Broadway tickets online have been a great way to find tickets for classic stage plays. But it is nice to be able to see our favorite plays put into television and film versions. Such is the case with “Peter Pan.” Producers, Craig Zadan and Neil Meron, are developing the hit stage play into a television movie for ABC.

These producers have their work cut out for them. I say this with some personal experience with this play. I played the role of Captain Hook in a high school production. I’ve also seen the Mary Martin version from 1960.

The simple fact is that the original play is extremely corny. Although the story has become something heavily ingrained in our culture, I think we forget just how square the original material is. I foresee some real changes needed to update the script to a modern audience.

The other big challenge is the fact that the role of Peter Pan has been played by a woman, with a score written for a woman’s voice. But I’m convinced that this really won’t work with a modern audience, especially on television with close-ups of the actors.

So they’ve got their work cut out for them. But they’ve got a lot of experience with this, having brought “Cinderella,” “The Music Man” and “Hairspray” to film, with varying degrees of success. Ultimately I think it comes down to the writer’s ability to translate the original writer’s intentions into a working and contemporary rendition of the classic material.  Let’s hope it works.

2007 marked the full return of the musical to the silver screen. Ever since the late 60’s, the traditional musical has been dead on screen. If you wanted to see people sing while telling a story, you had to look to the stage. Even buying Broadway tickets online was about as convenient as one could hope for in seeing a good old-fashioned musical.

But now, it seems that the trend has ended. We have a new dawn for musicals on film. 2007 brought us some real hits. It brought us a traditional modern Sondheim musical in “Sweeney Todd.” It brought us “Hairspray,” a movie which got remade as a Broadway show which then got remade back into a musical film. It also brought us the musical in the form of the Indie film shot on video in the exceptional “Once.”

We’re also seeing musicals invading the world of television, with the startling success of “High School Musical” and “High School Musical 2.”

We’re also seeing a return to the animated Disney musicals made popular in the early nineties with “The Little Mermaid.” This year the subgenre returned as a spoof of itself in the silly but fun “Enchanted.”

My hope is that with the popularization of the musical on film again we’ll also generate growth in stage productions of musicals as well.