“I would love to do a musical,” Steven Spielberg said last weekend during a War Horse q & a in Manhattan. “I would love that. I would have to find the right book, the right story, but some day I’m going to make one. I would really like to go off and direct a musical. That’s what I would really like to do when I grow up.”

Does anyone have a suggestions along these lines? What unshot musical plays or potential remakes of old movie musicals would be a good match for Spielberg?

I have one. Spielberg should make a present-day musical based on Carousel but set in suburbia. Update the milieu in the same way that Romeo and Juliet‘s Verona was transformed into the slum nabes of Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the 1950s.

Key question: Does Spielberg have the character and cojones to deal with a nihilstic, dark-souled character like Billy Bigelow? Has he ever dealt with such a fellow? There’s your answer. (And don’t bring up Leonardo DiCaprio‘s rakishly charming impersonator in Catch Me If You Can.)

Side pocket #1: “You can’t start a movie having the attitude that the script is fined,” Spielberg said on another jag. “To me a movie is fluid…a living organism. A movie script is a living, breathing organism, and it must change, as we change, daily. War Horse probably went through about 25 revisions.”

Side pocket #2: I totally understand and agree with Spielberg’s wide lens comment . “I just shot with wide lenses and that’s not something that’s shot today,” he said. “And some people who see War Horse think it looks old fashioned because I shot it the way a lot of the directors from the ’30s and ’40s shot their movies: by giving the audience the respect of being editors.”