by Tom Shea
It’s hard to pin down the reasons why this 1954 show didn’t succeed. To listen to the score is to marvel at the good fortune that great writers have in creating songs for dramatic characters; this score positively vibrates with sensuality.
The work of composer Harold Arlen and librettist-lyricist Truman Capote (who got the idea for the tale whilst vacationing in Haiti), House of Flowers told the story of Madam Fleur and her “house of flowers,” girls named Pansy, Gladiola, etc., and the arrival of a new “flower” who ignites personal and professional chaos on the island. Pearl Bailey, who nine years earlier had scored with Arlen’s songs in her Broadway debut, St Louis Woman, was difficult from the get-go, stealing material from other actors and refusing to cooperate with director Peter Brook after he was fired and rehired.
Then again, Bailey was great onstage, and some feel the very gay point of view of the material was what kept it from succeeding. But oh, that score.
7. JUNO
Marc Blitzstein was one of the American theater’s most talented and versatile composers; his work ranged from conventional theater works such as Regina, his opera based on Hellman’s The Little Foxes, and his version of the Brecht-Weill Threepenny Opera, to Reuben Reuben, an avant-garde work about a man who can’t communicate, and Juno, based on Sean O’Casey’s play Juno and the Paycock.
Juno was faithful to O’ Casey’s play, which is pretty much a laundry list of woe and misery from strife-torn Ireland, circa 1924. Blitzstein’s score, however, soars above the material; “I Wish It So” and “What Is the Stars?” are superb ballads, and the opening number, “We’re Alive,” is a perfect, colors-flying rouser.
8. PACIFIC OVERTURES
Stephen Sondheim, Harold Prince, and John Weidman’s Bicentennial musical is a brilliant examination of America’s policies of manifest destiny and global capitalism. Telling its story from the Japanese side, in Kabuki style, however, pretty much assured the show of going the way of all flesh.
There was nothing amiss in Sondheim’s score, however. Drawing heavily on the Eastern pentatonic scale and avoiding heavy Western rhyme schemes for its Asian characters, the cast album of Pacific Overtures is virtually perfect, brilliantly sung by an all-Asian cast. Particularly effective are the numbers “Poems,” and the massive history lesson “Please Hello,” which may be the funniest song Sondheim has ever written.
9. THE GOLDEN APPLE
This bold and creative resetting of The Iliad and The Odyssey was hailed upon its off-Broadway premiere in at the Phoenix Theater in 1954 and was greeted with even better notices when it moved uptown. But the audiences never came to see The Golden Apple, and it closed after only 125 performances. But the fifties saw the cast album explosion, so something this good was bound to reach vinyl.
But since The Golden Apple was a genre-bending folk opera, completely sung with no dialogue, cuts had to be made to preserve the score on LP. Lyricist John LaTouche reportedly whipped up rhyming continuity on the spot to patch over the severe cuts made to Jerome Moross’s brilliant music. And brilliant it is: Still heard on the album are the gorgeous “Windflowers,” Kaye Ballard’s hymn of seduction, “Lazy Afternoon,” and much of “The Judgment of Paris,” the hilarious county fair bake-off to win Paris’s favor.
10. FOLLIES
Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman’s brilliant 1971 musical was one of the musically richest shows ever heard on Broadway. So what’s up with the one-disc hatchet job of the brilliant original cast? Again, the song-and-dance team of Ego and Hubris take the prize.
Follies producer-director Hal Prince was reportedly sore at CBS Studios, who had so brilliantly recorded the previous Sondheim score, Company, so he made a rather capricious deal with Capitol Records, which didn’t have a whole lot of experience with original cast albums. The resultant recording was, to put it mildly, a piece of crap. Many of the brilliant pastiche songs were trimmed and large sections of music cut altogether to make the show fit on a single, two-sided disc. “Irresponsible” is the word often bandied about when this album is discussed. In 1985, RCA Victor thankfully recorded the all-star gala Follies in Concert with the New York Philharmonic.
Cinema Theatricalo
Movies about the Creation of Musical Theater
Theater is easily the most cinematic art form. After movies. And, ok, maybe TV. And records can be kind of cinematic, too, right? Anyway, here are ten movies which deal with the creation of musical theater.
1. TOPSY-TURVY
Mike Leigh’s masterful examination of the great Gibert and Sullivan, the Victorian era, and the circumstances which led them to create their most popular operetta, The Mikado. It’s a near miracle that a movie this richly detailed and luxurious, in time as well as content, was made in 1999, even in England.
2. MEETING VENUS
Glenn Close is a superb singing actress, but it’s doubtful she could sing Wagner. Nevertheless, she plays a temperamental Swedish diva (dubbed by Kiri Te Kanawa) in Istvan Szabo’s film Meeting Venus, a pseudo-documentary look at an international production of Tannhaüser. The personal affairs and petty jealousies of the opera folk are amusing (some have seen the mutinational feel of this 1991 film as a metaphor for German reunification), but the climactic Tannhaüser itself is dullsville.
3. CRADLE WILL ROCK
Tim Robbins’s delightful 1999 look at the creation of Marc Blitzstein’s political musical The Cradle Will Rock, whose opening (and closing) night became famous as the swan song of the Federal Theater Project. Robbins examines big business, the state of the art, and culture wars with a freewheeling cinematic sensibility and a cast of Hollywood stars (Vanessa Redgrave, Susan Sarandon, John Cusack) and New York theater veterans (Paul Giamatti, Cherry Jones, Barnard Hughes).
4. 42nd STREET
Pretty Lady must go on—even if the star twists an ankle. And you, Peggy Sawyer, are going to save the day! That’s the plot of 1933’s great 42nd Street, the corniest and most wonderful backstage musical ever filmed, based on Bradford Ropes’s novel. Lloyd Bacon directed, Busby Berkeley (of course) staged the socko numbers, and Ruby Keeler shone as the girl who went out there a youngster, but who came back a star. Broadway’s version, first seen in 1980, is heavily influenced by the film.
5. THE BAND WAGON
Another great fictional backstager, molded closely on real life. One of Vincente Minnelli’s last great M-G-M musicals, Fred Astaire basically plays himself (star dancer past his prime, looking for one last stage hit), Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray are basically writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and the tyrannical director is played by Jack Buchanan, basically playing … Vincente Minnelli. Don’t miss Astaire and Cyd Charisse all-timing it to “Dancing in the Dark.”
6. AMADEUS
It’s really about Antonio Salieri’s frustration at Mozart’s seemingly divine genius, but Peter Shaffer’s screenplay of his stage hit, brilliantly directed by Milos Forman, gives us tantalizing glimpses into Mozart’s Herculean oeuvre, from the highs of the Royal command premiere of Abduction from the Seraglio to the lows of the working-class shenanigans of The Magic Flute, all wittily staged by Twyla Tharp.
7. SHOWGIRLS
Nomi’s not a whore, she’s a dancer! Good-yet-violently-unstable girl goes to Vegas, becomes a lap-dancer, then a stripper, then the star of the fabulous Las Vegas review “Goddess,” in Paul Verhoeven’s godawful backstager-for-the-nineties, Showgirls. As many people have noted, her career trajectory would probably be reversed, since strippers make more money than showgirls, but hey, a semi-nude job’s a semi-nude job. Elizabeth Berkley is our toothy heroine; watch her trip another bitchy showgirl down the stairs, mwahahaha.
8. ALL THAT JAZZ
A cinema a clef if ever one existed, All That Jazz, egomaniac supreme Bob Fosse’s rumination on his life and work, breathes Broadway from its very pores. A look at talented workaholic and Renaissance man Joe Gideon’s struggles to finish a movie (“The Comedian,” based on Lenny) and get his new Broadway show NY/LA (which gives us t
he fabulous “Take Off With Us/Air Rotica” sequence) up and running, all while enduring open-heart surgery. All That Jazz features many of Fosse’s theater colleagues, some (Anne Reinking, Ben Vereen) playing characters based on themselves.
9. BABES ON BROADWAY
Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland made approximately 7,000 movies together, all about the same thing: Hey kids, let’s put on a show! And then we’ll take it to Broadway! These incredibly realistic showbiz tales are exemplified by Babes on Broadway, directed by (who else) Busby Berkley. The film is basically an excuse for a series of wacky production numbers, in which Judy and Mickey and the kids put on a show and then take it to Broadway. In a theater the size of a Hollywood sound-stage.
10. THE PRODUCERS
Mel Brooks’s first movie was the basis for the 2001 hit musical of the same name. Set at the time it was made, 1968 (unlike the stage show), it concerns a second-rate producer (Zero Mostel) who cooks up a scheme to make a killing by producing a flop musical. That flop is, of course, Springtime for Hitler. Brilliantly cast and completely unafraid, it’s not only one of the most quotable movie comedies ever, but also very canny about the theater, thanks in large part to choreographer Alan Johnson’s hilarious Springtime staging.
Food, Glorious Food!
10 Broadway Musicals you Could Eat
Hungry? Most Broadway theaters have a snack bar for the intermission munchies, but here are ten musicals to satisfy your appetite for something more (which is also the title of a musical, but not a musical about food).
1. THE GOLDEN APPLE
Brilliant, near-operatic resetting of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in turn-of-the-century Washington state. In this version, written by John Latouche and Jerome Moross, Helen is a randy (and bored) farmer’s daughter married to Sheriff Menelaus, and Paris is a dancing salesman who spirits her away in his balloon. General Ulysses and the heroes, cleverly renamed (Bluey for Philoctetes, Thirsty for Tantalus, and Doc MacCahan for Machaon) are back from the Spanish-American War and are eventually guilt-tripped into laying waste to Rhododendron In order to get Helen back.
2. RAISIN
This 1973 musical adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s classic play A Raisin In the Sun is fairly faithful to Hansberry’s powerful study of a family’s dreams deferred by outside and inside influences. The Judd Woldin-Robert Brittan score got down and dirty when called for (“Booze,” where Walter Lee Younger envisions his new liquor store), but also soared, especially in the superb “Measure the Valleys,” a mother’s plea for understanding of her son. Raisin brightened a lean year for Broadway musicals, and it won the Best Musical Tony in 1974.
3. SHERRY!
The late Dolores Gray (as sexpot movie queen Lorraine Sheldon) tried her best to liven up this leaden musical adaptation of The Man Who Came to Dinner, with TV’s Inside the Actors Studio host/suckup James Lipton partially to blame; he wrote the lyrics. Critics and audiences pointed right away to the unnecessary expansion of the great Kaufman-Hart play, here blown up to include scenes of the whole town of Sherwood, Ohio (“Smalltown, U.S.A.”—how original), with the zany locals brought on for pointless and needless production numbers. It lasted less than two months in 1967.
4. SUGAR
Jule Styne and Bob Merrill adapted the great film comedy Some Like it Hot for the stage in 1972. Not directed by Billy Wilder. Not in black-and-white. Not starring Marilyn Monroe. What’s the point? Broadway audiences felt likewise, despite the presence of old hands like Robert Morse and Tony Roberts and a drop-dead gorgeous Elaine Joyce as Sugar Kane. But the show (often retitled Some Like it Hot, for obvious reasons) continues to thrive in regional theater, whose audiences more readily appreciate the drag comedy and inevitable roaring-twenties hoofing. Tony Curtis toured the show in the role of nerdy Osgood during 2002 and 2003.
5. MILK AND HONEY
Jerry ”Hello, Dollyl” Herman waxes affectionate for Israel in this 1961 musical about new settlers and tourists in the Holy Land. Yiddish theater vet Molly Picon leads a pack of middle-aged Jewish-American widows looking for husbands. Herman’s Broadway debut gave a glimpse of the great things to come (although his “Hymn to Hymie” was not a tribute to My Fair Maidel, rather a widow’s paean to her dead husband). The first Broadway musical actually set in Israel, Milk and Honey was warm but also realistic about the trouble facing settlers in the territory.
6. THE COCOANUTS
Irving Berlin wrote the score, George S. Kaufman wrote the book, and it starred the Marx Brothers. It’s about a mayonnaise factory in Idaho. Just kidding. It’s Minnie’s boys running amok in the resort hotel business, circa late 1925. Not one of Berlin’s most stellar scores, the brothers filmed it in 1929, giving them a leg up on the art of screen comedy, which they would soon redefine, despite the staginess of this particular film. (Now you know why the film version of The Cocoanuts looks like a filmed stage musical: because it was.)
7. SUGAR BABIES
Mickey Rooney as Top Banana and Ann Miller as The Legs in this unabashed, smash-hit tribute to the great days of burlesque, with jugglers, ventriloquists, corny gags (in one sketch, Miller, as Mrs. Westfall, is referred to by the leering Judge Rooney as “Mrs. Breastfall” and “Mrs. Bestball”) and pretty chorus gals galore (the Sugar Babies of the title, here swinging like Evelyn Nesbit, and there dancing like Lillian Russell). A hit in 1980, Sugar Babies was perhaps the last successful evening of burlesque that Broadway will ever see.
8. THE ROTHSCHILDS
Hal Linden won a Tony for his portrayal of Mayer Rothschild, paterfamilias of the legendary European moneylenders. This show did not shy away from the anti-Semitism endured by Rothschild and his sons, but rather used the many attacks on their property and persons (“Jew, do your duty!” they were often told, meaning they were expected to bow and scrape in public) as dramatic motivation for their triumphs. The book, by Sherman Yellen, and the score, by the estimable Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, played mainly to the Jewish theater-party crowds and saw The Rothschilds to a middling 505-performance run.
9. THE THREE MUSKETEERS
Rudolf Friml’s 1928 operetta version of the Dumas classic, which somebody thought was just right for revival on the Broadway scene in 1984. Nope. A new libretto by the estimable Mark Bramble held forth the promise of a modern take on the Friml-Wodehouse-Grey warhorse. Unfortunately, nothing could offset the basic fustiness of the genre and the costume-drama trappings. Instead of settling in for a Marathon run and a nice Payday, this Dum Dum’s version of The Three Musketeers drew nothing but Snickers and became a nine-performance Milk Dud.
10. TOP BANANA
The legendary Phil Silvers gave a blazing performance in this 1950 show about a burlesque clown (named Jerry Biffle, but bearing a resemblance to a certain TV funnyman whose name rhymes with “Hilton Girl”) and his increasingly obsolete TV show, ladling the schtick on top of the corn like melted butter. The score was by Johnny Mercer, but there was no “Moon River” or “Ac-Cent-Chu-Ate the Positive” in this one; the show was really a flimsy excuse for Silvers and some other assured comic hands to cut up, early and often.
Cold and Dead
10 Musicals about Killers
The most heinous crimes often demand the most serious examination of our values. So it’s no mystery why killers might occupy the minds of many musical authors.
1. SWEENEY TODD, THE DEMON BARBER OF FLEET STREET
This 1979 musical is near the top of many musical “Best” lists. Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s “musical thriller” is based on the English legend of Sweeney Todd, a crazy barber who slit the throats of his customers while they were in his chair, and gave the corpses to his neighbor, Mrs. Lovett, to use in her meat pies.
Though the legend usually depicts Todd as a villain, this musical version is based on a dramatization that made Sweeney a victim of perverted justice. Sondheim was the catalyst for this project, and as directed by Harold Prince, this Sweeney took no prisoners and spared no sensibilities. Perhaps the supreme ac
hievement of the show—other than its breathtaking virtuosity—is the humanizing effect the authors have on the two central characters—Mrs. Lovett is a lovelorn capitalist, while Todd himself emerges a wronged husband and father driven to madness.
2. THE NEWS
This small-scale musical, which was booked in the Helen Hayes—the smallest theater on Broadway—still seemed too small for the Main Stem, and it unfortunately shows up on many “Worst of the ’80s” lists. It’s a rock-opera semi-satire on the methods and madness of a tabloid newspaper, in particular their treatment of a serial killer on their front pages.
Critics were united in their dislike for The News, which seemed to have no real handle on its subject matter, trivializing both the paper (which bore a masthead resemblance to a certain paper rhyming with “You Pork Ghost”) and the serial killer who winds up dating the editor’s daughter. Mostly the work of Paul Schierhorn, who was nominated for two Tony awards for this four-performance flop, The News was mostly sung, and a good thing, too: Coming in for most of the credit were Cheryl Alexander as a reporter and future Tony winner Anthony Crivello as the killer.