There are some things in this world that are simple and perfect and can never be revisited again. For a few months last year we were all taken with one of them, Once, the Irish indie that featured the song "Falling Slowly" and made pretty much everyone who saw it melt into a puddle. Remember when stars Marketa Irglova and Glen Hansard won their Oscars, and Jon Stewart brought Marketa back onstage after the orchestra played her off? Remember all that unabashed joy?
Well, prepare for that joy to be killed. Naturally, Once was too popular to go gently into that good night, so now it's going to be a Broadway musical. The group of producers who bought the rights to the movie told Variety they'll be aiming to bring to play to Broadway in 2010, and will stage it as a fairly intimate affair, something like Spring Awakening. They'll also be working with Irglova and Hansard, and possibly the movie's director John Carney, including many of the movie's original songs in the play.
None of this is enough, of course, for it to be OK that they're reworking something that never, ever needed to be redone. But what can you do? When a movie made for less than $500,000 becomes a cash cow, people are going to milk the damn thing until it's dead. At least Irglova and Hansard will never stop being adorable, no matter how much their movie gets destroyed.
