Broadway's Most Wanted

by Tom Shea

  8. A MASKED BALL (THE ADVENTURE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES’ SMARTER BROTHER)

  Film star Gene Wilder made his directorial debut with The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother, a film that, with its obvious period trappings, cheerful vulgarity, and primitive craftsmanship, seems directly influenced by that ’70’s camp-film auteur, Wilder’s good friend and colleague Mel Brooks.

  Basically the title says it all, as the great detective hands one off to his brother, Sigerson Holmes (Wilder), to solve. It involves stolen letters and a performance of the opera A Masked Ball, directed by and starring the evil Gambetti (Dom DeLuise), in league with Professor Moriarity (Leo McKern). It is at this opening-night performance that Sigerson Holmes (with an assist from his dumber brother) solves the case and saves the day and the Empire.

  The “Masked Ball” in the movie bears no relation to Verdi’s comic masterpiece; rather, it sounds like Le Nozze di Figaro plus Monty Python divided by P.D.Q. Bach. Madeline Kahn is hilarious as a diva in danger, singing lines like “Stop that, you’re such a tickle-tease/You know I’m super-passionate.”

  9. RED, WHITE, AND BLAINE! (WAITING FOR GUFFMAN)

  Christopher Guest’s documentary-style parody of community theater rates high on the showbiz “in-joke-o-meter” for its funny, often brutal takeoff on community theater types presenting a pageant in their hometown of Blaine, Missouri (the “Stool Capital of the World”).

  The good people of Blaine are put through their paces by the indefatigable Corky St. Clair, a failed drama queen with gumption enough for two Marjorie Main movies. His show, Red, White, and Blaine!, sounds like pretty much any amateur musical you’d care to name, with one ballad, “A Penny For Your Thoughts,” that could stand outside a parody film like this. The condescending tone of much of the movie is made palatable by the gold-standard cast that Guest assembled: Eugene Levy, Fred Willard, Catherine O’Hara, and Parker Posey as four of the stalwarts, with cameos by Paul Benedict, David Cross, and Paul Dooley adding to the fun.

  10. JEEPERS CREEPERS SEMI-STAR (MR. SHOW)

  Television’s last great sketch-comedy show was the late, lamented Mr. Show from HBO, and one reason for the show’s greatness was the fearlessness of their parodies. The first season gave audiences “Joke, the Musical,” a very funny community-therater-level musicalization of the joke about the traveling salesman and the three holes in the barn wall. Jeepers Creepers Semi-Star earns them the nod here, though.

  As you could probably guess, it’s a parody of Jesus Christ Superstar, and an almost spot-on parody at that. It’s a scrupulously faithful homage to Norman Jewison’s film version of Superstar, with the “troupe” piling out of a school bus and dancing in the desert somewhere, as Mr. and Mrs. Creepers sing ersatz Rice-Lloyd Webber about their apathetic, not-quite-perfect son Jeepers.

  Historical news Is Being Made

  10 Innovative Musicals

  The musical theater is an expanding, ever-changing art form, and its progress through the decades is fun to chart. These ten musicals gave us something new.

  1. SHOW BOAT (1927)

  The granddaddy of them all, the first true musical play, Show Boat, adapted from Edna Ferber’s novel, was the first Broadway musical entertainment to combine the musical lushness and grandiose trappings of oldschool operetta with new, uncompromising storytelling techniques—the playlet The Parson’s Bride on the boat, for instance, underscoring the love and family relationships being shaped at the same time in real life.

  Jerome Kern’s music and Oscar Hammerstein’s book and lyrics are legendary now, but how amazing it must have been to see, as the curtain rose, colored performers, not happy blackfaced minstrels but dock-workers bent over their hay bales, singing “Niggers all work on de Missisippi,/Niggers all work while de white folks play.” An uncompromising look at race, miscegenation, and even gambling, Show Boat presented its themes and characters with astounding freshness.

  2. ALLEGRO (1947)

  Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, the vanguard of musical storytelling, gave us Allegro in 1947, and in doing so, gave us the first true “concept musical”—a show about how it was about, rather than what it was about. A bare stage, with props and scenery rolled on and off as needed, with even a Greek chorus to tell the tale.

  But what tale is being told? Is it just the tale of small-town doctor Joe, who moves away from the tiny hamlet that reared him, to the big city where he flourishes financially but dries up spiritually? Not exactly. Rodgers, Hammerstein, and director/choreographer Agnes de Mille played not only with music, lyrics, and dance, but also with time and space. For the first time, characters were seen inhabiting space they couldn’t have possibly have existed in, either as real characters or dream figures. The hero’s long-dead mother appears on stage to guide him through the play’s finale, and a Greek chorus appears in the hospital delivery room to announce his birth. Allegro is perhaps not up to par with other R & H masterpieces, but it’s a most valuable show in the evolution of the form.

  3. NO STRINGS (1962)

  Following the death of his longtime collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein, Richard Rodgers chose to write his own lyrics for his next show, No Strings, in 1962. No strings, indeed: The pit band had no stringed instruments and often no pit. Director Joe Layton’s concept involved many of the musicians wandering into the action, which was deliberately stylized and artificially staged, often on a bare stage with lights clearly visible and aimed by hand for effect, with ensemble members forming tableaux to comment on foreground action.

  The plot, concerning the relationship between a black fashion model and a white American writer bumming around Paris, also echoes the title: Theirs is a romance with no strings attached or so each would like to think. This interracial love relationship was considerably risky for 1962 but skillfully put forth with little fanfare. It helps if she’s a world-class fashion model played by Diahann Carroll.

  4. COMPANY (1970)

  “New York City—NOW.” Those words, place and time, set the tone perfectly for Company, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s landmark musical meditation on marriage, friendship, and commitment. Furth’s ideas for several one-act plays were assembled by director Harold Prince into a plotless musical, with a score by Sondheim, that moved, looked, and sounded like no musical ever had. Furth’s script places the action in scrambled time and place, with the whole play really taking place in a split second, in a kind of theatrical limbo.

  Choreographer Michael Bennett made the company of fourteen actors move by using their personal strengths (like watching the New Rochelle PTA, as some have observed) to real dramatic effect. Prince put them through their paces on Boris Aronson’s remarkable abstract, steel-and-glass set, complete with working elevators, often isolating the players in stage spaces as if each couple were alone together in the big city. Sondheim’s score was rightly hailed as a blistering examination of nerves and neuroses, pulsating to the busy-signal, traffic-jam rhythms of the city, with everyone proclaiming their fidelity to their friend Robert, their “Bobby Baby, Bobby Bubi,” as if their very survival depended on him.

  5. PAL JOEY (1940)

  John O’ Hara’s New Yorker series of letters from his “pal Joey” served as the inspiration for Rodgers and Hart’s classic 1940 musical, the first musical with a rat for a hero. In fact, just about everyone in this spiked gimlet of a show is pretty rotten. Up and down the social scale, the lives examined are all unfulfilled, and the unblinking, straightforward way these lives are examined was bracingly new to the musical theater.

  Our pal Joey is a charismatic louse with a little bit of song-and-dance talent; his goal in life is to own his own nightclub (“Chez Joey”—that’s classy) in Chicago. On his way up, he meets a sweet young kid of whom he takes advantage, and a rich older broad who takes advantage of him (who both agree in song that he’s no damn good). Never had characters sounded and acted quite as they do in Pal Joey, neither sentimental nor completely evil either. Chicago’s seedy underbelly was deft
ly examined by Rodgers and Hart (and by no-nonsense director George Abbott), and critics, even if they found the show distasteful, got the message: Musical theater was growing up.

  6. LOVE LIFE (1948)

  The prodigiously gifted composer Kurt Weill seemed to make musical theater history as he went along, from his work with Bertolt Brecht in their native Germany culminating in class-conscious masterpieces like The Threepenny Opera, to his work in his adopted United States, where he created political zeitopers like Knickerbocker Holiday and Johnny Johnson. Love Life, his 1948 collaboration with the great Alan Jay Lerner, was another step forward in the life of the American musical.

  Love Life told the story of the American family, examining love, marriage, children, economics, and the social structure. The Coopers, a nuclear family, are seen through 150-plus years of Americana, yet they don’t age. Interspersed with scenes from each time period are intercalary “vaudeville” numbers which provide commentary on the book scenes and give them depth, such as when the harried wife and mother is sawed in two by a magician, or in Michael Kidd’s the-title-says-it-all ballet, “Punch and Judy Get a Divorce.”

  7. SHUFFLE ALONG (1921)

  The legendary songwriting team of Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle reached their peak in 1921 with Shuffle Along, often credited as the first black musical. It was truly the first musical written, directed, and performed by blacks, but its significance reaches farther than that. Shuffle Along can honestly share the credit for launching an entire cultural movement.

  Blake and Sissle met Flournoy Miller and Aubrey Lyles at a benefit for the NAACP in 1920. The four decided to create their own musical comedy, and the result was Shuffle Along, which broke many barriers. By showing the performers, and the characters they played, as real human beings (real in a musical-comedy sense, anyway), instead of servile clowns or objects of cartoonish lust, and by making a hit show while doing so, Shuffle Along was a touchstone for the advancement of African American art and culture. The Harlem Renaissance, that glorious era of creativity, began at the same time that Shuffle Along toured America. Producer Florenz Ziegfeld also hired many of the Negro performers to teach dance steps to his chorus girls, to lend them an air of authenticity.

  The show itself is best described, as pianist Dick Hyman has said, as a “musical melange.” Many song styles are present—the hit “Love Will Find a Way” hinting at Jerome Kern, as well as the two-step classic “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” which was actually written as a waltz!

  8. A CHROUS LINE (1975)

  A Chorus Line is the show that gave the anonymous dancers of the ensemble a forum to be heard, and the way director-choreographer Michael Bennett conceived and executed the show is the stuff of theatrical legend. A Chorus Line stands as the apotheosis of the showbiz musical, a show so tightly coordinated that its elements are almost diminished by examining them separately.

  Michael Bennett loved dancers, and in now-legendary taped bull sessions, his dancers opened their souls to him and to each other. Whose idea it was to take these confessional tapes and fashion a musical from them is much debated, but Bennett had the clout, and the Public Theater’s Joseph Papp had the checks, to allow Bennett to “workshop” his budding dance musical away from prying eyes. Co-librettists James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante formed much of A Chorus Line’s confessional nature out of actual monologues from the tapes (including Dante’s own drag-queen speech, given to the character Paul). The score, by Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban, is a superb amalgam of showbiz cliches and pure emotion.

  But the true hero of the creation of A Chorus Line is Michael Bennett. Bennett, the great auteur of seventies musicals who learned at the feet of the seventies’ other genius director, Harold Prince, so precisely focused the content of A Chorus Line in workshop and rehearsal that its theme—the idea of an audience learning something about dancers as they auditioned for a Broadway show—was immediately clear to all who saw it. Not only a triumph of the “workshop” system and a masterpiece of collaboration, A Chorus Line also finally serves as a potent metaphor for anyone who has ever “put themselves on the line”—whether it be at work, in love, or with family.

  9. OKLAHOMA! (1943)

  If their careers were a graph, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II would inevitably have met with the monolithic Oklahoma! Think about it—the heretofore witty, sophisiticated tunesmith Rodgers, famous for Pal Joey and “Manhattan,” writing with Oscar Hammerstein II, he of the frou-frou trappings of Show Boat and The Desert Song (or, as one wag labeled their collaboration, “smart meets heart”). We’ll see.

  But wait. They’re writing a western musical? With no cowboy ballads? No big hoedowns? No dancing girlies? Their musical play, as their producers, the Theater Guild, called it, based on Lynn Riggs’ play Green Grow the Lilacs, Oklahoma! broke most of the ground rules of musical theater writing that these two gentlemen had already set down themselves in their previous shows. For the first time, the songs advanced the story instead of interrupting it, with no pointless chorus blowouts or specialty numbers to distract from the forward motion of the plot.

  Also of note was the use of choreographer Agnes deMille’s dances (with a huge assist to her arranger, Trude Rittman). The great deMille’s contributions were highlighted by the first-act ballet “Laurey Makes Up Her Mind,” in which the amorous subconscious desires of our conflicted heroine Laurey are danced out as a part of the story and not as a throwaway fantasy. The effect of Oklahoma! on the art form simply cannot be overstated.

  10. CABARET (1966)

  Once again, director Harold Prince marshaled his formidable forces to create a new, thrilling type of musical theater. Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories was adapted by John van Druten into the play I am a Camera, from which Joe Masteroff, John Kander, and Fred Ebb created the musical play Cabaret. The musical became a fascinating close-up study of passion and prejudice played against the impending onslaught of Nazism.

  Cabaret’s freshness was in its structure. Three love plots of varying intensity were played in “real life” as conventional book musical scenes and numbers, with thrilling contrasting scenes taking place on the stage of the Kit Kat Klub, the cabaret where heroine Sally Bowles works. As embodied by the Emcee, a rouged-up, death’s-head-looking evil clown, these scenes serve as ironic counterpoint to the action in the “book plot” preceding them, as in the number “Two Ladies,” in which the Emcee and two girls describe their ideal live-in relationship just after Sally Bowles and her friend Cliff Bradshaw (the Isherwood stand-in) have agreed to their own posslq’d relationship.

  Adding to the brilliance of the enterprise was the work of Prince’s set designer of choice, Boris Aronson, who provided his own stroke of brilliance by greeting the audience with a warped mirror hanging in front of the Broadhurst Theater stage, distoring the features of everything it reflected, including the audience. This chilling allegorical flourish was the preamble to a thrilling musical, worthy of its place in the canon.

  Sunrise, Sunset

  10 of new York’s Longest-Running Musicals

  Musical theater is a tricky business. Most shows never even see an opening night, let alone a New York run of any kind. But here are ten musicals that stayed around through many, many sunrises and sunsets.

  1. THE FANTASTICKS

  This exquisite off-Broadway gem is the longest continuous run of formal (and probably informal) record in the history of American theater. A small (cast of eight, piano, and harp) adaptation of Rostand’s play Les Romanesques, which took up residence in the tiny Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village, it opened to good reviews and, well, just stayed around. For forty-two years! So ubiquitous was The Fantasticks on the New York theater scene that its corner of Sullivan Street was renamed Fantasticks Boulevard, and somewhere in mid-run (ha!), New Yorker magazine just started printing the number of performances “so far.”

  2. CATS

  Cats opened on Broadway on October 7, 1982. When it closed on September 10, 2000, it
reigned as the longest-running Broadway show ever. The best way to explain the worldwide success of Andrew Lloyd Webber and T. S. Eliot’s Cats, as a show and as a marketing phenomenon, is the faith in a pure form of theatrical magic. Cats is about as deep and heavy as a child’s wading pool, but show fans, casual theatergoers, and ordinary folk all ate it up. The type of mega-hit that sustains the Broadway tourist industry for decades, Cats rode high from the first glimpse of the trademark green cat’s eyes, and 7485 performances and nearly eighteen years later, the kitties left the Broadway junkyard for good.

  3. A CHORUS LINE

  Director-choreographer Michael Bennett’s supreme achievement from 1975 changed the way musicals were created and was the single most important musical of the 1970s. The workshop atmosphere in which the show was created gave it the very collaborative aura necessary to ensure the show’s success.

  A very fictionalized audition for a spot on the chorus line in a Broadway show (no director-choreographer at the time would have cared to know “a little something about” his dancers), its theme—people literally putting themselves “on the line” for acceptance—was so universally embraced that the show became a nearly unprecedented phenomenon, with the famous fighting of the great unwashed for tickets as soon as the show opened downtown at the Public Theater. And when it moved uptown to Broadway’s Shubert Theater, you couldn’t find a ticket for love or money. For years, A Chorus Line was Broadway’s evergreen seventies phenomenon. Upon passing Grease as the longest-running Broadway show ever, performance number 3,389 was greeted with hysteria bordering on anarchy. A Chorus Line finally closed in 1990, after 6,137 performances.