The Real Lesson of "Dance 10, Looks 3"

In the musical theatre, we love our instructive parables, from the casting of Gene Kelly in Pal Joey to the struggle over finding just the right opening number for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. One of the most popular, however, revolves around a specific number from A Chorus Line.

Those of you acquainted with the basics of this story can skip the next paragraph. However, for the uninitiated...


The character Val has a gleefully naughty number about how much more successful she has been in appealing to casting directors since she got plastic surgery. It was pitched as a big comedy number, but it wasn't getting laughs. The creators scratched their heads at this until they looked in the program and recalled what title they had given it: "Tits & Ass." In short, they had put the punchline of the song in the title. They changed the title to the more oblique "Dance 10, Looks 3" and it brought the house down. Happy ending.

The lesson usually derived from this is one of detail and pacing. Through it, we are taught that even a seemingly small detail like a song title can completely change an audience's reaction, and that jokes are better when left to unfold organically, not when telegraphed.

This is all perfectly true and perfectly valuable, but I think it overlooks the more fundamental lesson of the parable. Because here's the thing: "Dance 10, Looks 3" is just fundamentally a much better title.

Unless you are deliberately obfuscating for effect - like the intentionally vague title "Epiphany" in Sweeney Todd - your song title will also be the key phrase around which the song is based, and a good key phrase must get at the central dramatic tension of the song. "A Weekend in the Country" from A Little Night Music is a great title for the song it is attached to because the song is all about the comically contrasted reactions of the various characters to the suggestion of a weekend in the country and the disparate things it means to each of them. Right there in that seemingly innocuous phrase you have the tension that drives the entire number.

In this light, "Tits & Ass" is a terrible title primarily not because it telegraphs the punchline but rather because the song is not properly about that punchline. The song is about the tension the character discovered between her talent and her looks and how she went about resolving that tension. Or, put more elegantly, "Dance 10, Looks 3." The title is about the double standard she faces. The punchline is about how she deals with it.

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Sweeney Todd vs. Into The Woods: Two Approaches To Film Adaptation

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I have been given to understand that I am somewhat outspoken in my love for the 2007 Tim Burton adaptation of Sweeney Todd. Whatever your complaints (and I've heard them before, I guarantee it), I would like us to set them aside for a moment and consider the movie as an adaptation alone.

Consider, for example, the controversial decision to entirely excise the chorus numbers. One might immediately presume this to be a measure taken against implausibility and staginess, but it actually serves a larger thematic purpose in the movie. The Tim Burton filmography is almost entirely about alienation, and Sweeney Todd is no exception. You can see this in the make-up work, where the gaunt and skull-like circles around the eyes are granted to those in Sweeney's sphere who have succumbed to madness. Toby, for instance, is not given the gaunt eyes until his very last scene - the one in which (SPOILER, I suppose) he cuts Sweeney's throat.

The decision to cut the chorus numbers extends this theme. The music and the related compulsion to sing is re-framed as a product - or perhaps an expression - of the madness inherent in the main characters. Where the Hal Prince interpretation emphasized the universality of inter-human predation and framed Sweeney's crimes as an extension of the callous disregard for life in an over-industrialized society, Burton pares back the story. He makes it less socially relevant, true, but at the same time more intimate and personally affecting.

For a film adaptation, this is - at least in my view - entirely the right choice. In a medium in which the camera can precisely focus on whatever specific element the director demands and capture micro-expressions that would be imperceptible on the stage, taking a sweeping story and making it tight and close is a choice that perfectly suits the medium into which the work is being transferred.

In short, Sweeney Todd serves as an excellent example of how to adapt a musical to film with a keen eye on the comparative advantages of each medium. By way of contrast, then, let us compare this approach to that used in the recent film adaptation of Into The Woods.

As I explained in my review at the time, I did not think the movie was particularly bad. The source material is just so good that you would really have to go far out of your way to make it unwatchable, after all. However, I also criticized the approach of the adaptation with a metaphor that I would like to elaborate on somewhat here.

The adaptation of Into The Woods is characterized not by any major additions, chronological fiddling, augmentations, or what have you, but instead by its omissions. Say a certain scene has to be cut for time. In that case, the subplot that the scene in question resolves must be cut in its entirety. If this cannot be done without destroying the main plot, then a more disposable subplot must be found. If you are going to cut the resolution of the Witch's arc, then you must also cut Rapunzel's death. If you are going to cut the Narrator and the Old Man for reasons of staginess, then you also have to cut "No More." You must cut precisely the right scenes in order to maintain the basic structural integrity of the piece as a whole.

In short, this adaptation treats the story like a Jenga tower. The trick is to pull out precisely the right blocks so that the whole edifice does not collapse.

Which, while I recognize that it's probably necessary in this case given just how complicated the plot of Into The Woods can get, I would assert is entirely the wrong way of going about it.

While I hope this does not require reiteration, I may as well repeat it here: the cinema and the stage are separate mediums with separate demands, and a good adaptation of one to the other requires heavy alteration of the source. If that alteration "ruins" the story, then maybe that work should not have been adapted in the first place, which is also a possibility that I think the entertainment industry doesn't consider nearly enough.

But in any case, whatever your reservations might be about Helena Bonham-Carter's singing, Sweeney Todd stands alongside the likes of Fosse's Cabaret as a shining example of how to do a stage-to-screen adaptation right by rebuilding rather than just reducing the source.