by Tom Shea
Movie success in other genres followed, as well as the legendary TV special Liza With a “Z,” and she had fully inherited her mother’s legacy by this time. She often returned to Broadway, in full shows (Tony-winning The Act in 1977) as well as specialty engagements (like Liza in 1974).
7. GLENN CLOSE
Glenn Close made her Broadway debut in the play Love for Love in 1974; a year and a half later, she made her musical debut in Richard Rodgers’s Rex. Close’s movie career really took off after she was Tony-nominated in Barnum; she appeared in The World According to Garp not long after, and Garp won her the first of her five Oscar nominations. She came back to Broadway in 1983, winning a Tony for the play The Real Thing, again in 1992, winning her second Tony for the play Death and the Maiden, and won her third Tony in 1995, for her haunting Norma Desmond in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Sunset Boulevard.
8. JOHN STAMOS
Pretender to the throne of King-of-TV-Movie-Land, John Stamos is an unusual Broadway crossover star, but he’s proven his chops with stints in musicals that couldn’t be more different. The “stunt” casting of a TV heartthrob may have been at work, but sometimes, these things have a way of working.
Stamos, in addition to being an actor, is an accomplished percussionist (yes, he really does play congas in the Beach Boys “Kokomo” video) and singer, so his appearance as Matthew Broderick’s replacement in the 1995 revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying was not completely out of left field. For his next Broadway gig, in the highly charged revival of Cabaret, he definitely didn’t play it safe. In the spring of 2002, he took over the role of the androgynous, sexually suggestive Emcee for five months. Late in 2003, he got more press by stepping into the role of Guido Contini in the Broadway revival of Nine, succeeding the very popular Antonio Banderas.
9. BETTE DAVIS
Another candidate for Greatest Movie Star Ever, Bette Davis appeared in two musicals in her great career, with less-than-spectacular results. In 1952, she appeared, with much hoopla, in the musical Two’s Company, but had to withdraw early because of health problems. Her early departure caused no little financial distress to the producers.
In 1964, Emlyn Williams adapted his play The Corn is Green into the musical Miss Moffat, ostensibly as a project for Mary Martin. Ten years later, Miss Moffat was offered to the woman who had played her on film, Bette Davis. Davis accepted a pre-Broadway tour, then the fireworks began. She proved to be less than stellar as a singer and started to miss performances, raising the red flag again with the producers. She ultimately clashed loudly with the show’s director, Joshua Logan, as well. Miss Moffat never made it to Broadway.
10. TOM BOSLEY
After blazing to stardom as Mayor LaGuardia in Fiorello! in 1959, Tom Bosley found his good-natured bravado in some demand, Unfortunately, his next musical projects weren’t up to the level of the Pulitzer-winning Fiorello! The first show, Nowhere to Go but Up, from 1962, was a subpar comic musical about Depressionera bootleggers Izzy and Moe, and his next musical, 1968’s The Education of H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N, an immigrant’s tale of assimilation, might have done well had it not been undone by history. On the show’s opening night, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, and the news cycle in the following days left no room for H*Y*M*A*NK*A*P*L *A*N to build any kind of an audience.
So Bosley lit out for Hollywood, where he found his greatest success on the TV sitcom Happy Days. He finally made his return to Broadway in 1994, as Belle’s Father in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. He came back again to play Herr Schultz in the revival of Cabaret.
It’s a Hit, It’s a Palpable Hit
Hit Songs you never Knew Came from Musicals
Way back when, the music of Broadway was our nation’s popular music. Every one of the ten songs below has enjoyed hit status at one time or another, but many folks don’t know that these familiar melodies are actually show tunes.
1. “HE TOUCHED ME” (FROM DRAT! THE CAT!)
Drat! The Cat! is a sexy, funny show about an olde-tyme female jewel thief and the hapless cop who eventually catches her and wins her heart. The show, which starred Elliott Gould and Lesley Ann Warren, was a failure on Broadway in 1965, but Mr. Gould happened to be married to The Thing Itself, Barbra Streisand, and Gould’s big ballad, “She Touched Me,” was refashioned by Streisand and recorded as “He Touched Me.” Socko, boffo, million-plus sales.
Milton Schafer and Ira Levin wrote a successfully varied score for Drat! The Cat!, with flat-out comedy numbers, period-style charmers, and a superb overture, but scored biggest with that hit ballad, which then reached the stratosphere when Streisand laid it down. So who knew it was written by the creator of The Step-ford Wives?
2. “LAZY AFTERNOON” (FROM THE GOLDEN APPLE)
The score to The Golden Apple, Jerome Moross and John LaTouche’s resetting of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey in America between the years 1900-1910, is so well-integrated that it’s almost impossible to imagine any part of the score standing separately from the whole. But two songs did make their way out of the score: the beautiful, wistful “Windflowers,” Penelope’s lament for her golden days with Ulysses, and Helen’s sultry “Lazy Afternoon.”
“Lazy Afternoon” is sung by Helen as she seduces Paris (not the other way around) in her front yard, singing a superbly idiomatic lyric (“my rockin’ chair will fit yer and my cake was never richer”) accompanied by undulating vibes, winds, and bass. “Lazy Afternoon” has been a cabaret staple for years, and the song was recorded by alt-rockers The Reivers in 1989 in what is a rocking but fairly respectful tribute version.
3. “SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES” (FROM ROBERTA)
Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach’s 1933 musical Roberta was a successful post-Princess Theatre musical about a college football star whose Aunt Minnie runs a dress shop in Paris (as the titular mam’selle Roberta). The show, based on the Alice Duer Miller novel, was star-studded, featuring an aging Fay Templeton, a young Bob Hope, Fred MacMurray, and George Murphy, and if Harbach’s book was typically inane, Kern’s score was not, for it gave us “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”
The critic and historian Martin Gottfried has said that the great composers can be rightly judged by the strength of their greatest song, and for Jerome Kern, that song is “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” With Kern’s tune wedded to one of the greatest lyrics ever written for an American popular song, “Smoke” was popular in the show and became more popular in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film version of Roberta. But most people must know this great song from the single cut by the Platters. Number One on the charts for three weeks in 1959, the Platters’ version rescued a dormant title (a feat publicly acknowledged by no less a high priest than Oscar Hammerstein II) and made the song sing to future generations.
4. “MACK THE KNIFE” (FROM THE THREEPENNY OPERA)
One of the twentieth century’s great works of theater, The Threepenny Opera, yielded one of the century’s great melodies, Kurt Weill’s A-minor “Moritat von Mackie Messer,” with Bertolt Brecht’s brilliant, cynical lyric translating as “The Moritat (ballad) of Mackie the Knife.” The Threepenny Opera came and went quickly on Broadway in 1933, but the piece gained acceptance as a classic, particularly in Europe, and was revived off-Broadway in 1955 at the Theatre de Lys. Marc Blitzstein’s Eisenhower-era bowdlerization of Threepenny slowly became one of the biggest hits in off-Broadway history.
It was this Blitzstein translation that crooner Bobby Darin had worked into his nightclub act, and he laid it down on vinyl in 1959, with a swingin’ band behind him, subverting and somewhat neutralizing the lyric about the robber-killer Macheath, a/k/a Mack the Knife. The public snapped it up despite the subtext of the song, and Darin’s recording hit Number One on the charts and became Billboard’s number two song of the year.
The dichotomy of the two versions of the song was not lost on the creators of the 1994 movie Quiz Show. Robert Redford opened his film with folks rushing to get home to see the popular quiz shows of the
day, accompanied by Darin’s version, and ended with a grainy Kinescope of grotesque audience faces laughing, oblivious to the scandals, as singer Lyle Lovett’s somber version of the “Moritat” played.
5. “TILL THERE WAS YOU” (FROM THE MUSIC MAN)
Meredith Willson’s 1958 musical was hailed as a classic almost from the beginning, but amidst all the trombones and Shipoopis, the tender second act ballad of realization, “Till There Was You,” was somewhat lost. Again, we can thank the kids for bringing it into the national consciousness: After pop songstress Peggy Lee recorded her version in 1961, the Beatles recorded it in July 1963, apparently influenced by her non-sentimental version, and included it on With The Beatles (known as Meet The Beatles in the US).
The Fab Four had been carrying “Till There Was You” around with them for some time (at least as far back as their audition for Decca Records), and they gave it a new feel, with Spanish guitars and a beguine beat, ending on a most un-Willson-esque F major chord with a major seventh. This version is easily the most famous of all, and many first-time listeners are surprised to discover the song wasn’t originally a Latin number at all.
6. “HERE’S THAT RAINY DAY” (FROM CARNIVAL IN FLANDERS)
Johnny Carson’s favorite song comes from what is easily the most obscure musical on this list. Carnival in Flanders, based on the award-winning 1936 French film La Kermesse Heroique, was a six-performance bomb as chaotic as a Breughel painting and about as easy to decipher. Wouldn’t you think Johnny Burke, Jimmy Van Heusen, and Preston Sturges were the right guys to pen a medieval tuner set in a small Flemish town? Anybody?
Carnival in Flanders nevertheless gave us “Here’s That Rainy Day,” another wistful ballad for a rough year, and wisely gave it to Dolores Gray, who defined Sexy Middle Age on Broadway during the Golden Era. The late, great Gray won her Tony for 1953’s Flanders, the shortest-running show to ever net a performer a Tony, and “Here’s that Rainy Day” entered the jazz band and torch song repertoire, while at the same time capturing the attention of a certain talk-show host from Nebraska.
7. “ONE NIGHT IN BANGKOK” (FROM CHESS)
Unless you count Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” written for the 1982 film version of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and made world famous by Whitney Houston ten years later, “One Night in Bangkok” is the last hit song from a musical to make the top of the pop charts.
A catchy piece of ’80s junk-pop from the ’80s junk-pop musical Chess made famous by the Murray Head single, “Bangkok” was written by Tim Rice, Benny Andersson, and Bjorn Ujlvaeus. The pre-sold success of the song insured the high profile of the show.
8. “SEND IN THE CLOWNS” (FROM A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC)
Stephen Sondheim’s one and only hit song (by himself, that is— West Side Story and Gypsy have done him just fine, thank you) wasn’t yet a smash when A Little Night Music won six Tony Awards in 1973. It took pop singer Judy Collins (and her musical director, Jonathan Tunick, also Sondheim’s orchestrator) to make it truly famous.
On her 1975 hit album, Judith, Collins delivered a simple, piano-accompanied version of “Send in the Clowns,” preserving the undercurrent of regret and sadness inherent in the song (while somewhat obscuring the nocturne setting of the piece). Collins’s version won Sondheim the Grammy Award for “Song of the Year” for 1975, and gave the song an entry into the popular consciousness it never would have received through the superb but somewhat rarified Night Music.
9. “SEPTEMBERSONG” (FROM KNICKERBOCKER HOLIDAY)
As beautiful a song as “September Song” is, it’s actually quite a manipulative little piece in context. Knickerbocker Holiday concerns the life and times of Pieter Stuyvesant, the aging governor of New Amsterdam, and the Kurt Weill-Maxwell Anderson song is sung to convince his nubile young intended, Tina, to consider his suit in marriage, peg-leg, eye patch and all, instead of the young troublemaker she really loves, and to do it now.
“September Song” was written for the actor Walter Huston, a craggy persona with no real singing voice and no real vocal range. Weill wrote a verse which was short-lined and a chorus which was limited as far as range, leaving Huston ample opportunity to “act” the song and put it over that way. This he did, and his studio recording of the song was a hit even after the show closed.
Huston did not re-create his role in the 1944 film version of Knickerbocker Holiday (just as well—it’s a bit of a bomb), but the song was still put over well by Charles Coburn, furthering its popularity. But Huston is the performer most people associate with “September Song,” and since he was not primarily a musical theater talent, most people don’t realize the song comes from a musical, let alone one as little-known as Knickerbocker Holiday.
10. YOU’LL NEVER WALK ALONE” (FROM CAROUSEL)
Here’s one for the sports fans out there. The theme song of the most successful team in the history of English football (“soccer” to us Yanks) has as its motto and theme song a 1945 show tune by Rodgers and Hammerstein. But Liverpool FC and Carousel’s Billy Bigelow have much in common.
As Billy lays dead in Carousel, Nettie Fowler sings “You’ll Never Walk Alone” to his grieving widow, giving her the strength to carry on. In 1966, with English football at the top of the world (hosting and winning the World Cup), Liverpool Football Club was on top of the domestic game. The supporters of the club unofficially adopted the version of “Walk Alone” performed by Liverpool band Gerry and the Pacemakers, the lyric matching the life-and-death importance the English give their football. The song is played as the players take the pitch to this day, and the club crest boasts the words “May you never walk alone.” Even Pink Floyd incorporated a version of it into their 1971 Meddle LP.
I Love a Film Cliché
Movie Musicals that Made It to the Stage
What people in the theater seem loath to acknowledge is that the state of the Broadway musical is almost as creatively bankrupt as the much-maligned movie industry—which is why the majority of the below listed titles are current. Here are a few examples of stage musicals adapted from movies.
1. SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN
The film that many consider the pinnacle of the movie musical, it’s a flawless, joyous celebration of movement. The hilarious script (by Betty Comden and Adolph Green) deals with Hollywood’s awkward steps from silents to talkies as well as the need for quality rainwear.
The 1985 stage version, however, upset the sleek screenplay by dropping in unnecessary extra numbers (“Hub Bub,” an extended “Wedding of the Painted Dolls”) and giving other characters extraneous and often downright unpleasant dialogue. Modern dance pioneer Twyla Tharp directed and choreographed, but the show had little effect on a real live stage, where even the water seemed extraneous.
2. 42ND STREET
This great 1933 movie musical was a backstage fable to begin with, and even as re-authored by Michael Stewart for a 1980 audience, it was pure showbiz corn from the word go. The classic story—Girl Off Turnip Truck who Dances Like an Angel gets job understudying Temperamental Star with Rich Boyfriend, Girl gets Fired by Star, Star breaks Leg, Desperate Producer Hires Girl back, Girl becomes Star of Biggest Hit Ever— was played with a clear-eyed sense of Broadway as Wonderland.
Thanks to director-choreographer Gower Champion, the show strutted in high style, with tap, jazz, ballet, and good old hoofing all on view in a chorus dancer’s dream. The Abominable Showman himself, David Merrick, had his last great hit producing 42nd Street, and the death of Gower Champion on the show’s opening day added to the legend of this long-running show.
3. SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER
The fine 1978 disco movie, the coming-of-age story of Tony Manero, a working-class mook who finds himself on the disco floor on Saturday nights, was fleshed out for the Broadway stage in 1999. The legendary Bee Gees tunes from the film were augmented with other songs from the movie’s soundtrack album, plus other disco-riffic hits of the era.
The show was clearly an attempt at
’70’s nostalgia, and the attempt to shoehorn the songs into the book was clunky (and probably doomed to failure). The lack of John Travolta’s star presence didn’t help either—the show boasted no stars, although it created one in the monomial Orfeh.
4. SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS
One of the finest musicals ever conceived for film, this 1954 adaptation of the bucolic tale “The Sobbin’ Women” featured glorious CinemaScope photography and two of the best musical numbers ever shot, “Lonesome Polecat” and the immortal “Barn Raising,” with choreography by the estimable Michael Kidd.
Opening on Broadway in the summer 1982, it should have been obvious that no stage adaptation could ever match the peerless film version, and the well-cast but ultimately pointless stage version closed in less than a week. It has gone on to a better life in regional theaters.