Judging by the enthusiastic applause that greeted the out-of-town preview, which closed Sunday at San Diego's Old Globe Playhouse, "Monty" appears on track to conquer Manhattan. The New York Times' Bruce Weber, after making the trek to the other coast, declared it "a crowd-pleaser." And Broadway.com columnist Ken Mandelbaum predicts, "'Monty' will be arriving in New York with the look of a hit, and could just be unstoppable, no matter what anyone writes about it in October."

If the prognosticators are correct, "Monty's" newest incarnation will add another chapter to an ongoing Cinderella story. The first installment began when the movie was unveiled at the '97 Sundance Film Festival. The little $3.5 million project, funded by 20th Century Fox's Searchlight Pictures, took audiences by surprise and stunned the industry, raking in $46 million at the box office in this country and a whopping $198 million abroad. "Monty" would go on to garner four Academy Award nominations -- including one for best picture -- and nab an Oscar for Anne Dudley's comedy score. No sooner had the movie opened, reports Lindsay Law, then president of Searchlight, than "we got an extraordinary number of requests, probably 45-60 of them, from theatrical producers around the world wanting to turn it into a stage show. That turned my head to looking at it as a full-fledged musical, and we began exploring the idea."

Hit movies don't necessarily make boffo Broadway, though -- a painful lesson that Fox itself learned when a thudding "musicalization" of its hit 1988 Tom Hanks comedy, "Big," opened in '96 and promptly disappeared after only 22 previews and 192 performances. Andrew Lloyd Weber's '94 version of "Sunset Boulevard" lasted just two and a half years -- a minor run for the "Cats" man. "Footloose," a wan, carbon-copy version of the '84 Kevin Bacon flick, just closed after 737 performances -- though audiences nationwide won't be spared an upcoming national tour. An equally panned stage mounting of "Saturday Night Fever," which opened last year at Broadway's Minskoff Theater, continues to hold its own, but John Travolta needn't worry that it will ever crowd out memories of the '77 classic on which it's based.

"There's nothing new in Broadway musicals adapting featherweight entertainment," observes Jack Verteil, creative director of Jujamcyn Theaters, which has booked "The Full Monty" for its Eugene O'Neill Theater. "Back in the '50s, shows like 'Damn Yankees' or 'The Pajama Game' were based on light novels. Today, those light novels are more likely to be TV shows or movies. Certainly, when you're working with a popular title like 'Saturday Night Fever,' it makes it easier to raise financing and book tours, often sight unseen. But it may also work negatively. 'Footloose' and 'Saturday Night' seem so recent that audiences can always go out and rent the video. They don't necessarily have to spend $80 to see them on Broadway."

Still, Broadway producers, eager to transfer a marquee brand name from the cineplex to the Great White Way, continue to force movie adaptations onto the stage: "The Witches of Eastwick," which began life as a 1984 John Updike novel before morphing into the problematic '87 Jack Nicholson feature, is currently having its kinks worked out in London. Marvin Hamlisch, composer of "A Chorus Line," is working on a stage version of the '57 classic "Sweet Smell of Success" -- John Lithgow will appear as fearsome gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker in a workshop this fall -- and then plans to join forces with Woody Allen for a musicalization of "Bullets Over Broadway." Even a relative trifle like the 1967 flapper comedy "Thoroughly Modern Millie" is being brought to the stage.

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