In the indie movie Once, a girl and a guy sit at a piano in a musical instruments store in Dublin. He’s a busker and vacuum repairman. She’s a talented pianist and Czech immigrant. When these near strangers’ voices find their way to a lovely harmony in writer-director John Carney’s hushed yet rousing film (“Take this sinking boat and point it home, we’ve still got time”), darned if this critic at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival screening didn’t taste tears.

“I also loved the film when it came out,” Chris Coleman shared in a recent email. The Artistic Director of the Denver Center Theatre Company took a moment from rehearsals for The Tempest, to talk about the surprising satisfactions — and challenges — of adaptation, especially of the screen-to-stage variety.

“I rewatched the film last week in preparation for our design conference, and what struck me was how much a ‘slice of life’ it is. It feels like John Carney was setting out to create a new texture for a movie musical that might let a new generation find a way to connect,” he said. “So, it feels quite spontaneous, even a bit aimless at times.” I wonder if the team that was setting out to adapt it for the stage thought, “will this level of quietude sustain an audience’s attention in a large, Broadway venue?”

It’s not an unreasonable thought, given Broadway’s tendency — need, producers might argue — for shows to go big or go home. Yet, in the case of Once — the cast, doubling as characters and musicians, is on stage the entire show — Coleman says, “I think it’s a remarkably successful reimagining of source material that honors the original while succeeding on its own terms.” The eight Tonys and 11 nominations for writer Enda Walsh and director John Tiffany’s show and its successful national tours confirm as well as its rousing allure.

The Theatre Company’s spring production of Once (April 2-May 2) joins a robust slate of screen-to-stage musicals presented by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts’ Broadway division. Among them: Waitress (another Sundance Film Festival find from 2007 that went on to artistic and financial success on stage), Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, (Hollywood’s behemoth studio launched its theatrical division in 1993), ELF The Musical, Legally Blonde, and Death Becomes Her. And we can be forgiven for confusing the stage-screen vectors of The Great Gatsby and MAMMA MIA! and even The Outsiders, (Sept. 8-27) that have movie versions sure to cloud the memories of some theatregoers to the original’s roots. Even Buena Vista Social Club shares a distant kinship to Wim Wender’s celebrated documentary about the same all-star ensemble of Cuban musicians.

One of the most beloved American art forms, the Broadway musical, is also a pricey bit of show business. Starting with a proven commodity — like a box-office blessed movie — is a smart way to minimize risk and capitalize on built-in audience awareness. But lasting art isn’t merely about commerce. Finding the ways in which a story still speaks to audiences across different mediums is an art unto itself. While the flippant, not entirely fair critique, “the book was better” tends to hold up when it comes to the movies, Broadway has only recently courted the “the movie was better” critique. Though the list is getting longer. For an aching adult, romance, nothing beats Jean Cocteau’s 1946 adaptation of Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s La Belle et la Bête. But the kid in us, salutes the musical of the animated enchantment.

“I think the challenge of adapting something well known is that audiences come in with their own memory of the original, and you are competing with that,” Coleman said. Yes, even if what we deem the original, isn’t actually. Dial M for Murder — which will end the Theatre Company’s season next May — will always be, first and foremost, an Alfred Hitchcock thriller, starring the incandescent Grace Kelly as a cheating wife whose husband has hired a killer to dispatch her and gain her fortune. But the 1954 film is based on the 1952 Brit play by Frederick Knott.

“If you are too religious in hewing to the original, it may feel dull or unworthy,” Coleman says of the delicate dance. While if you veer too far away from the original, folks may complain that it doesn’t warrant the title. And you’re always asking, ‘what is our version of this story?’ It’s fun but definitely challenging.”

Enter, Hold on to Your Butts. The work of the New York-based comedy-theater ensemble Recent Cutbacks counts on the moviegoing fan’s obsessive fondness to its source material: Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park. In this lark of a show — at the Garner Galleria from Sept. 16 through Oct. 4.— two performers and a foley artist recreate a shot-for-shot parody of the 1993 Box-offisaurus Rex.

“Originally, the show was born out of a desire to make our own work,” said Kristin McCarthy Parker, director and co-founder (with Nick Abeel and Kyle Schaerfer) in an email. “Nick and I were both very drawn to physical theater — Nick to mime, me to clown — and had been experimenting with some cinematic vocabulary in shorter devised work.” When they saw a four-actor production of Pygmalion, they were inspired.

“Nick was a huge Jurassic Park fan, so we decided to flesh out this silly idea into a full show for one night only,” said Parker. If you’re wondering about the title, then you’ve got to work on your movie trivia. (Hint: it may be the third most quoted line spoken by the actor Samuel L. Jackson.) “After the success of Butts, we kept moving forward, experimenting with different physical theater genres that were interesting to us, and marrying them to films that we loved.”

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