. Little Me in particular, because it was based on a classic Patrick Dennis book and poked very broad fun at the movie industry. (Nothing too nasty.  More along the lines of Singin' in the Rain.)

Fiorello! was also a star-making vehicle for Tom Bosley. If there had been a movie version, who knows what kind of film career he might have had.

I know this thread isn't supposed to focus entirely on musicals, but the one which has always stood out for me is Rodgers and Hammerstein's Pipe Dream (1955), especially considering that their name at that time practically guaranteed a movie adaptation. It was a show with an amazing pedigree which mostly failed to connect with audiences and critics, which probably explains the movie industry's indifference. It was based on a John Steinbeck novel about a marine biologist who falls in love with a prostitute, and there's your big problem right there. Neither Broadway nor Hollywood was equipped at that time to deal honestly and realistically with that kind of material, so it was probably always going to be a non-starter. Plays from Broadway were routinely "cleaned up" for film, but if the New York product was already so watered down then there wasn't much hope of bringing anything intelligible to the screen. Hammerstein apparently later regretted having been persuaded to do it because it was so against his instinct to tell that kind of story. 

Henry Fonda was attached to it for a bit but eventually bowed out after an honest appraisal of his vocal ability by all concerned, including himself. Helen Traubel, from the world of opera, was signed for the role of the madam of the bordello, which quickly became a vague kind of boarding house/social club. Judy Tyler was signed on the basis of her role as Princess Summerfall Winterspring on the Howdy Doody Show and her part became less prostitutey and more "free spirited". (She did Jailhouse Rock with Elvis shortly after but died with her husband in a car crash driving back to the East Coast.) Her song "Everybody's Got a Home But Me" is probably the one which has had the longest life after the show. 

There hasn't been a major revival and I'm only really aware of it because I found the cast album at a yard sale. It's understandable that there wasn't a movie version, I guess, but still shocking because of the caliber of talent involved in its creation.

An early example of that might be Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth (1942). It played fast and loose with theatrical conventions and no doubt would have rocked the cinema boat as well if it had been attempted. It's a mish-mash of historical themes and contexts, presided over by one character in particular who directly addresses and sometimes hectors the audience. Acts I and III center on a family unit meant to suggest Adam, Eve, Cain and Abel, set in a New Jersey suburb with an ice age impending, bringing an assortment of historical characters to their door seeking shelter, including a dinosaur and a Wooly Mammoth Their maid, the one given to breaking the fourth wall, reappears in Act II as a beauty queen on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City set on disrupting the family dynamic as, again, disaster looms in the form of a Noah-style deluge. Act III begins as the family emerges from bunkers following a disasterous years-long war, with members of the family on opposing sides and questionable prospects for recovery and redemption. The play intentionally raises the question of whether or not the human race is capable of not repeating its history and basically leaves any solution in the hands of the audience

The play was obviously crafted to speak to a country which had just emerged from the Depression and was currently involved in a World War on an unprecedented scale. It's a sometimes-bewildering mix of whimsy and pathos, yet it connected to Broadway audiences and had a long run, also winning the Pulitzer Prize. So it can't really be said that there wasn't a potential movie audience as well if a way could have been found to translate it to that medium, though it's hard to imagine what that way might have been.


             That's Montgomery Clift at the rear.