by Tom Shea
6. ANNIE GET YOUR GUN
One of the most popular musicals in American history, Irving Berlin’s classic is set in and around the world of the rodeo—Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, to be precise. But don’t be fooled. This is no SportsCenter highlight reel. A few trick shooting scenes aside, there truly is “No Business Like Show Business,” as Annie Oakley and Frank Butler spar in the center ring and woo each other behind the scenes, all the while insisting they’re as wrong for each other as can be. Uh-huh.
Produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein (no dummies they) in 1946, the show was undoubtedly the best vehicle ever for the original Annie, Ethel Merman. Merman had been a leading lady for years, but Berlin’s tender ballads for Annie showed the public a soft side to Merman that had never been tapped by other writers. For that reason, and despite Merman’s indelible stamp on the role, every female musical-comedy star wants to play Annie Oakley at some point in her career. A revival starring Bernadette Peters hit Broadway in 1999 and found great success with everyone from Susan “Erica Kane” Lucci to country star Reba McEntire doin’ what comes naturally.
7. LITTLE JOHNNY JONES
The first hit show by the great, proto-American songwriter, George M. Cohan, Little Johnny Jones was a typical turn-of -the-century Broadway show, both onstage and off. The admittedly corny, flag-waving story of a Yankee jockey in England, Johnny was as basic and calculated-to-please as most of the shows of the time, with little dramatic tension or story to get in the way of the girls and the socko songs.
Offstage, too, this 1904 show followed the formula of the time, all but unthinkable in today’s theater economy: Open on Broadway, withdraw to the road after the inevitable bad reviews, tour the show and revise it, then hit the Main Stem again, all guns blazing. And blaze they did: Cohan’s score gave us both “Yankee Doodle Boy” and “Give My Regards to Broadway,” either one of which would have guaranteed Cohan’s immortality and the show’s success. It was revived none too successfully, however, in the early ’80s, with David Cassidy not quite believable in the lead role.
8. GOLDEN BOY
Clifford Odets’ potboiling boxing play concerns a young Italian-American palooka intent on fighting his way out of his neighborhood. Neophyte producer Hillard Elkins floated the idea of a musical version of the play to Odets, and once Sammy Davis, Jr. expressed interest, Italian Joe Bonaparte became the Negro Joe Wellington. The score was written by Lee Adams and Charles Strouse, whose previous musical, All American, had also been about sports, specifically college football.
The differences between play and musical turned out to be the least of the problems in getting the show on, with Odets dying in 1963 (his work was finished in 1964 by William Gibson) and the original director (and many cast members) getting lost (i.e., fired) in the shuffle. What worked, eventually, were the performance of Sammy Davis and the show’s climactic fight scene, performed to percussion, and thrillingly staged in a real boxing ring by Donald McKayle.
9. CRICKET
Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber reunited in 1986 to write this short chamber musical about Tim Rice’s favorite sport (he owns a cricket team, writes a cricket column for the London Daily, and has published several books on the sport). Trevor Nunn, also a cricket fan, was the director.
The piece was written as part of a Royal Command Performance for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, and was also performed at Lloyd Webber’s Sydmonton Festival. Due to the size and subject matter of the piece, and considering the unique circumstances surrounding its creation, it’s unlikely that Cricket will ever be seen professionally in New York or anywhere in the States.
10. DIAMONDS
This off-Broadway revue from 1984 was a collection of songs and sketches about the National Pastime, directed by the legendary Harold Prince, and it featured material contributed by over 40 writers, including Beauty and the Beast’s Howard Ashman and Alan Menken (though writing separately) and Cabaret’s team of John Kander and Fred Ebb.
The upbeat, lighthearted nature of the revue made it obvious that there would be no sketches on labor disputes, no drug references, and no “Ballet of the Rainout Showing of the 1975 All-Star Game Film.” About the most satirical the show got was a collection of blackout sketches taking off on voluble broadcaster Warner “Let’s go to the videotape” Wolf, here impersonated by actor Chip Zien.
Again, from the Top
10 Prominent “Revisals”
The “revisal” is a fairly new phenomenon to Broadway. A revisal is a purely commercial rethinking of an exisiting show which is given the benefit of 20/20 hindsight and supposedly improved by wholesale changes to songs, story, or both. Here are ten revisals that had success at some level, either creatively or commercially.
1. THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE
Gilbert and Sullivan’s classic tale of duty, love, and Victorian silliness was given a full-throttle rethinking in 1980 by the New York Shakespeare Festival. New orchestrations (unfortunately overdone: listen to the xylophone playing sometime!) were a good indicator of the level of wackiness to be had.
Directed (and co-designed) by Wilford Leach, this Pirates was an unexpected hit at the Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park, then moved to Broadway for a multi-award-winning run. Incorporating two new songs (both from the other G & S operas) and a clipper ship’s worth of physical schtick, Pirates never ever took itself seriously. Not for the die-hard Gilbert and Sullivan purist, perhaps, but a great deal of fun.
2. ME AND MY GIRL
The veddy British musical comedy Me and My Girl was a smash hit between the wars in London, running for four years in the West End and even giving birth to a popular dance craze, the “Lambeth Walk.” Richard Armitage, the son of the show’s composer, Noel Gay, decided to remount the musical, about a Cockney bloke who inherits a title but not the attendant snobbishness, in 1984, and oversaw a painstaking reconstruction of a show largely thought to be lost to the ages. Adding three new old songs and almost completely rewriting the book, the show touched a nostalgic nerve in the West End and rode the “All Things Big and British” wave to Broadway in 1986, winning raves for the show’s star, Robert Lindsay.
3. CANDIDE
Not only is Candide the Granddaddy of all flop musicals, it’s also The Show That Would Not Die. After Broadway in 1956, Candide was tried with various and sundry revisions to script and score on tour and overseas, then greatly overhauled in 1973 for an off-Broadway production.
Hottest-director-in-the-world Harold Prince was asked to take a look at the show for the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Chelsea Theater Center. His new production was a wacky, juvenile, environmental staging with a completely new book by Hugh Wheeler and some new Stephen Sondheim lyrics to re-jiggered Leonard Bernstein melodies. The triptych-like show moved better than it had before, but it meant less. Which meant nothing to audiences, both off-Broadway and on, who responded to the show’s pedigree and Prince’s status and ate it up.
Prince, and especially Bernstein, kept prodding at the show, re-conceiving it for New York City Opera in 1982, Scottish Opera in 1990, Broadway again in 1997 after Bernstein’s death, and for the Community Women’s Church Guild Clock Tower Players Dinner Theater in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, in 1999.
4. CRAZY FOR YOU
A triumph of borrowed finery, Crazy For You is a 1992 musical very loosely based on a previous Gershwin brothers musical, Girl Crazy. Crazy For You, like Girl Crazy, concerned a man who ventured out West and fell in love with the town’s only girl.
Girl Crazy later “became” Crazy For You, featuring a new libretto by Ken Ludwig, who added a palatable show business subplot to the proceedings. Bobby, our hero, goes to Nevada to foreclose on a theater and ends up putting on a show and falling in love. A few of the Gershwin songs from Girl Crazy were thrown out and other Gershwin songs (“Tonight’s the Night,” “What Causes That?”) supported the standards from the earlier show (“Embraceable You,” “I Got Rhythm”). In its spiffy new duds, Crazy For You, directed and chor
eographed in superbly physical style by Mike Ockrent and Susan Stroman, respectively, was judged to be sufficiently “new” enough to win the Best Musical Tony in 1992.
5. CABARET
Cabaret, Joe Masteroff, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s 1966 masterpeice of decadence unchecked, visited Broadway in 1998 in a production from London’s Donmar Warehouse. While many shouted “Wilkommen” at the new production, others quietly said “A Bientôt” to the show’s inherent subtext.
While the 1966 production of Cabaret shocked a complacent Broadway with its garish stage pictures and the adult treatment of its grim subject matter, the 1998 Cabaret, directed by Sam Mendes and choreographed by Rob and Kathleen Marshall, was completely and proudly vulgar while it was in the cabaret (which the audience, seated at nightclub tables, was, all night long). Not only was the show’s Emcee (a thrillingly androgynous and insatiable Alan Cumming) an agent of evil in the Cabaret, but he also hovered over the show’s book scenes, underscoring, with little subtlety, the impending disaster.
6. SHOW BOAT
America’s seminal musical play, Show Boat suffers from a kind of schizophrenia. As the show that straddled the gap between operetta and a new kind of musical drama, Show Boat is often accused of being too much of one or the other, leaving purists of both art forms sharply divided on how to do justice to this masterpiece.
Show Boat has undergone countless revisions in its 75-plus year history; indeed, it’s possible that there have never been two productions exactly alike on paper. Broadway’s two most recent productions of Show Boat vividly illustrated the dichotomy inherent in the piece. Director Jack O’Brien’s 1982 production was a florid, oversized, near-operatic reading of the piece, while Harold Prince’s 1995 version was sleek, brilliantly streamlined, and bore striking resemblance to a contemporary musical. Tony Awards and lengthy tours followed. The one constant in both productions? The presence of actress Lonette McKee, as doomed chanteuse Julie.
7. FLOWER DRUM SONG
Asian-American playwright David Henry Hwang, a fierce protector of Asian-American heritage, was approached to rewrite Oscar Hammerstein’s libretto to his 1958 musical (written, of course, with Richard Rodgers) Flower Drum Song. Flower Drum Song, based on Chin Y. Lee’s novel, tells a fairly basic tale of assimilation versus obligation in San Francisco’s Chinatown, where a young man must choose between a traditional Chinese bride and a brash, sexy Chinese-American dancer.
Hwang’s new book dealt with considerable back-story and filled in the politics behind the arrival of these Chinese immigrants, and the new Broadway production (2002) altered the tunestack to fit the new story. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a success in this new version, and while the show may not be tried again in either version, one might suggest not interfering with the architectural brilliance of any Hammerstein libretto, no matter how noble the sentiment.
8. ANYTHING GOES
Cole Porter wrote one of his very best scores for this 1934 shipboard farce. The first draft of the show concerned a shipwreck plot, but after the S.S. Morro Castle sank, the plot had to be re-written on the fly. The necessity of a quick fix introduced the world to the hugely successful writing team of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, who were brought together at director Lindsay’s insistence for help in patching up the book.
In 1962, Anything Goes was revived off-Broadway, with six other Porter songs interpolated to help prop up the typically creaky 1930s book. A brand-new version sailed into Lincoln Center in 1987, featuring four more new old songs, and a completely reworked book by John Weidman and Russel Crouse’s son, Timothy. Patti LuPone’s blazing performance as Reno Sweeney, evangelist-chanteuse, brought sex appeal back to the role, which had fallen into the hands of too many Jo-Anne Worleys over the years. Also noteworthy were the characters of Luke and John, “two Taiwan Chinese” named Ling and Ching in 1962, who figure in the comedy subplot and are actually somewhat empowered in the 1987 version, as opposed to being mere caricatures in 1962. Whichever version you see, the real pleasure is in hearing some of the greatest songs ever written for the theater, courtesy of one of the masters, Mr. Cole Porter.
9. THE THREEPENNY OPERA
Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s agitprop classic first premiered on Broadway in 1933 (in an English-language version not prepared by Brecht). This bitterly political, audience-alienating zeitoper wasn’t exactly what depression-era crowds were looking for, and it lasted only twelve performances. However, a 1954 production mounted at the Theater de Lys off-Broadway after Weill’s death, and starring his widow, Lotte Lenya, was a monster hit, running for 2,611 performances.
This popular version of Threepenny was prepared by the gifted composer and lyricist Marc Blitzstein, who, in this version, gave the world the sobriquet “Mack the Knife” for the show’s antihero, Macheath. Unfortunately, the text and political thrust of the show were considerably (albeit understandably, considering the Ike-era politics) bowdlerized.
Broadway has seen Threepenny twice since, most notably in a production directed by Richard Foreman in 1976. This version, translated and de-santitzed by Ralph Mannheim and John Willett, brought much of the political, scatological, and sexual energy of the piece back to the fore, and Douglas W. Schmidt’s audience-alienating scenery, with its low-hung lamps and puzzlingly-placed strings criscrossing the audience’s field of vision, contributing to the truly Brechtian atmosphere.
10. IRENE
When the idea was floated in 1972 to revive the 1919 musical comedy Irene and make it palatable to new audiences, the hardhats went on and the work began. To overhaul the book, producer Harry Rigby hired two of the best, Joseph Stein (Fiddler on the Roof) and Hugh Wheeler (who was also represented that season by his Tony-winning book for A Little Night Music), to revise his own adaptation.
The original score, by Harry Tierney and Joseph McCarthy, was considerably altered, with new songs, many by theater vet Wally Harper, inserted alongside the show’s classics like “Alice Blue Gown.” The presence of Debbie Reynolds, as lovely Irene O’Dare, gave new-fangled star power to the evening, and old pros like George S. Irving and Patsy Kelly made the whole show, despite its many coats of paint, look like a new old-fashioned show, rather than an old vehicle with a tune-up.
Duelling Musicals!
Musicals that Share the Same Source Material
Every so often, a musical will hit the boards with an air of familiarity about it. And often that familiarity is justified: Many musicals share an original source with another show. These twenty musicals examine that kinship.
1. CYRANO vs. CYRANO, THE MUSICAL
Some would consider a musical version of Rostand’s classic play Cyrano de Bergerac a waste of time, since the play itself is so beautiful and lyrical. But the period trappings, the romance, and, indeed, the lyricism of the play are surely what draw musical authors to the classic tale of a brilliant yet unattractive man wooing and eventually dying for his vision of perfection.
The 1972 season saw Anthony Burgess adapt his own superb translation into a musical libretto, with music by Michael J. Lewis. The production, an import from Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater, starred Christopher Plummer as Cyrano, and he won raves and a Tony Award, but the production was dismissed as unmemorable. A similar fate befell the version that hit Broadway in 1994 as Cyrano, the Musical. This version was a big success in the Netherlands, and the producers decided to chance it on Broadway in a weak season that saw only two successful new musical entries (Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and Passion).
The great wordsmith Sheldon Harnick was asked to polish the lyrics, which were not exactly Broadway-worthy (one example: Cyrano refers to his nose as “a snorer or borer or odor-explorer.” Achoo!) Despite an energetic performance from Bill van Dijk as The Nose, Cyrano, the Musical went the way of Cyrano the musical, and faded fast.
2. KISMET vs. TIMBUKTU!
Two musicals based on the Arabian Nights have made it to Broadway, and they’re actually the same show, or almost. Kismet (1953), first out of the b
ox, was a colorful, stylish telling of the Arabian tales based on the play Kismet by Edward Knoblock, set to the music of Borodin’s “Polovetsian Dances,” adapted by Luther Davis, Robert Wright, and George Forrest. Starring Alfred Drake as the poet Hajj, it was a smash hit.
Davis collaborated with Charles Lederer on the 1978 “African” version, Timbuktu! Set in the Mali capital instead of Baghdad for this version, director Geoffrey Holder, following his similarly Afro-centric The Wiz, punched up the tribal-ritual trappings inherent in the new setting and gave the role of Saheem-La-Lume, the evil Wazir’s bored, sexy wife (known simply as Lalume in Kismet) to Eartha Kitt, who entered borne aloft on brawny shoulders, and pretty much didn’t come down all night. Both Kismet and Timbuktu! remained true to the themes of love, life, and death as played against the shifting sands of time.
3. THE WILD PARTY vs. THE WILD PARTY
Joseph Moncure March’s epic poem The Wild Party, about the Jazz Age revels of a fading vaudeville couple, got two, count ’em, two different productions in New York in 2000, both featuring scores by up-and-coming New York composers.