by Tom Shea
6. GONE WITH THE WIND
Yes, indeed. The grandest, most spectacular tale ever told on film was given the musical treatment in 1973, and to the surprise of many, it wasn’t laughed out of the country. Actually, it started out of the country, in Japan in 1970, as Scarlett, with a score by the estimable Harold Rome and staging by Joe Layton. Playwright Horton Foote came aboard for the pre-Broadway try-out, when the name changed to GWTW, starring Lesley-Ann Warren and Pernell Roberts. The show closed on the road to Broadway after the critics weighed in with predictable pans. While much of the show was intriguing, just why they bothered to try making it a Broadway musical is still a mystery.
7. BEATLEMANIA
Well, at least this one was kind of a hit. Beatlemania was, basically, a cover band. Basically just four guys who may or may not have looked and/or sounded like the Beatles, playing instruments and wearing a huge variety of time-specific costumes and wigs in front of time-specific “1960s” projections. Listen up, everybody, four guys up on stage dressed in Sgt. Pepper outfits doesn’t make them the Beatles. And it ran for 920 performances! And then they made a movie out of it! What the hell is wrong with us?
8. WELCOME TO THE CLUB
There seem to be two Cy Colemans: Classy Cy, who writes City of Angels, Sweet Charity, and other sleek shows, and Tacky Cy, who indulges his trashy impulses and puts them onstage. Results include I Love My Wife (’70s swingers), The Life (hookers and pimps in Times Square), and the least successful of these shows, 1989’s Welcome to the Club.
Welcome to the Club concerns a bunch of stereotypes in alimony jail, with only their thoughts to bail them out. Seemingly as stuck in the ’70s as the other two Tacky Cy shows, its leering, Leroy Lockhorn-style take on women and relationships was well out of place in 1989, not to mention cheaply produced.
9. THE CIVIL WAR
Composer/lyricist Frank Wildhorn had some success with two late-1990s musicals, Jekyll & Hyde in 1997 and The Scarlet Pimpernel in 1998. Both these shows featured power-pop scores rather well suited to their “Classics Illustrated” sources, and enough fan interest to make their progress at least interesting. His next Broadway show, 1999’s The Civil War, was more, and ultimately less, of the same. The Civil War, with lyrics by Jack Murphy, began as a double pop-album project, with Wildhorn’s pop-soup ballads and pastiche rousers recorded by the likes of Hootie and the Blowfish and Travis Tritt. While the recording again stirred some interest, the lack of a linear story line to hang these songs on (the book was cobbled together from letters and speeches of the period) should have been evidence enough that it wouldn’t work onstage, and indeed it didn’t. Critics and audiences dismissed the show as eminently unworthy of its subject matter.
10. DANCE OF THE VAMPIRES
Yet another show ill suited to Broadway, 2002’s Dance of the Vampires (adapted from the movie The Fearless Vampire Killers) is a piece of Euro-trash retro fitted for a camp audience in New York. To New York’s credit, it didn’t take. At all.
Adapted from the Viennese pop-opera smash Tanz der Vampire, songwriter Jim Steinman collaborated with playwright David Ives and original author Michael Kunze on the new version. Vampires is set in, oh dear, Lower Belabartokovitch and concerns the restless Count von Krolock, locked in a good-and-evil struggle for the soul of … someone to bite, maybe?
Peppered with lines like “God has left the building,” the new book obviously aimed for good campy fun, but the score was not suitably altered to match the book, and it showed. Vampire never would have risked Broadway were it not for the presence of its star, Michael Crawford, whose magnetic performance in The Phantom of the Opera went a long way toward obscuring that show’s goth-camp flaws.
Wig in a Box
10 Musicals Featuring Characters in Drag
Since the dawn of theater, a man dressed as a lady (and, later, vice versa) has been a great way to get a laugh, and it’s no different in musicals. Often, however, musical theater writers have used drag characters and situations for something more substantial.
1. WHERE’S CHARLEY?
1948 brought Where’s Charley? to Broadway. Charley, featuring Frank Loesser’s first Broadway score, was adapted by George Abbott from Brandon Thomas’s 1892 farce Charley’s Aunt The type of play for which the term “warhorse” was invented, it involves forbidden romance, spinsters, lovestruck youth, and mistaken identity. And a man in drag.
Legendary clown Ray Bolger played lovesick Charley Wykeham, who dresses as his own spinster aunt to gain access to his beloved Amy Spettigue (played by the lovely Allyn Ann McLerie). Madcap hilarity ensues. Bolger took the show’s hit, “Once in Love with Amy,” and turned the gentle stroll into an audience sing-along number which endeared him further to the crowds, helping to turn the charming show into a 792-performance hit.
2. A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM
The plays of Plautus were the basis for this supreme farce, in which the drag doesn’t occur until late in the second act. The musical’s authors, Stepehen Sondheim, Larry Gelbart, and Burt Shevelove, made sure that the inevitable cross-dressing propelled the action, rather than distracted from it.
Pseudolus, a slave who will do anything to win his freedom, has enlisted the help of the ninny slave Hysterium, who must dress as a warrior’s deceased virgin bride-to-be in order to fool him, while Pseudolus spirits said virgin away, very much alive, to his master, Hero. (Trust me, it’s funnier than it sounds.) Since every character in this farce is a type (henpecked husband, wizened old man, vainglorious soldier, etc.), all eyes are fooled when Hysterium appears, scored to an ironic reprise of the ballad “Lovely,” as the golden-haired angel. The show reaches its acme in the mad chase that ensues.
3. LA CAGE AUX FOLLES
A drag musical with a point of view, 1983’s La Cage aux Folles takes its inspiration from the French farce of the same name. The main characters are the owner of a drag club on the French Riviera and his lover, the club’s star attraction. The plot is set in motion by the impending marriage of the club owner’s son.
The owner, Georges, and his lover, Albin, are living a fairly domestic life (so Harvey Fierstein’s libretto tellsus), until they learn that Michel, Georges’ son from a one-night assignation, is engaged to the daughter of a notoriously conservative politician. Jerry Herman’s score (his last for Broadway to date) delineates each lead: Georges, solid and masculine, and Albin, defiantly effeminate. Albin’s anthem of self-assuredness, “I Am What I Am,” ends the first act, as he doffs his wig before storming off stage.
This move backfires later, as Albin, in drag as Michel’s “mother,” doffs his wig by mistake at another nightclub, to the horror of the conservative couple. Finally, to slip past the press, the politician must dress in drag himself. “Honor thy father and mother,” Fierstein stated, was the theme of this smash hit, and though the journey is unusual, the end result is indeed, worthy of the term “family values.”
4. THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD
Rupert Holmes, pop recording artist, picked up a copy of Charles Dickens’ unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood prior to a train trip, and by the end of his journey, he knew he wanted to make a musical out of it. The trouble inherent in musicalizing the moody tale of a young dandy, his troubled uncle, and the woman who comes between them was simple: It wasn’t finished.
Holmes had his project adopted by Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in New York, who presented it in Central Park in the summer of 1985, prior to bringing it to Broadway for a Tony-winning run. Holmes wrote the book, music, lyrics, and the orchestrations, a nearly-unprecedented quadruple.
The task of finishing Dickens’s tale was assigned to the audience, who voted a different detective, murderer, and set of lovers each night, and the whole show was placed within the context of a “performance” of Drood by the Music Hall Royale. As befits a music-hall setting, one of the leads was a “pants” role, a man’s part (Edwin Drood) played by “Miss Alice Nutting,” the diva of the Royale.
5. THE PRODUCERS
Broadway received a much-needed shot in the arm with the appearance of The Producers in the spring of 2001. Hitting the Main Stem with almost-unprecedented anticipatory hoopla, it surpassed all expectations. Not bad for a show with something to offend everybody.
Mel Brooks’ 1968 movie The Producers is a slapdash but often riotously funny farce about a theater producer (Zero Mostel) who takes on a nebbishy partner (Gene Wilder) by convincing him they can make more profit off a flop than a hit show. They proceed to find the worst possible play and hire the worst possible director, Roger DeBris, and the result is the jaw-dropping Springtime for Hitler. And of course, it becomes the hit of the season, leaving the two producers to ponder where they went right.
It seems more of an insult to Hitler nowadays to have him played by DeBris, a screaming drag queen, than by an innocent hippie, as he was in the film. As portrayed originally by Gary Beach, DeBris (assisted by his confidante, Carmen Ghia) enters in a gown resembling New York City’s Chrysler Building and gets more outrageous from there. The drag quotient is upped in the first-act finale, as the stage fills with little old ladies, the pigeons Lane has been “plucking” to finance his show. The ladies and gentlemen of the ensemble totter on, dressed as old biddies, clicking their walkers in unison and singing of the joys of geriatric sex.
6. HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH
Hedwig and the Angry Inch is the 1998 brainchild of John Cameron Mitchell, an appealing singing actor who penned this musical saga (with music by Stephen Trask) about a German “girly-boy” named Hedwig, whose failed sex-change operation results in the aforementioned “angry inch.”
Hedwig’s tale is one of unrequited love for an American GI who used and abused him before becoming the rock star Hedwig always wanted to be. Hedwig hits the road with his own band, called the Angry Inch, and stalks his beloved from afar. Hedwig is played by a man in fearless and fantastic drag (Mitchell wrote himself literally dozens of costume changes), and Trask and Mitchell’s songs (aided off-Broadway by Trask’s band, Cheater) tear into Hedwig’s glam-rock dream world.
7. SUGAR
This is the musical version of the great film Some Like it Hot, wherein two struggling Chicago musicians witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and are forced to take it on the lam. Lambs they ain’t but gams they got, as our heroes join an all-girl band bound for Florida.
Following the formula and story of the film, our boys pile double entendres upon cheap jokes as they’re forced to swish around, evading the gangsters and the amorous attentions of Osgood the millionaire and Sugar the bombshell. Sugar was producer David Merrick’s “big show” for 1972. Gower Champion briskly staged the capers, and Jule Styne and Bob Merrill’s score kept Peter Brook’s script moving along. But despite some success, the musical suffers in comparison to the great movie version, the greatest drag comedy ever.
8. THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW
Most anyone who buys this book is aware of the audience shenanigans that accompany a showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a minor movie musical which gained legendary status thanks to midnight showings attended by diehard fans. The fans create their own show, hurling toast, rice, and their own dialogue at the screen and showing up in costume as their favorite characters.
But before there was the film, there was the stage musical. The Rocky Horror Show began as a fringe entertainment in England in 1973, making it to Broadway in 1975. The show is a mile-high-camp spoof of schlock horror movies and ’50s drive-in specials as innocent Janet and Brad spend a dark and stormy night in the mansion of Dr. Frank-N-Furter. Furter is a drag nightmare, in outrageous makeup and ladies’ lingerie, and he proceeds to turn the square couple on, over, and inside out.
Broadway saw Rocky Horror again in 2001, after icon status had been bestowed on the property, and the drag was as flamboyant as ever, yet seemed as comfortable as a pair of old shoes doing the “Time Warp.”
9. PAGEANT
Drag musicals reached a kind of apotheosis with this 1991 off-off-Broadway evening, conceived by its director, Robert Longbottom. The work of Frank Kelly, Albert Evans, and Bill Russell, Pageant was literally a beauty pageant, with the performers (named Miss Bible Belt, Miss Industrial Northwest, and the like) played by men. Hosted by an unctuous emcee, Pageant was more clever than funny, though it had mild success in regional theater.
10. THE BALLAD OF LITTLE JO
Based on a true story and a 1993 movie of the same name, Mike Reid and Sarah Schlesinger’s The Ballad of Little Jo had its premiere at Chicago’s vaunted Steppenwolf Theater Company in 2000. More than a drag show, Little Jo is an examination of the roles expected of men and women on the Western frontier in the wake of the Civil War.
Josephine Monaghan, ostracized by her family for bearing a child out of wedlock, lands in Silver City, Idaho, and dons men’s clothes, passing as a man to survive on her own. She falls in love with both her business partner and the man’s wife, enacting a sort of Twelfth Nighi-on-the-range. Judy Kuhn’s touching performance as Jo went a long way towards balancing out irregularities in the storytelling and the pleasant, but contrived, score.
Bigger Isn’t Better
10 “Small” Shows
Although the big, splashy musicals normally bring in the big crowds, and therefore the big bucks, smaller musicals have sprung up by necessity; not everyone can afford big-ticket musicals, and many prefer a more intimate style of musical theater. These ten small musicals have been seen all over, Broadway and beyond.
1. THE FANTASTICKS
The prototypical small musical, with just two instruments—piano and harp—supporting a cast of nine. Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt made their careers on this all-time long-running champion, which ran for over forty years at New York’s tiny Sullivan Street Playhouse. The turning of the seasons serves as a potent metaphor in many Jones and Schmidt shows, and in this 1960 classic, young love and friendship are examined against the inevitable changing climes. The Fantasticks is their shining example and a perfect small musical.
2. FALSETTOS
William Finn and James Lapine’s teaming of two musicals in Finn’s “Marvin” trilogy, March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland. These two shows (and their predecessor, In Trousers) tell the story of a married father’s struggles to come to terms with his latent homosexuality. The shifting definitions of “family” are examined in these shows; none has a cast larger than seven (one character even makes note of the “teeny tiny band” playing for them). March and Falsettoland were first paired for a full evening in 1992 by director-choreographer Graciela Daniele at Hartford Stage Company.
3. MARRY ME A LITTLE
This chamber musical was conceived by then-budding playwright Craig Lucas (Prelude to a Kiss, Longtime Companion) to fill a late-night slot off-off-Broadway back in 1981. Stephen Sondheim gave his blessing to the use of eighteen of his “trunk” songs, songs cut from other shows. The two-character, one-piano evening told the interesting tale of two lonely souls living in separate apartments, yet inhabiting the same stage space, articulating their hopes and dreams through Sondheim’s songs.
4. I DO! I DO!
The always-experimental Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt cast two of Broadway’s biggest stars, Robert Preston and Mary Martin, as the entire cast, a married couple, in their 1966 musical based on Jan de Hartog’s play The Fourposter. I Do! I Do! was an examination of a marriage in music, and Preston and Martin, despite having to carry the whole show, predictably filled the entire theater with their warmth and sheer star power.
5. AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’
Off-off-Broadway all the way to Tony Awards and a legendary run and reputation, all for a cabaret show about a stride piano player. 1977’s Ain’t Misbehavin’ successfully and ebulliently recreated the spirit and the music of the legendary Fats Waller, with a cast of just five strutting in high style, backed by a piano player (the great Luther Henderson at the show’s premiere) and a small jazz combo.
6. JOHN & JEN
Th
e two-performer, three-person-orchestra chamber show john & jen came to off-Broadway in 1995 by way of the venerable Goodspeed Opera House, birthplace of many shows, both large and small. But john & jen took a novel approach to its subject matter, the changing dynamics of love, families, and sacrifice, as one actress played jen to one actor playing her brother, john, and his son, also called john. Papa john is killed in Vietnam, and jen must connect to young john in order to bring their grief and understanding full circle.
7. BABY
An agreeable but somewhat banal 1983 musical about a potentially interesting subject. Baby concerns three couples (in their forties, thirties, and twenties) and their adventures in the baby game. As each couple tries to conceive, they must confront not only impending parenthood, but also the demands placed on their relationships with each other. The book, by Sybille Pearson, covered this territory better than Richard Maltby, Jr. and David Shire’s mediocre score.
8. THE LAST FIVE YEARS