Broadway Movies & Heaven Is for Real

Passing thought on the nature of theatres and what we see there. They now advertise operas to be seen at selected venues, productions filmed as they took place on stage. I would think that any opera buff would leap at the chance to see his favorite operas with famous opera stars. No need to go to New York or London or Rome to see them. Maybe not quite as good as a live performance, but close. So, why don’t they do the same with Broadway musicals and plays? The cost of filming would be minimal, certainly a lot less than the millions now spent to produce a Broadway musical as a movie, and all too often the movie version isn’t nearly as good as the Broadway version. For example, the recent television special of The Sound of Music with Carrie Underwood actually wasn’t very good. I remember seeing Into the Woods on PBS, filmed as it was done on stage, and it was delightful. So, why don’t they do that with other shows and have them shown on a big screen in a theatre? I’d go to see them in a minute, in a second, and they could bypass all the money spent on converting them into movies. Maybe in my next life.

To celebrate daughter Jeri’s birthday, we went to see Heaven Is for Real and then to Black Angus for dinner. I wasn’t sure I wanted to see this movie, based on a true story about a small boy’s experiences with a visit to heaven. I’m a life-long disbeliever and have always been a skeptic when it comes to formalized religion. Despite my misgivings, the film was moving and the Nebraska countryside beautiful. Greg Kinnear plays Pastor Todd Burpo, with Kelly Reully as wife Sonja Burpo, and Connor Corum as four-year-old Colton Burpo, the boy who went to heaven. Listening to one of several of the good pastor’s sermons, I thought that if I’d ever had a minister as good as Todd Burpo, I might have been a better little churchgoer. Instead, as a boy, I got Father Clark’s boring intonations on boring church liturgy, sermons that soon drove me away from his church and any other church along the way. Todd Burpo was almost too good to be true: a volunteer firefighter, wrestling coach at the high school, softballer, faithful husband and good father to his two children, and understanding merchant repairer of garage doors, accepting goods as payment instead of the cash he really needs. When his son nearly dies from a ruptured appendix, all the parishioners pray for him, and he barely makes it through the extensive surgery. And then this darling little boy begins telling his father and anyone else who’d care to listen about his experiences when Jesus took him to heaven. A moving story, with no sex or violence or bad language, and it was a nice relaxing way to spend two hours at the theater. Was it a great movie? Not even close.