This one isn't exactly calling out for a remake, but I think I know how to make it work: [italic]Godspell[/italic].
The film we have is as good a record of (some of) what the original stage version was like as we'll ever get. It's got original cast members from several of the first-run companies, the basic quality, tone, and ideas are the same... like it or hate it, its movie is one of very few in the theater canon where you got a fairly faithful translation of a musical to the screen. Having said that, if you don't know the show going in, the film would leave you utterly clueless as a first-timer. They took out some of the score's big tent-poles, so to speak, and moved other songs around, which muddied the structure somewhat. Unfortunately, with [italic]Godspell[/italic], when you fiddle with structure, it does damage to the rest of the show. (Like [italic]Hair[/italic] [a la Sunday school, in this case], [italic]Godspell[/italic]'s plot is not immediately evident, partly because it's mostly subtextual, but it is there.)
So, remake... but how? Personally (and I'm probably the only one who gives a shit, so I feel safe in saying this), I'd lean on my mentor's stage production. One of his big claims to fame was having directed the original Harlem company of [italic]Godspell[/italic] in the late Nineties (on West 125th St., no less, at the Victoria, one door down from the Apollo), to date the only all-black production in the show's history, which also updated the arrangements to reflect gospel, rap, hip-hop, R&B, and other black music formats in addition to the traditional folk-rock influences. (It also benefited from direct input from Stephen Schwartz, who liked the production, helped incorporate new material [first time the new "Beautiful City" lyrics were ever heard on a live stage], and went on tape saying that, with money, it would be the best production he'd ever seen.) The production was set in a church basement in contemporary Harlem, where the cast were rehearsing for the annual church play, when the literal Second Coming showed up and the rest of the show, as filtered through the "inspirational theater" techniques one might see in Tyler Perry's stage pieces or shows that play the "black Broadway" circuit, ensued.
[italic]Godspell[/italic] on the face of it doesn't work like it used to anymore. In too many productions, its spiritual side is flatly ignored in favor of flashy song and dance, or "future SNL cast members" shamelessly mugging at the show's (and often the story's) expense. These productions still entertain, but they’re not moving. The Harlem production was quite powerful, emotional even, because it was darker than most of the sugar-coated, cookie-cutter revivals of the past, and it tapped into a genuine spark and sentiment in the African-American Christian community that one rarely finds elsewhere; in Harlem, Jesus is real. So my remake, for lack of a better short description, would be a Perry-esque [italic]Godspell[/italic], set in the context of a black Pentecostal service and drawing on black theater tradition going way back, with names on the level of, say, Jenifer Lewis, Rain Pryor, Shirley Caesar, and such like in the cast. Finally it wouldn't be just a revue or variety show about team-building, as important as those elements are to Schwartz.
