It must be very hard to transfer a successful movie to the stage. Apparently the attempt failed with “The Producers”.

Stockholm’s Oscars Teater has succeeded well in transforming the Gene Kelly-Debbie Reynolds-Donald O’Connor film “Singin’ in the Rain”. The performance is simply delightful.

Generally they follow the movie closely. Rennie Mirro as Don Lockwood and Karl Dyall as Cosmo Brown are very good, although they are a bit too much alike. Cosmo is supposed to be the less handsome sidekick. Watching Hanna Lindblad as Kathy Selden it almost seems like Debbie Reynolds.

The stage production diverges from the movie in a few key areas. The roles of the director Roscoe Dexter (played by Johan Rheborg) and the female elocution teacher (played by Gerd Hegnell) are both expanded. In the former case, adding a massively self-preoccupied Dexter not portrayed as in the movie, works on stage. But there really doesn’t seem any purpose in using the elocution teacher to disturb the filming within the story.

There was a nice use of actual film for the sections of the story when everyone was watching movies. Having the theater audience there to play an audience in the story was nice.

I was very curious how they would treat the “Broadway Melody” section. They pulled it off, but it wasn’t as focused as in the film, lacking the strong story thread. The stage version complicated the story by splitting the single Don Lockwood role, using both the Don and Cosmo figures. Instead of the single Cyd Charisse dancer, who switched from femme fatale to pure and white and then back in the film, the Kathy Seldon figure played the dancer in white.

The scene worked, but it was weaker than the strong story in the film. One interesting feature was that they moved the extremely sexist song “Beautiful Girl” from the part of the movie summarizing the quick take-over of Hollywood by talkies (which might have been hard to do on stage anyway) to the middle of “Broadway Melody”.

But the one place the entire production totally breaks down is the Lina Lamont character, played by Sisella Kyle. Not only is the actress too old for the role, she actually looked most of the time like a guy in drag, and not like the bewitchingly lovely Lina.

Lina is a subtle role, and I think Sisella Kyle’s outlandish take missed the point. Lina can be deceptively nice, Kyle never was. And Lina never uses the coarse language that Kyle throws in, perhaps they couldn’t have gotten away with that language in the 1950’s musical, but it just jarred.

Everytime she spoke, it was like nails on a blackboard, and the one extra scene not in the movie was a far too lengthy Lina/Kyle monolog. Of course, Kyle received lots of applause at the end from the Swedish audience, so I might be alone here. I wonder if perhaps Swedes, who are generally rather restrained, just enjoy seeing someone completely let go of inhibitions?

The show is being extended, with Maria Lundqvist taking over the Lina role from the fall. One hopes she watches the movie and takes her model from there, and not from the Kyle interpretation.

That said, the music was wonderful, the rain scene was great, and it was impressive to see Karl Dyall do the “Make ‘em Laugh” scene live without the advantages of film editing. The end features a medley of the best songs and you just want them to keep singing and never stop.