Broadway's Most Wanted

by Tom Shea

  4. 1776 (1969)

  1776 was 1969’s big musical hit, and actor William Daniels’ performance as John Adams, simultaneously charming and frustrating, was the year’s finest musical performance. So fine, in fact, that he refused to play in the same league with his co-stars come Tony time.

  Since 1776 was a show with a huge male ensemble cast, no single performer was given star billing with his name above the show’s title. So when the Tony award nominations were announced, Daniels was listed in the Featured (supporting) category. Daniels objected, rightly stating that his was a lead performance, and requested that the committee remove his name from the Featured category. The Tony committee acquiesced, and the Featured Actor Tony went to Ron Holgate, also from 1776. Holgate had one show-stopping number and literally about half the stage time Daniels had. Daniels was not nominated in the Lead Actor category.

  5. STARLIGHT EXPRESS (1987)

  Andrew Lloyd Webber and Richard Stilgoe’s Starlight Express is a musical bedtime story: a tale about trains competing in a race, ultimately won by Rusty, the old steam engine, who embraces the Starlight Express, the God figure of the show.

  A decidedly subpar offering from Lloyd Webber, Starlight Express tells its rail tale with its actors, on skates, playing the trains. For Broadway, set designer John Napier created a staggering travelogue-of-America set, complete with a mammoth mechanized bridge. Tony voters were less than staggered, though, and nominated Napier’s clever Starlight costumes but not his set.

  On the night of the Awards, Napier indeed won for his costumes, and a minute later, he won for his brilliant set for Les Miserables. He made his thanks to his staff, and then he wondered aloud why his Starlight set wasn’t nominated. Seventeen people in the Mark Hellinger Theater applauded, then Napier stated he’d swap his Tony “to have been in the room,” backhanding the Nominating Committee. He then quickly added, “You know? Thanks,” then hit the road, leaving a stunned, silent audience to wonder what had happened. And … let’s go to commercial. (No hard feelings; Napier won again in 1995, for yet another massive, two-level Lloyd Webber set, Sunset Blvd.)

  6. VICTOR/VICTORIA (1996)

  When Blake Edwards and his wife, Julie Andrews, decided to bring their film musical, Victor/Victoria, to Broadway, the gossip immediately began. When rumors of creative trouble on the production started to surface, the gossip started again. And when the 1996 Tony nominations were announced, the gossip went into overdrive.

  Victor/Victoria, the story of a woman pretending to be a female impersonator, was a superb film musical, expertly weaving its storybook-like Parisian musical comedy with sex-farce machinations. Edwards reportedly had trouble successfully adapting his movie for the stage, and the Leslie Bricusse tunes augmenting the late Henry Mancini’s movie songs were not well integrated.

  Reviews, except those for Andrews, were bad, and hers was the only Tony nomination the show received. On May 8, 1996, she addressed the audience at the Marquis Theater, after her curtain call, to announce that she was refusing the nomination, preferring to “stand with the egregiously overlooked,” referring to the cast and authors. The Nominating Committee did not honor Andrews’ request, and Tony host Nathan Lane twitted her mercilessly on the awards broadcast.

  7. SENATOR JOE (1989)

  Producer Adela Holzer had a strange and not-too-successful track record on Broadway; her taste in projects always veered toward the cockeyed. Unfortunately, her business acumen tended to stray from the path as well. Her last Broadway stint was on Senator Joe.

  By all accounts, Senator Joe was going to be a routinely bad rock opera about everyone’s favorite Commie-hunter, Joe McCarthy. Mostly the work of frequent Holzer confederate Tom O’ Horgan, it began its preview period on January 5, 1989, and shuttered forever just two days later. Holzer, jailed shortly after for financial irregularities, had a track record of shady financial schemes, including a recent immigration scam. Actress Tovah Feldshuh, however, puts it all in perspective: “Adela Holzer,” she told online columnist Peter Filichia, “was very good to her actors.”

  8. SUBWAYS ARE FOR SLEEPING (1961)

  After Brooks Atkinson retired from the New York Times, people should have seen this one coming. Producer David Merrick, the “Abominable Showman” his ownself, played a publicity prank for his musical Subways Are for Sleeping that still gets a chuckle and a head shake today.

  Merrick found seven men whose names matched the names of the drama critics of the seven daily New York papers. He took them to dinner and the show, they all had a lovely time, and he quoted their “rave reviews” in an ad shortly after. The fact that Merrick printed their pictures next to the names should have tipped off the ad editors, but the ad inexplicably slipped through to the morning edition of the January 4 Herald Tribune. There is no more Subways Are for Sleeping. There is no more Herald Tribune. ’Nuff said.

  9. IT AIN’T NOTHIN’ BUT THE BLUES (1999)

  Another potential Tony Award brouhaha, which was actually more of a tempest in a teacup. The high-spirited (but, ultimately, rather toothless) blues revue, It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues, racked up a precious Best Musical Tony nomination in 1999, guaranteeing the show a performance spot on the TV broadcast. Right? Wrong. Cut to two hours of airtime by CBS, the Tony broadcast was running behind, and the number from Blues was axed. Following the ceremony, the myriad producers of the musical complained to the press, thereby guranteeing the show more publicity than it ever would have received if the show had been seen on the Tonys. As a consolation prize, CBS booked the show on “Late Night With David Letterman,” but Blues closed shortly after anyway.

  10. YOUR OWN THING (1468)

  Your Own Thing was a popular and critical hit off-Broadway during the 1967-68 season. By coincidence, it was also one of the worst years ever for Broadway musicals. When Your Own Thing won the Drama Critics Award, producer Zev Bufman lobbied to get Your Own Thing considered for Tony award eligibility, hoping to expand the horizons and blur the lines between Broadway and off-Broadway.

  Predictably, Broadway producers stamped, and hissed, and shouted Bufman down, preferring instead to cling to shows like the eventual winner, Hallelujah, Baby! (Remember it? Well, do you?) This argument is raised every generation or so when off-Broadway producers see a chance to increase the profile of their own shows by invoking the “lack of quality new shows on Broadway” rant.

  All Things Bright and Beautiful

  10 Musicals about the Animal Kingdom

  Musicals about animals are a risky proposition. Movies make animals walk and talk with ease, while on the stage, a certain stylization is called for. These ten shows took the plunge anyway.

  1. THE LION KING

  A Broadway stage version of Disney’s animated hit film “The Lion King” seemed like a slam dunk; still, few would have expected the finished product to be quite this successful. Tim Rice, Hans Zimmer, and Elton John’s movie score was agreeably padded for the stage, but the true star of the evening (and perhaps the decade) was director and costume designer Julie Taymor, who, in tandem with her fellow designers, conjured up image after unbelievable image of the animal kingdom. A true triumph of both bread and circuses, The Lion King looks to be one of Broadway’s evergreen titles.

  2. CATS

  T. S. Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats was set to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber as far back as 1977; did I hear someone say international phenomenon? A marketing bonanza from a musical of people playing kitties all evening? Well, director Trevor Nunn (who originally imagined the show being played by “five talented performers”) and his cohorts worked their typical ’80s Brit-magic. With John Napier’s spectacular set, transforming the theater into a human-scaled cat’s junkyard, and ingenious props and costumes to support Eliot’s irresistible verses and Lloyd Webber’s superbly theatrical music, Cats became a leviathan, the longest-running musical in both London and Broadway history.

  3. MOBY DICK

  Another London smash, Moby Dick was a radical
reimagining of Melville’s classic tale. While retaining the story of the obsessed Captain Ahab and the Pequod’s quest for the great white whale proper, the show’s authors framed it with a girls’ school “performance” of Moby Dick for Parents’ Weekend. Producer Cameron Mackintosh picked up the small-scale pop-rock show and took it to a prize-winning run in the West End, the production emphasizing creative staging and a youthful cast. The show has had little success in the States, offering a delicious irony: A musicalization of one of the great American novels proved a hit in England but a flop in The United States.

  4. THE YEARLING

  Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ great novel of innocence lost was adapted for the stage in 1965, but lasted only three performances. To its credit, the yearling fawn in question was “played” by a real deer onstage, rather than an actor in a deer suit. The show, from a very bleak source to begin with, did not shy away from its depressing underpinnings and was not a success, but the score, by Michael Leonard and Herbert Martin, has its supporters.

  5. HONK!

  This version of Hans Christian Andersen’s “Ugly Duckling” was originally produced regionally in England, and has found a life in regional productions around the United States as well. Once again, the animals are given human qualities, the bad Cat being a slick hustler, Grace the beautiful duck being a prissy pageantqueen type. But the spin put on Andersen’s tale is quite funny and charming (Mother Ida, fearing her Ugly is really a turkey and looking him in the eye and saying “Butterball”), and the score by George Stiles and Anthony Drew works for both child and adults.

  6. EVERYTHING’S DUCKY

  The same tale again, this time adapted by Americans Henry Krieger, Bill Russell, and Jeffrey Hatcher, and the ugly duckling in question is a girl, Serena. She’s also adopted, it turns out, and there’s no unconditional love forthcoming from her mama at all. Unlike Honk!, this version is not a family-friendly version of the story, as the evil coyotes run a strip club, and Serena becomes a bitchy supermodel. She believes in herself, however, and that’s the upshot of this tongue-in-cheek, adult version of the classic tale.

  7. SEUSSICAL, THE MUSICAL

  Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty’s ultimately unsatisfying musical setting of stories by the late, great Dr. Seuss opened in 2000, after a year of development. The Cat in the Hat (played on Broadway by the tooedgy David Shiner) was to unify the evening, but the tales of Horton the Elephant, lazy Mayzie and her egg, the Whos, and many, many others were too dissimilar to unify into a musical. The songs, while professional, didn’t possess the necessary Seussian sense of wonder, and the Cat was a strange choice to guide the evening—iconic, yes, but a bad kitty nonetheless. The show has been radically rethought and redesigned for its touring production.

  8. A YEAR WITH FROG AND TOAD

  The popular series of children’s books by Arnold Lobel were musicalized in 2002 by the Reale brothers, Willie and Robert, in Minneapolis, then off-Broadway. The sweetness of the Lobel books transferred well to the stage, and the musical transferred to Broadway in the spring of 2003, where it was out of place among the bigger, brassier shows. Jay Goede and Mark Linn-Baker were the lighthearted Frog and the phlegmatic Toad. Set designer Adrianne Lobel is the daughter of author Arnold.

  9. THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS

  Kenneth Grahame’s immortal children’s novel about Mr. Toad and the denizens of the Wild Woods has been musicalized many times, both for stage and film. The Broadway version played only four performances in 1985, yet was nominated for book and score Tonys due to weak competition. This version, the work of William Perry, Roger McGough, and Jane Iredale, made a mistake familiar to many “family” musicals—namely, ignoring subtextual elements intended for adult readers to interpret for their children. This Wind is most notable for its stellar cast of starts-to-be, including Tony winner Scott Waara, Nora Mae Lyng, David Carroll, and a young Nathan Lane as Toad.

  10. SHINBONE ALLEY

  New York Sun columnist Don Marquis wrote a series of columns about archy the cockroach, and his cat friend mehitabel, starting in 1916. In 1957, archy (lower case because he typed his poems but couldn’t operate the shift key) and mehitabel and their animal friends were immortalized on Broadway in Shinbone Alley. Broadway’s first racially integrated cast featured the amazing Eartha Kitt as the indomitable mehitabel, and the late Eddie Bracken as her steadfast archy. Mel Brooks, Joe Darion, and George Kleinsinger adapted Marquis’ verse for the stage as well as for concert presentation and an animated film.

  Let’s Do It

  10 Musicals about S-E-X

  Here, for your lascivious, exhibitionist pleasure, are ten musicals which address the oldest pleasure there is. Enjoy, sickos.

  1. A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC

  This magnificent musical adaptation of Ingmar Bergmann’s film Smiles of a Summer Night concerns a legendary actress/courtesan, Desirée Armfeldt, and the amorous encounters of her former lover, his family, and another middle-aged couple on a Swedish country estate. All and sundry, guests and servants, pair off under the watchful summer night, which smiles on the young, the old, and the foolish. Stephen Sondheim, in peak form, wrote the score almost completely in variants of waltz time, including the classic nocturne “Send in the Clowns.” Nineteen-seventy-two’s Tony winner is universally regarded as a tasteful classic.

  2. OUT OF THIS WORLD

  Cole Porter, who for so long masked his risqué lyrics due to censorship battles, finally had a chance to write about the great game in this 1950 musical. Unfortunately, while the score was great, and the sets were fantastic, the book was not up to the level of either.

  Out of This World is a musical version of the Amphytrion saga, in which Jupiter disguises himself as a mortal general and leaves Olympus, in order to sleep with the general’s wife. The score is typically excellent, but the book, which was written by Reginald Lawrence and Dwight Taylor, suffered in comparison to Porter’s great score (which still got snipped by Boston bluenoses), and the show lasted only 157 performances.

  3. THE BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE IN TEXAS

  This show, despite its title, is actually less about sex than it is about tradition and the media. A tall Texas tale based on the real-life Chicken Ranch (where clients could barter for favors), under the auspices of Madam Mona and the good-natured, pragmatic local sheriff, the show originally inspired some controversy because of that title.

  But in spite of the obvious possibilities for vulgarity, Whorehouse told its story with good taste, thanks mainly to a no-nonsense book by Larry L. King and Peter Masterson, and the superb work of director-choreographer-Texan Tommy Tune, only veering into Cartoonland when examining the motives of a holier-than-thou TV host intent on shutting down the beloved Ranch.

  4. NINE

  Another Tommy Tune stylistic exercise, 1981’s Best Musical Tony winner is an erotic adaptation of Fellini’s classic film 8½ (Otto e Mezzo). Like Fellini’s film, it concerns a selfish, blocked film director in crisis with the women in his life: wife, mistress, protegeé, boss, etc. He is helped by his younger self to come to grips with his immaturity and to finally devote himself to one woman.

  Also similarly to Fellini, the story was told mainly in black and white, Tune’s fantastic staging set against Lawrence Miller’s stark, white-tiled spa set and glorious black costumes by William Ivey Long. A very clever score by Maury Yeston was the capper to this sexy, stylish musical.

  5. SCANDAL

  Broadway in the mid-1980s was a cold, cold place for musicals, and one reason was because Michael Bennett, the best director and choreographer of his generation, was largely dormant. Trade publications buzzed with rumors of Bennett’s new musical, Scandal Unfortunately, Bennett’s great musical was not to be.

  Scandal was written by pop songwriter Jimmy Webb and television writer Treva Silverman. The story of a married woman’s search for self through sexual discovery, Scandal was assumed to have been Bennett’s masterpiece, but a capricious (and, unfortunately, drug-troubled) Bennett prematurely
pulled the plug on Scandal, for reasons which remain largely unknown. Many insiders speculate that Bennett’s encroaching illness, which, of course, turned out to be AIDS, was the main reason. But all who witnessed Bennett’s preproduction work on Scandal weep for what might have been.

  6. OH! CALCUTTA!

  Chances are if you said “sex musical” to someone on the street, they’d either keep walking, or they’d answer Oh! Calcutta! And so it is that Oh! Calcutta! (whose title is a bastardization of the French for “nice ass, honey”) became part of the popular lexicon by being America’s best-known nudie musical. The show, a fairly insubstantial trifle, was a record long-running song-sketch-dance revue, all about sex, sex, and more sex. Leering doctor-and-nurse sketches, trippy expressionistic dances, and dirty songs abounded, all kept afloat by tourist money. Choreographer Margo Sappington and writer and critic Kenneth Tynan were the driving forces behind Oh! Calcutta!, which, despite its long, long run, was always treated like Broadway’s red-headed stepchild.