By Steven Suskin
19 Apr 2009

This year's Academy Awards were dominated not by "Doubt," with its five nominations, but by Slumdog Millionaire [Fox] which nabbed seven of the statuettes (including Best Picture). No sooner had this occurred than word came out that a Broadway musical version was in the planning stages, with composer A. R. Rahman — winner of two of those Oscars, and the composer of the recent Broadway musical Bombay Dreams — not surprisingly writing the score. Just how "Slumdog" might translate to the stage is not a question for our consideration; one supposes that it will either work (in a big way) or it won't (in a big way).

The film, meanwhile, has proved an enormous crowdpleaser. The DVD presents director Danny Boyle's epic in all its glory, presenting a massed panoply of mankind mixing a few heights of grandeur with many depths of despair. The story tells of a slumdog — a teenager who grew up homeless in the slums of Mumbai — who finds himself reaching the final stage of the India version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire." How does an uneducated, unschooled peasant accumulate enough knowledge to correctly answer all those obscure questions? Simple enough to find out; just have the police torture him until they find out how he managed to cheat. (This is not America.) But what, as the torturer at some point asks, if he really did know the answers? This leads to the heart of the story, and cannily so; each question is matched with a flashback which illustrates the point in question.

"Slumdog" makes a rousing movie. As for the Broadway musical version, stay tuned. Given the inherent difficulties in adapting this material, it would seem to be unlikely. But it is the unlikeliest projects which sometime manage to turn themselves into successful stage musicals.