Broadway's Most Wanted

by Tom Shea

  Starting in 1971, with Frank Merriwell, Walter Bobbie was a reliable musical performer who created the role of Roger in the smash Grease, as well as Nicely-Nicely Johnson in the 1992 revival of Guys and Dolls. In 1994, he conceived and directed the Rodgers and Hammerstein revue A Grand Night for Singing, which led to his helming the long-running revival of Chicago. Most recently, in 1999, Bobbie co-adapted, with Dean Pitchford, and directed the movie musical Footloose for Broadway.

  I Saw Stars

  Recent TV Shows with Tony Winners and Nominees

  Once, a Broadway star would take New York by storm, then they’d be whisked away to Hollywood and the movies. Now, the quick riches and notoriety of TV are often the big lure. Some good, some bad below.

  1. ENCORE! ENCORE!

  Funnyman Nathan Lane was given his shot at sitcom stardom with this 1998 NBC offering, about an opera singer who loses his voice, then returns home to his family’s Napa Valley wine orchards to begin his life anew. Most pegged this one as a winner. Then the cameras started rolling.

  Troubled from the start, Encore! Encore! hit the airwaves in the fall of 1998 with very little network support and unwisely featured Lane playing Frasier-type high comedy instead of his trademark comic desperation. It was one of the high-profile disasters of the season. Lane got a second chance with a new sitcom about a gay actor who runs for Congress, which was also unsuccessful.

  2. KRISTIN

  Pint-sized tornado Kristin Chenoweth made a big hit on Broadway in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, for which she won a 1999 Tony. Her squeaky-voiced portrayal of Sally Brown eventually led her fortunes to NBC, who spent a year and a half putting Kristen on the air.

  The dreadful summer 2001 replacement show featured Chenoweth as Kristin Yancey, typical plucky aide to your typical idiotic corporate blowhole. The squeaky voice was still there, but, like everything in this stupid sitcom turkey, was misguided. It worked on Broadway because she played a four-year-old, fellas.

  3. THE MARTIN SHORT SHOW

  After his Tony-winning stint in 1998’s Little Me, the comic genius Martin Short waded into the risky waters of the TV talk show. Perhaps Short was hoping to snag some of Rosie O’Donnell’s Broadway-happy audience, but his eponymous show went the way of approximately 99.95 percent of all talk shows.

  Short’s chameleonesque aptitude for creating sketch characters gave the show its one saving grace: the grotesquely comic Hollywood columnist Jiminy Glick, who now has his own show on Comedy Central (Primetime Glick). As of this writing, Short is knocking ’em dead in Los Angeles in The Producers.

  4. SEINFELD

  One of the most popular sitcoms of all time, Seinfeld was built around observational stand-up comic Jerry Seinfeld, but boasted an eclectic supporting cast. Julia Louis-Dreyfus (galpal Elaine) hailed from Chicago’s Second City school of improv comedy, Michael Richards (Kramer) was a Los Angeles-based sketch comedy and commercials guy, and Jason Alexander (pathetic George) was a New York musical theater guy.

  Alexander won his Tony in 1989 for Jerome Robbins’ Broadway (he was also in the legendary flop Merrily We Roll Along in 1981; no Tony), then headed west and hooked up with the Seinfeld crew and the rest is history. And lots of money. He starred with the aforementioned Martin Short in The Producers in La-La Land.

  5. HACK

  Two-time Tony winner Donna Murphy (Passion, The King and I) is gorgeous, funny, and a phenomenal singer and song stylist. So it’s no surprise to anybody that she’s been badly used by the suits in Hollywood.

  Following her triumph as Fosca in Stephen Sondheim’s Passion in 1994, she guested as Francesca Cross on the thriller Murder One on ABC starting in 1995. Many uninspiring (and, naturally, non-musical) movies followed, broken up by another Tony for The King and I in 1996, until the sitcom misfire What About Joan in 2001. (At least she got to sing in one episode, and she ripped it up.) She now plays Heather Olshansky on CBS’s wildly implausible cop-turned-cabbie series Hack.

  6. MISTER STERLING

  An obvious attempt to cash in on the “DC cred” of The West Wing, the 2002-2003 NBC series Mister Sterling gave the viewer a dashing young senator who speaks his mind and plays it his way, dammit. Lucky for those who watch, it also gives the viewer Audra McDonald as his chief of staff, Jackie Brock.

  McDonald is a fiery performer with three Tony Awards to her name, and a growing reputation as a cabaret performer and recording artist. The gig on the cancelled Mister Sterling was an attempt for this talented lady to reach the mass audience she deserves.

  7. L.A. FIREFIGHTERS

  Gee, what do you suppose this one was about? A blatant attempt to do for firemen what ER did for doctors and Baywatch did for lifeguards, L.A. Firefighters is looked back upon with absolutely no fondness from anyone. It’s particularly unfortunate for musical fans because it cost New York one of its prime hunks, Jarrod Emick.

  Emick, a handsome, stocky athletic leading man, won a Tony at age age 25 for his Joe Hardy in the 1994 Damn Yankees revival. Unfortunately, his agents whispered in his ear, and two years later, he was cashing Fox Television’s checks in the aforementioned L.A. Firefighters. Three more bad TV series followed before Emick made it back to New York, as an ideal Brad Majors in The Rocky Horror Show. He’s slated to play the lover of Peter Allen (Hugh Jackman) in The Boy From Oz in late 2003.

  8. NIKKI

  The pneumatic (and actually talented) beauty Nikki Cox was given her own sitcom on the WB network in 2000. The surprisingly-titled Nikki was a standard-issue dumb sitcom with one interesting twist: Nikki, our heroine, was a Las Vegas nightclub dancer, and we actually saw at least one production number each episode.

  The dancer stuff was the only watchable part of the show, and it was made bearable by the presence of the marvelous Susan Egan as Nikki’s randy friend and fellow showgirl, Mary. Egan, a Broadway pro from her days in Beauty and the Beast (Tony nomination) and Triumph of Love (as well as the superb studio recording of Drat! The Cat!), then Cabaret, at least provided some spark to the flop-sweat proceedings. Egan has a lucrative career as a voice-over artist for Japanese animé as well.

  9. FAME

  Debbie Allen made a blazing impression on Broadway in the 1980 revival of West Side Story, winning a Tony nomination in the process. Alan Parker’s semi-documentary Fame followed, in which she played a pitiless dance teacher at the New York High School for the Performing Arts. She played the same role, chomping scenery all the way, in the TV version of the movie as well.

  Following that was a Tony nomination for the 1986 revival of Sweet Charity. The reality TV craze brought Allen and Fame back, this time as a bald-faced “talent show” attempt to clone the success of American Idol. Allen rides herd on her young charges and pumps them up, shamelessly playing both Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul.

  10. DEAD LIKE ME

  A Tony winner for his thrilling Ché in Evita, Broadway favorite Mandy Patinkin has gotten a reputation in recent years as something of an oddity as a performer; indeed, his Dress Casual concerts place his singularly committed performances front and center. What’s often lost is how truly remarkable an actor he is when he’s not the whole damn show.

  Following a hilarious, Emmy-nominated cameo as himself on The Larry Sanders Show, Patinkin played Dr. Jeffrey Geiger (and won an Emmy) on the CBS medical drama Chicago Hope. He now plays Rube, the Grim Reaper—or, more specifically, the father figure to a group of Reapers, soul collectors—on Showtime’s offbeat drama Dead Like Me.

  All We’ll Do IS Just Dance

  10 Dance Musicals

  Broadway musicals usually celebrate the union of spoken word, song, and dance. But in some shows the book and songs go out the window, letting the audience feast primarily on the hoofing. Here are ten shows that gotta dance.

  1. DANCIN’

  Bob Fosse eliminated both book and score altogether in this 1978 tribute to the dancers he so dearly loved. Dancin’ was literally wall-to-wall choreography, saluting ballet, tap, modern dance, jazz dance, and g
ood old Broadway-style hoofing, set to music by artists as diverse as J.S. Bach, Benny Goodman, and Cat Stevens.

  2. CONTACT

  Director-choreographer Susan Stroman and author John Weidman collaborated on this evening of three dance pieces off-Broadway in 1999. Performed to prerecorded tracks and featuring no live or original music, Contact nevertheless won the Tony Award for Best Musical when it moved to Broadway in 2000. The show was at its best in the third piece, “Contact,” which told the tale of a suicidal executive who longs to connect, through dance, with the elusive Girl in the Yellow Dress he sees at a nightclub. The need for communication, for contact, both physical and spiritual, as expressed through dance, is at the heart of this superbly executed dance show.

  3. TANGO ARGETINO

  The creative and producing team of Claudio Segovia and Hector Orezzoli brought Tango Argentino to Broadway in 1985, after playing a hit engagement in Paris. Another plotless dance evening, it nevertheless caused a minor stir due to the sheer physicality and sexiness of the tango dancing on display. Segovia and Orezzoli collaborated on another evening of Hispanic dance, Flamenco Pura, and a hit blues revue, Black and Blue, in 1989, which won them a Tony for costume design. Choreographer Luis Bravo brought the tango back to Broadway in 1997 with his own evening of Argentine music and dance, Forever Tango, and the original show returned to Broadway in 1999.

  4. SWAN LAKE

  Tyro choreographer Matthew Bourne created his Swan Lake in London in 1995, the centenary year of the standard Petipa-Ivanov version of Tchaikovsky’s classic ballet. Bourne’s choreographic conception of the tale of alienation and loneliness featured a black-leather swan, goofy royals, and a gay encounter in a weakling prince’s bedroom. The male corps of bare-chested swans created the biggest stir, but despite superb choreography, design, and dancing, most Broadway enthusiasts wondered why it was being treated as a Broadway musical at all. Bourne’s concept, radical as it was, didn’t disguise the fact that this Swan Lake was still a ballet.

  5. JEROME ROBBINS’ BROADWAY

  A massive tribute evening to the innovative director-choreographer Jerome Robbins, the 1989 show was directed by Robbins with scenes from virtually all his major work for Broadway, from 1943’s On the Town to Funny Girl in 1964, with many stops in between.

  Robbins rehearsed his huge company for the small epoch of nine weeks, during which time he was occasionally seen walking down the street wearing a T-shirt that read, “It’s going fine, thank you.” All the great moments were included: West Side Story’s exquisite suite of ballets, the joyful peasant dances from Fiddler on the Roof, the musical-comedy magic of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and Gypsy, and many others, all woven together as a fitting tribute to one of the architects of the Broadway musical edifice.

  6. BRING IN ’DA NOISE, BRING IN ’DA FUNK

  Perhaps the most innovative musical of the 1990s, 1995’s Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk was a riotous celebration of the black experience in America, using hip-hop beats, spoken word (with slam poetry texts by Reg E. Gaines), and much music and dance. And what dance it was.

  Noise/Funk was, first and foremost, a tap show, the dancing illustrating the many chapters of African-American life. A number on a slave ship, with dancers clinking chains and neck irons stood out, as did the piece de resistance, “Taxi,” a pulsating tap dance about four young black men (a hip-hopper, student, businessman, and a man in uniform) trying to hail a cab. Over and over we hear the wheels screech away, and the men dance out their frustration. With Noise/Funk, Tony-winning choreographer and lead dancer Savion Glover cemented his reputation as the leading tap artist of his generation.

  7. SONG AND DANCE

  A fairly unique concept: Act One, song; Act Two, Dance. Originally titled Tell Me On a Sunday, Andrew Lloyd Webber set a two-act tale to variations on Paganini’s A minor Caprice and wrote the first act as a song cycle for a young Englishwoman named Emma, who falls in and out of love with a guy called Joe. (We see and hear only Emma.) Act Two sets an entire ensemble dancing, acting out Joe’s adventures in courtship, leading him finally to his Emma.

  Despite the pedigree of Lloyd Webber and lyricist Richard Maltby, Jr. and the choreographic chops of ballet master Peter Martins, Song and Dance never really added up to anything other than a novelty concoction for two performers, Emma in Act One and Joe in Act Two.

  8. RIVERDANCE

  What began as a brief dance interlude at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest has become an unparalleled worldwide dance phenomenon. Michael Flatley and Bill Whelan’s space-filler has exploded into a gargantuan evening of song and dance and a stirring tribute to the power of Celtic myth.

  Riverdance, as conceived by composer/lyricist Whelan and principal dancer and choreographer Flatley, became an immediate sensation in Dublin, soon playing to capacity crowds in London and eventually all over the world. The show had played limited engagements in New York before, but finally hit Broadway in 2000, minus Flatley, who left the show prior to its London opening due to creative differences.

  9. MOVIN’ OUT

  Twenty-four Billy Joel songs from several of his hit albums were cobbled together in an attempt to create a narrative about friendships over time. A large corps of dancers was put through its paces dancing not to prerecorded Joel tracks, but by a pit band featuring a Billy Joel sound-alike, Michael Cavanaugh.

  Director-choreographer Twyla Tharp unfortunately shaped the material literally (Sergeant O’ Leary walking the beat, Brenda & Eddie still going steady, etc.), and without an original score, the weak material overshadowed the strength of the dancing. The show opened strongly, however, in October 2002.

  10. FOSSE

  1999 saw this snappy revue come to Broadway as one of the last gasps of Canadian production company Livent. Fosse was a collection of well-executed numbers originally created by the late, great Bob Fosse, focusing on all the media in which he worked—film, television, nightclubs, and, of course, Broadway. As a retrospective, it was splendid, but as a new musical, it was less well regarded (and often compared with Dancin’), and, like Contact, was a dance show which won a Best Musical Tony in an otherwise weak year.

  Hard to Be a Diva

  10 Outrageous Offstage Moments

  They say there’s a light for every broken heart on Broadway. What they don’t tell you is there’s a “diva fit” for every broken light on Broadway. Here are ten outrageous moments of offstage antics, weirdness, and just plain diva-hood.

  1. RED, HOT AND BLUE (1936)

  Red, Hot and Blue was a deliberate attempt to cash in on the success of Anything Goes: same librettists (Lindsay and Crouse), same composer-lyricist (Cole Porter), and same leading lady (Ethel Merman). New to this production: Bob Hope, Jimmy Durante, and a laughably egomaniacal billing war.

  Durante and Hope came aboard after William Gaxton walked, allegedly after hearing Merman talk about how huge her part was compared to everybody else’s. Then the egos really took over. Durante and Merman’s people apparently thought each deserved top billing, and no compromise could be reached to suit the stars. The end result still gets a chuckle from the show freak: Cross-billing, Durante’s name running from, say, eleven o’clock to five, and Merman’s running from seven to one. (Hope’s name ran inoffensively under both.) Not only does one think, “Wow, trained egos!” but also, “Hey, looks like the Scottish flag!”

  2. MISS SAIGON (1991)

  The pop-opera spectacle Miss Saigon was a monster hit in London, but as soon as producer Cameron Mackintosh announced his plans to bring the show, a Vietnam-era Madama Butterfly, to Broadway, chaos erupted.

  Asian American playwright David Henry Hwang served notice with Equity, the actor’s union, that he and a coalition of theater people objected to Mackintosh’s intention of bringing Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce over from London to reprise his role of the Engineer, a Eurasian pimp. Hwang specifically objected to a pure European playing this Asian role with prosthetic eyelids when an Asian American actor c
ould have played the role naturally.

  As the press got wind of the controversy, Mackintosh countered by threatening to scrap the entire production, saying it was his to cast as he saw fit, and that Pryce (and Filipino actress Lea Salonga, also coming over from London) would open the show—or no one would.

  Actor’s Equity and Asian labor leaders chastised Hwang for his position, saying he was denying scores of Asian performers future employment opportunities, Ultimately, Hwang dropped his grievances, Pryce opened the role on Broadway (and won a Tony), and Mackintosh made good on his promise to hire Asian American performers to replace Pryce in the role of The Engineer.

  3. NINE (1982)

  The original Broadway production of Nine was a blissful exercise in many different musical theater styles. One of the highlights of the show was Anita Morris’s performance as Carla, the larger-than-life mistress of the musical’s lead, Guido (Raul Julia). Clad in a see-through black jumpsuit, she seduces Guido over the phone in the fabulous “A Call From The Vatican.” Hello, Tony Awards!

  Except for the inevitable brouhaha. CBS-TV executives pulled the plug on Morris performing her number at the last moment, saying the idea of a grown woman seducing a grown man was too adult for broadcast. So, the number they chose to broadcast instead was “Ti Voglio Bene (Be Italian),” a memory number with Young Guido and his chums being taught the ways of amore by the local whore, Saraghina (Kathi Moss). So … hot redhead on the phone? Sorry, no. Colorful whore with a group of young boys? Why, sure! “A vast wasteland,” indeed.