by MATTHEW HAYS

Perhaps one of the toughest things for a filmmaker to pull off is the stage-to-screen adaptation. Fans of the original are prone to complain that the essence of the work has been betrayed. Or, detractors will suggest, the finished product feels too stagy and hasn’t managed to pull itself away successfully from the proscenium. For the adapters, the risks are great, and don’t always bear fruit.

Which makes this bit of good news all the better: Mambo Italiano, the collaboration between playwright-co-screenwriter Steve Galluccio and co-screenwriter-director Émile Gaudreault, is an extremely successful feature. It is lively, clever, often hilarious and never drags in its pacing. What the team behind the film have managed to do is to take this so-so play, about a young Italian man trying desperately to stay sane as he comes out to his Italian family, and turn it into a fast-paced, poignant comedy.

Italiano invasion?

Interestingly enough, Mambo Italiano may actually out-strip Les Invasions barbares to become the most talked about Quebec movie of the year. The theatrical productions of Mambo have been compared to My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and now the publicists surrounding this movie version are doing the same. Though it sounds like press-kit hype, the parallels aren’t so off; Mambo appears to be a serious crowd-pleaser, and one that boasts a knockout cast: Paul Sorvino and Ginette Reno as the parents of our hero, the young gay Angelo, played by Toronto-based Luke Kirby; former pro football player Peter Miller as Nino, Angelo’s troubled lover; This Hour Has 22 Minutes’ Mary Walsh as Angelo’s mom; rising québécoise star Sophie Lorain as the woman who comes between Nino and Angelo, and Montrealer Tim Post as a Gay Line volunteer.

Oddly enough, the story behind the big-screen version of Mambo is only partially one of adaptation. In fact, Gaudreault had set his sights on bringing the entire story to movie form after reading only one scene of the play. It started several years ago, when Gaudreault decided he wanted to branch out into English-language filmmaking. The actor-writer had already made a name for himself in the local theatre scene (as a player with the comedy troupe Le Groupe Sanguine) and as a noted screenwriter (his first movie effort was co-screenwriting the ’94 hit Louis 19, le roi des ondes).

“I placed an ad in the Mirror,” Gaudreault recalls. “I was asking for writers who wrote in English to send 10-page samples of their work. The response was overwhelming. But Steve’s work really stood out. Funny, alive, you could see his talent. I called him and we clicked right away.”

By that time, Galluccio was already a staple of Montreal’s underground Fringe Theatre Festival, where he’d produced, directed and written a number of hits, including plays relying on cult TV shows like Batman and The Brady Bunch. Long rejecting his Italian heritage as something he felt too boring to comment on in his writing, eventually, Galluccio would change this attitude. “I began to comment on it in my work, in particular with Sexual Success in Montreal and Peter and Paul Get Mary’d.”

Now that’s not Italian

Then came the Mambo moment, when the inspiration for what has now become a bit of Montreal theatre history hit him. Perhaps not surprisingly, it had everything to do with both TV (a medium the writer has long and unapologetically cited as a major influence) and his Italian background. “I was watching Oprah shortly after the 1997 Ellen coming-out episode. There were a bunch of people there with their parents and they were discussing how they’d watched the show together and how they’d come out and how it had affected them all. And I remember thinking to myself, ‘This is definitely not how it would happen in an Italian family.’”

That drove Galluccio directly to his desk, where he began to write the first scene of the play, in which the son tells his parents he’s gay. By this point, Gaudreault and Galluccio had already begun to collaborate on various TV projects, and Galluccio showed Gaudreault his new idea. “He would show me drafts as he was writing it and I would give him my feedback,” says Gaudreault. “The coming out scene was the first thing he wrote. I told him right away that I liked it and said that if there was to be a movie version of this, I would like to be the one to direct it.” Thus the movie rights of the play were secured before the play had even been completely written, let alone first staged.

Tremblay to the rescue

When Galluccio finished writing the play, he began shopping it around. But there were few takers. Then Gaudreault was struck with an idea: he showed the play to Quebec literary and theatrical godfather Michel Tremblay. (“We have the same agent,” explains Gaudreault.) In another wrinkle to this Montreal success story, Tremblay was so taken with the work, he agreed to translate Galluccio’s original English text into French pro bono. Suddenly, the work had Tremblay’s name on it, and (surprise!) there were takers. Since then, for those of you completely out of the loop, Mambo Italiano has enjoyed hugely successful runs in both French and English on Montreal stages, breaking box-office records (and, it must be noted, often eliciting polar-opposite responses from critics, many of whom hated it passionately). In January, the Centaur production of the play opened in Toronto (produced by none other than the Mirvishes), where it almost sold out (but also received some pretty harsh notices).

While the play was becoming more and more triumphant at the box-office, the movie was taking shape. “While we were writing it, the play was turning into this monumental success,” recalls Gaudreault. “Mainstream audiences were embracing it. People were very touched by it. It’s very universal, with the family breaking apart and then coming back together again. I think it touches everyone somehow. But it was a difficult process, because we were working on this adaptation of the play while the success of the play was happening. Steve was so good and sporting about it. He was willing to do something else with it, so long as the spirit of the character and story was the same.”

Among the most notable shifts, from stage to screen: the central character, as played by Kirby, is decidedly more sympathetic. “You can’t really have a protagonist who’s unlikeable in a movie,” suggests Gaudreault. The character is also not a successful screenwriter from the get-go, but rather someone who goes from relative obscurity to success as part of the film’s plot arc. “That makes for another dimension, his dreams and his pursuit of them,” says Gaudreault. The film also has a staccato pacing, one that keeps things moving so quickly you’d never know its source material is a play. And Gaudreault has cranked up the visual volume to 11, giving the work a screaming-in-Technicolor sensibility. Gaudreault says production designer Patricia Christie was “amazing and very creative. The first thing I told her was that I didn’t want anything that looked like reality. I wanted it to look like another world.”

So, Mambo Italiano looks poised to move from Montreal theatre institution to international movie sensation. Galluccio is understandably thrilled, but also still incredibly pleased about the show’s obvious power. It’s entertaining, for sure, but it must also have shifted some consciousness about gay people in Montreal’s notoriously conservative Italian community. “I’ve even had some very macho Italian men come up to me and say that they’ve seen the show,” reports Galluccio. “And I’ve thought, ‘Okay, they’re going to beat me up now.’ Instead, they’ve said, ‘We loved it. When are you going to write your next play?’

“I think it’s basically because this show comes down to a very simple, straightforward core: it’s about family breaking apart and getting back together. Who can’t relate to that?”

Mambo Italiano opens Friday, June 6

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