Broadway's Most Wanted

by Tom Shea

  9. OLIVER SMITH

  A winner of seven Tony Awards for scenic design, Oliver Smith designed sets for more than 125 shows in a career that spanned over 50 years. His Tony-winning musical designs are a trip through the history of musical theater in America: Camelot, My Fair Lady, West Side Story, Baker Street, Hello, Dolly!, The Sound of Music. And if the Tonys had existed in 1944, he surely would have won for his awesome sets for On the Town. Smith’s career as codirector and designer of Ballet Theater (later the American Ballet Theater) led to his designing and producing for Broadway. No designer has been more honored, or perhaps more influential.

  10. TOMMY TUNE

  Tommy Tune shares a Tony record with Harvey Fierstein (but two of Fierstein’s awards are for plays, not musicals—so maybe next book, Harvey): Tonys in four separate creative categories (excluding Producer credits). The supremely gifted and Texas-tall Tune started out as a hoofer (one critic called him the tallest chorus dancer he’d ever seen) and, in 1973, won a Featured Actor Tony for his work in Seesaw, iced by his very own number, “It’s Not Where You Start.” He won his first Tony for director of a musical in 1982, for his sensational staging of Nine, besting his friend and mentor, Michael Bennett. The next season, he won his Tony as a lead actor, and shared the choreography prize with Thommie Walsh, for My One and Only. Tune has won two prizes each for director and choreographer since: in 1990 for his amazing Grand Hotel: The Musical and, the next year, for his work on The Will Rogers Follies.

  With Their Awful Clothes and Their Rock-and-Roll

  10 Musicals Written by Famous Rock Artists

  Back in 1968, a revolution swept through the musical theater when Hair, the first true rock musical, ushered in a change that shook Broadway to its foundations and is still being felt today! Nope, sorry, just kidding. Most rock musicals were too disposable and untheatrical to carry enough weight to last, but here are ten shows whose composers know at least a thing or two about the rock game.

  1. CHESS (BENNY ANDERSSON/ BJORN UJLVAEUS)

  Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ujlvaeus are better known as the B-for-brain-trust of the Swedish pop leviathan ABBA. Chess, written originally in 1985 and released as a pop album (which yielded the songwriters yet another top-10 hit, “One Night in Bangkok”) became a stage musical in 1986.

  Chess is about a love triangle formed during a US/Russia chess match, with the board game serving as a metaphor for the Cold War. It became a smash in London, though with a new libretto, it was a surprising failure on Broadway despite a powerful cast of singers. Since its conception, Chess has, of course, become somewhat obsolete, and, due to its outdated politics and even more outdated synthpop, is not often performed any more.

  2. WHISTLE DOWN THE WIND (JIM STEINMAN)

  Andrew Lloyd Webber collaborated with pop composer Steinman (best known as the author of many of Meat Loaf’s biggest hits) on this musical adaptation of the 1961 British film about three children who discover a murderer hiding in their barn and mistake him for Christ. Headed for a high-profile Broadway opening in 1998, the production was scuttled by mutual consent of the authors and director Harold Prince, all of whom perhaps thought the show’s allegorical nature was poorly handled. Washington, DC, was the last stop for the show. The score, as heard on CD, does reassure the listener of Lloyd Webber’s formidable gifts.

  3. EIGHTY DAYS (RAY DAVIES)

  The Kinks’ energetic frontman wrote this musical version of Jules Verne’s classic tale of English ingenuity in the early eighties, after his first musical adaptation, a version of Aristophanes’ The Poet and the Women, which was unfortunately called Chorus Girls. Director Des McAnuff developed Eighty Days in San Diego, at LaJolla Playhouse, where it stalled on its way to Broadway.

  4. THE CAPEMAN (PAUL SIMON)

  Notorious autocrat Simon had no first-hand experience with the Broadway process and therefore was unwilling (or unable) to relinquish creative control of this moody, almost cantata-like 1998 musical tale of a murder on the barrio streets of New York. This creative logjam (modern-dance maven Mark Morris was to direct and choreograph; he was replaced by Jerry Zaks and Joey McKneely when the blood started flowing) was part of the failure of the show, which critics called leaden and unfocused. Simon’s score, written with Derek Walcott and featuring the elegant doo-wop “Satin Summer Nights,” did receive a Tony nomination.

  5. THE WHO’S TOMMY) (THE WHO)

  Tommy, the quintessential rock opera, which had already been filmed successfully in 1975 with an all-star cast, was given the Broadway treatment in 1993 following several quasi-staged all-star concert presentations of the score. Director Des McAnuff gave the show, written mainly by The Who’s Pete Townshend, a stronger narrative, focusing much of the action on the characters’ reaction to the events of World War II and its aftermath on the splintered, dysfunctional Walker family. The dazzling, brilliantly designed, and cinematically staged production was a smash hit, though not the rebirth of the rock musical some predicted it would be.

  6. IN A PIG’S VALISE (AUGUST DARNELL, A/K/A KID CREOLE)

  Songwriter August Darnell is perhaps better known by the nom de pop Kid Creole, a zoot-suited wildman fronting his band The Coconuts. In 1989, Darnell collaborated with the playwright Eric Overmyer on the off-Broadway musical In a Pig’s Valise, a wacky and stylish private-eye spoof featuring a not-yet-famous Nathan Lane. The “hardboiled yarn with music,” as Lane described it to Theater Week magazine, played New York’s Second Stage.

  7. BIG RIVER (ROGER MILLER)

  Yet another musical directed by Des McAnuff (the auteur-by-right of contemporary rock musicals, it would seem) and developed in La Jolla, California, and at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, prior to opening on Broadway in April 1985, Big River took on no less a Herculean task than Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

  Playwright William Hauptmann pruned Twain to fit the stage, keeping Huck as the narrator as well as a participant in the adventures. Folk-rock troubador Roger Miller wrote the score, delivering a simple, pleasing treatment of Twain’s novel largely devoid of his “can’t roller skate through a buffalo herd” smart-aleckness. The ballad “River in the Rain” and the country-waltz “You Oughta be Here With Me” were highlights.

  8. THE NIGHT THAT MADE MADE AMERICA FAMOUS (HARRY CHAPIN)

  In an unusually timely project in the wait-and-see arena of Broadway musical production, singer-songwriter Harry Chapin rushed this revue/rock show to Broadway in 1975 to capitalize on the popularity of his hit single “Cat’s in the Cradle.” The song was not heard in the show however, theater fans saw through the spectacle, and the revue had only a short run on Broad way. Chapin’s songs, however (including some from an earlier sci-fi musical called Zinger), are distinctly story-like in nature, and his off-Broadway musical Cotton Patch Gospel (Christ’s life as told by “Matt the Revenuer”—Saint Matthew—and set in rural Georgia) and the regional theater revue Lies and Legends are testament to the enduring popularity (and theatricality) of his songs.

  9. THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD (RUPERT HOLMES)

  Rupert Holmes made his career as a writer, producer, and performer in Los Angeles, most notably with the number one single “Escape (the Pina Colada Song).”

  Despite its easy-listening trappings, “Escape” was a song with a true narrative, so it came as no surprise when Holmes’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood opened at the Delacorte Theatre in New York’s Central Park. What was surprising was that Holmes wrote all of it—book, score, and orchestrations—and inserted an ingenious second-act twist: he let the audience, by vote, solve the mystery every night, effectively finishing what Dickens never wrote. After a hit engagement in the Park in the summer of 1985, The Mystery of Edwin Drood soon moved to Broadway and became a multi-Tony-winning hit. Holmes has written two straight plays for Broadway since Drood: the thriller Accomplice and the one-man multimedia whatizit Solitary Confinement

  10. SMOKEY JOE’
S CAFÉ (JERRY LEIBER AND MIKE STOLLER)

  The great songwriting team of Leiber and Stoller gave the pop music world hit after hit in the ’50s and ’60s. In 1995, a flashy revue of their biggest hits, called Smokey Joe’s Café, came to Broadway.

  Previously produced in Chicago (under the name That’s Rock and Roll!), director Jerry Zaks and choreographer Joey McKneely were brought in to polish up the work of the revue’s creator, Otis Sallid. Smokey Joe’s Cafe opened in the 1994-95 season, the worst Broadway season ever for new works, and lost all its seven Tony nominations. But the inventive staging, sexy advertising (featuring the short skirts and long legs of actress DeLee Lively), and familiar song titles (“Hound Dog,” “I’m a Woman,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and, of course, “On Broadway”) helped make Smokey Joe’s one of the longest-running eligible Broadway musicals to have never won a single Tony.

  I Can’t Do the Sum

  10 numerical Broadway Musicals

  The following ten musicals add up to much more than ten. But who’s counting? Five, six, seven, eight…

  1. ONE, TWO, THREE, FOUR, FIVE

  This cheeky musical comedy (by Maury Yeston and Larry Gelbart) is based on the first five books of the Bible. Originally offered by Manhattan Theater Club, it was revised later as History Loves Company and In the Beginning.

  2. TWO BY TWO

  This 1970 musical based on Clifford Odets’s play The Flowering Peach, concerning Noah and the building of his Ark, was most notable as one of Richard Rodgers’s last shows, and for the return of Danny Kaye to Broadway. It was his last visit.

  3. 1776

  This grand musical dealt with the drafting, debating, and signing of the Declaration of Independence during the long, hot summer of the titular year. Thanks to this Peter Stone-Sherman Edwards musical, it was indeed a very good year.

  4. 1491

  This was not such a great year. Meredith Willson’s Christopher Columbus musical had the great Chita Rivera as Columbus’s patron, Queen Isabella. Willson’s facility with musical comedy was not well suited to the European costume trappings necessary for 1491, and the show never made it to Broadway.

  5. FIVE GUYS NAMED MOE

  A sad sack named Nomax gets advice on life and love from five fellows named Moe (Big Moe, Little Moe, Four-Eyed Moe, Eat Moe, and No Moe) in this high-spirited tribute to swing composer Louis Jordan, conceived by Clarke Peters. A big hit in London, it was less potent in the States.

  6. HALF A SIXPENCE

  Give the boy a banjo! British boy singer Tommy Steele’s big splash on Broadway was Half a Sixpence, a Brit hit of a Cockney fable about a “workin’ lad ’O inherits a bleedin’ for-choon.” Song-and-dance man Steele and choreographer Onna White got the best reviews.

  7. 70, GIRLS, 70

  John Kander and Fred Ebb wrote this musical (with Norman L. Martin), very loosely based on the British film Make Mine Mink. The residents of a retirement home decide to rob a furrier, apparently just to prove they’re not too old to rob a furrier. The whole enterprise was too cutesy-poo to cut very deeply at all.

  8. 42ND STREET

  One of the most effective film-to-stage musical transfers, 42nd Street was a straightforward retelling of the corny backstage film of the same name. Many, many people came to meet those dancing feet hoofing their way through Gower Champion’s classic dances. (The original 1981 production didn’t play at a theater on 42nd Street, though the 2002 revival did.)

  9. NINE

  The imaginative 1981 Tony winner, based on Fellini’s film 8 1/2. Tommy Tune’s inventive staging and brilliant color shadings heightened the tale of a once-great film director in crisis with his art and with the women in his life.

  10. TENDERLOIN

  Tenderloin has a highly enjoyable score (by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick) and is based on a true story. It concerns the Reverend Brock, a Gay Nineties holy roller intent on cleaning up the Tenderloin, New York’s seedy downtown sin district. The fact that the Reverend Brock was less appealing than the media figures and skin traders he was fighting is the main reason this show flopped.

  next Stop, neverland

  10 Musicals Set in Imaginary Locations

  Where do you long to be? Away from the humdrum? These ten musicals will indulge your fantasy quotient.

  1. GREENWILLOW

  This quaint musical from 1960 was based on a novel by B.J. Chute, who set his tale in Greenwillow, a mythical village where the male members of the Briggs family were apt to follow the “call to wander.” Remarking on the elusiveness of the eponymous village, Chute himself said of Greenwillow’s location, “I have been told variously that it is located in such diverse regions as Vermont, Corsica, Denmark, and the Kentucky mountains.”

  Broadway legend Frank Loesser (Guys and Dolls, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying) wrote the score, which is easily his most bucolic. Musical theatre neophyte (and later Oscar-winner for The Sting) George Roy Hill was the director, and Anthony Perkins was the star.

  2. FINIAN’S RAINBOW

  One of Broadway’s most glorious scores comes from one of its most satirical musicals. Set in Rainbow Valley in the state of Missitucky, the 1947 Finian’s Rainbow is a political satire about a corrupt senator who clashes with the tobacco sharecroppers of the valley.

  The sharecroppers are spearheaded by the daughter of Finian McLonergan, an Irishman who has stolen a pot of gold from a leprechaun back in Ireland in order to plant it next to Fort Knox, where it will grow bigger. Considered wildly liberal in its time, the show gave us standards like “Look to the Rainbow,” “Old Devil Moon,” and “How are Things in Glocca Morra?”

  3. SHANGRI-LA

  Between the classic 1937 Frank Capra film Lost Horizon and the 1973 dud remake came this 1956 stage version of James Hilton’s novel of a Himalayan paradise. The premise was much the same as the film: Travelers searching for Paradise find the real thing in Tibet.

  But convincingly showing Shangri-La on stage (where the mountains were clearly made of plastic), confining it to the proscenium, was harder than showing it on film, and the inevitable comparison to the movie ensured the musical would flop. Shows like this prove the rule that fantasies and special effects are better done by the movies.

  4. LI’L ABNER

  Al Capp’s classic comic strip seemed to cry out for musicalization and got it in this superb 1956 stage version. All the denizens of Dogpatch were there, notably Stubby Kaye as Marryin’ Sam and Julie Newmar, who stopped the show (and the hearts of more than a few tired businessmen) as Stupefyin’ Jones.

  The score was by Gene DePaul and Johnny Mercer, with superb and very physical choreography by the great Michael Kidd. His “Sadie Hawkins’ Day Ballet,” in which winsome Daisy Mae and evil Appassionata Von Climax vie for the heart and mind of our hero, Abner Yokum, is considered a classic.

  5. HOT SPOT

  The great Judy Holliday gave a legendary performance as Ella, the Susanswerphone girl, in Bells Are Ringing, but her next show, Hot Spot, which never opened on Broadway, unfortunately left the comedienne high and dry. She again played a nice girl who gets mixed up in someone else’s problems, this time as a Peace Corps emissary to the tiny island of D’Hum. That the name of the island was pronounced “dumb” all night gives an indication of what kind of show this was. Holliday was in financial straits at the time (1960) and only took the show to pay debts. Sadly, she died soon after it closed out of town.

  6. FLAHOOLEY

  What’s a Flahooley, you ask? Well, the show’s authors (E.Y. Harburg of Finian’s Rainbow, Sammy Fain, and Fred Saidy) said it was the only word they could think of that you couldn’t spell backwards. (It’s really an Irish word describing a flight of fancy.)

  That was the mindset behind this certifiably crazy musical, set mostly in Capsulanti, USA, at a toy factory where a young toymaker, with the help of a genie from a lamp (don’t ask), creates his new doll, the Flahooley, which laughs when you shake it. The genie floods the market with Flahooleys (he doesn’t
want to return to the lamp), causing a depression, and the public outcry is palpable.

  A 1951 Korean-War-era satire on postwar business and political ethos, Flahooley never found an audience on Broadway, despite the presence of such pros as Barbara Cook, Ernest Truex, and the mysterious Yma Sumac as an Arab princess with a penchant for throat singing. But Flahooley has charm and wit in abundance (the opening number is called, with tongue firmly in cheek, “You Too Can Be a Puppet,” in which the toy-makers of Capsulanti urge America to “Come out of the woodwork, brother/And join the Brotherwood of Man.”), as well as that sharp satirical edge.