Broadway's Most Wanted Page 6

  Off-Broadway saw Manhattan Theater Club’s production of The Wild Party, with a book and score by Andrew Lippa, who had two new songs featured in the Broadway revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown the season before. The Wild Party, version 2.0, was developed at New York’s Public Theater and had a score by Michael John La Chiusa and book by La Chiusa and director George C. Wolfe.

  Following much media tongue-wagging focusing on the unusual happenstance surrounding the two shows’ proximity, the Lippa version played its subscription run and hoped to transfer to Broadway, but didn’t. The Public Theater version did move uptown but won none of its seven Tony nominations, and shuttered soon after the awards ceremony. Both versions of The Wild Party got points for trying, but neither was quite able to do justice to the decadence and desperation of the March poem.

  4. THE GOLDEN APPLE vs. HOME SWEET HOMER

  Perhaps nothing short of the Bible (or the Koran) is less suited for Broadway musical adaptation than Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, at least when played straight, and that’s the reason for the wildly different shows that share the source material here.

  Home Sweet Homer concerns itself with Homer’s quest to return to his wife Penelope, and as a vehicle for the always-intense Yul Brynner, the piece tended to take itself rather too seriously for its own good. Following a legendarily tempestuous and difficult tryout period, Home Sweet Homer, totally humorless and charmless, opened and closed on a single day in January 1976.

  1954’s The Golden Apple, on the other hand, is one of the most underappreciated musicals Broadway has ever seen. Composer Jerome Moross and librettist-lyricist John Latouche fashioned a brilliant musical (or, rather, to co-opt a title of a previous Moross-Latouche collaboration, a “Ballet Ballad”) from the two Homer epics—first act, Iliad, second act, Odyssey—but pointed up the theatricality of their enterprise by re-setting the legend in turn-of-the-century Washington state, with its Mount Olympus and golden apples, at the time of the Spanish-American War.

  Ulysses and the heroes, agrarians all, are back from Manila and Cuba, unsure of the new industrial century challenging them in the form of the city of Rhododendron, down in the valley. Paris, the very symbol of industry and urban chicanery, is a traveling salesman who dances Helen away in his balloon. Ulysses wins Helen back in a bare-knuckle boxing match before Mayor Hector, the citizenry, and the sirens pick the heroes off little by little, leaving Ulysses alone to re-examine the new century, his wife, and their marriage.

  That these weighty ideas play with the speed and breeze of a cyclone is a testament to the authors, who used early-twentieth century musical forms and rhymes (and no dialogue—take that, Mr. Brynner) to remove any pretense. About the only thing Home Sweet Homer and The Golden Apple have in common, other than the source material, is that The Golden Apple was a commercial flop as well.

  5. GODSPELL vs. COTTON PATCH GOSPEL

  The Gospel According to St. Matthew is undeniably great drama, and by the evidence offered in these two shows, not bad musical theater either. Stephen Schwartz and John-Michael Tebelak had previously musicalized the story of Christ’s last days (Schwartz writing tunes) for Tebelak’s master’s thesis, and in the anything-goes off-Broadway scene of the early ’70s, they put it up with great success. The 1971 production was irreverent and groovy (Jesus was a benevolent clown with a Superman ‘S’ on his shirt, his disciples lovable ragamuffins) but never blasphemous or overtly preachy.

  Harry Chapin’s Cotton Patch Gospel, from 1981, used the same Gospel (by way of Dr. Clarence Jordan’s Cotton Patch Version of Matthew and John) to tell Christ’s story as a revival-tent show in Gainesville, Georgia. Tom Key and Russel Treyz’s book created more obvious modern parallels to the ancient story than Godspell (Herod bombs a church nursery to try and kill Jesus; Christ is eventually lynched by Governor Pilate’s henchmen), and the mood and the music were contemporary country, with several superb, moving Chapin songs, most notably “Jubilation” and “When I Look Up.”

  But Cotton Patch Gospel, like Godspell, offers a vivid witness to the Greatest Story Ever Told, and it’s no mystery as to why both are popular in regional and community theaters across the country.

  6. THE BOYS FROM SYRACUSE vs. OH, BROTHER!

  Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart often wrote in tandem with estimable author/director George Abbott, and The Boys from Syracuse, their 1938 effort, may be the best collaboration of them all. The source for Syracuse was Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, which became a snazzy, jazzy farce (“If it’s good enough for Shakespeare,” the show begins, “it’s good enough for us”) concerning two sets of mismatched twins and their escapades on one crazy day in Ephesus. A truly great score (featuring the standards “This Can’t Be Love” and “Falling in Love With Love,” as well as the close-harmony wowza “Sing For Your Supper”) led critics to opine that Shakespeare had merely been missing the punch of a Rodgers and Hart score to make his show really work. An unsuccessfully re-written revival hit-Broadway in 2002.

  The Comedy of Errors is itself based on Plautus’ The Twin Menachmae, and in 1981 another musical based on The Twin Menachmae hit the Main Stem. The unhappily-titled Oh, Brother! reset the twins plot in the contemporary Persian Gulf (yep, a lot of opportunity for Broadway-style musical comedy there). Whatever charm was present in Syracuse (not to mention the killer score) didn’t translate, and despite a George Abbott-like surfeit of young talent (David-James Carroll, Harry Groener, Mary Mastrantonio, sans “Elizabeth”), Oh, Brother! lasted only one performance.

  7. THE HOUSE OF MARTIN QUERRE vs. THE RETURN OF MARTINQUERRE

  The tale of Martin Guerre is a true story of a Frenchman who marries, then leaves his home in the Pyrenees village of Artegat to join the army, where he is presumed dead. Years later, a man returns to Artegat, claiming to be Martin Guerre. He is welcomed back, but is later suspected (and finally revealed) to be an impostor. Two musicals based on the true story of Martin Guerre have received high-profile musical stagings—and it seems in the case of this tale, smaller is better.

  The House of Martin Guerre opened in Toronto in 1993. The work of two women, Leslie Arden and Anna Theresa Cascio, House focused on Martin’s long-suffering wife, Bertrande, and the effect of her child-marriage to the loveless Guerre, her eventual attraction to Guerre’s impostor, and the eventual awakening of the village to the new world outside their closed doors. A superb production at Chicago’s Goodman Theater in 1995, starring Tony-winner Antony Crivello as the impostor, and the wonderful Julain Molnar as Bertrande, gave full voice to this version of the legend as seen from a woman’s point of view.

  At nearly the same time as House was on the boards in Chicago, Cameron Mackintosh’s production of The Return of Martin Guerre opened in London. Written by Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, who were responsible for Mackintosh’s Les MisÉrables and Miss Saigon, The Return of Martin Guerre had neither the epic sweep of Les MisÉrables nor the tragic stature of Miss Saigon, yet was produced with size and bombast similar to those twin behemoths. The show relied on weary storytelling devices as well, originally telling the tale through the narration of a town cripple and a trio of old village biddies who provided heavy-handed comic relief.

  8. BAKER STREET vs. SHERLOCK HOLMES

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s novels featuring his fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, are easily the most popular detective novels ever published, and their London locations, colorful villains, and elaborate plots would make them ideal candidates for musicalization. Two top-flight musicals have explored the world of the great gumshoe.

  Baker Street, from 1965, was a Big Broadway Musical from the get-go. Directed by Harold Prince, Baker Street set its tale at the time of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee, pitting Holmes and Dr. Watson against their old nemesis, Professor Moriarty, who wants to pinch the Crown Jewels and get rid of Holmes once and for all. Holmes enlists his Baker Street Irregulars to pursue Moriarty through the alleys and sewers of London. With a then-unheard-of top ticket price o
f $9.90, Baker Street offered stunning, Tony-winning sets by Oliver Smith and a Jubilee parade in the fog by the Bil Baird Marionettes, but the score and script ultimately did the show in. Baker Street’s record-breaking grosses dried up quickly, and the show closed in less than a year.

  Sherlock Holmes, the Musical, wasn’t even that lucky (or even that good, if you ask most people). Veteran tunesmith Leslie Bricusse supplied book, music, and lyrics, with British character man Ron Moody stepping into Holmes’ tweed cape and deerstalker hat. Opening in London in 1989, it incorporated much from other Bricusse shows, most notably the opening number, “London is London,” which was cribbed from Bricusse’s musical Goodbye, Mr. Chips. A critical and financial flop, Holmes brought to mind the music-hall shows of the previous era, which had been completely eclipsed by the pop-opera spectacles of the ’70s and ’80s. Moody’s presence in Sherlock Holmes also invited inevitable comparison to his triumph as Fagin in the infinitely superior Oliver! two decades before.

  9. THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA vs. PHANTOM

  Gaston Leroux’s celebrated novel of a deformed lunatic living in the bowels of the Paris Opera House had been memorably filmed many times and in many styles, but still it came as no surprise to theater folk when Andrew Lloyd Webber announced his intention to write the music for a stage version. What followed has become perhaps the greatest commercial phenomenon in musical theater history, rivaled only by Les Miserables and that other Webber behemoth, Cats.

  Breathtakingly designed by Maria Bjornson and Andrew Bridge, and directed in high style by Harold Prince, The Phantom of the Opera opened in London in 1985 with Webber’s wife, Sarah Brightman, as the heroine, ingenue Christine Daae, and Michael Crawford in a mesmerizing turn as the tortured Phantom. A worldwide smash hit, the show had roughly eight thousand touring companies on the road, and a merchandising operation that would make Michael Jordan blush.

  Phantom is the simpler title of another musical version from 1991, this one written by the gifted Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit, who collaborated on the Broadway musical Nine in 1982, besting Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in the Tony race that year. The Yeston-Kopit Phantom has never played Broadway for obvious reasons, but has a rich life in regional and foreign productions (often being billed as the most successful musical never to have played New York). Supporters of the Yeston-Kopit Phantom maintain that the storytelling is superior in their version, offering a more compelling relationship between Christine and her father, and portraying the Phantom as a more pathetic, and less mesmerizing, creature of need.

  10. MY DARLIN’ AIDA vs. AIDA: THE MUSICAL

  Another great idea for a musical: A golden boy, loved by all, son of a conquering war hero, falls in love with a slave, their forbidden romance setting in motion a tragic chain of events. Great, except that Giuseppe Verdi got there first. He turned it into the grand opera Aida, which is standard repertory all over the world. Two musicals based on Verdi’s work have opened on Broadway, with varying results.

  Charles Friedman had directed Oscar Hammerstein’s Carmen Jones, which Hammerstein had adapted from Bizet’s opera Carmen, resetting the opera in the black American South. Friedman, not exactly on Hammerstein’s level as a writer, adapted Verdi’s opera into the Southern gothic My Darlin’ Aida in 1952. Retaining Verdi’s music, Friedman turned ancient Memphis into Memphis, Tennessee, at the time of the Civil War, and changed the characters accordingly (Radames = Ray Demarest, Pharaoh = General Farrow, etc.). The beautifully mounted production came across to most critics like a novelty, music critics mostly saying, “great music,” and drama critics saying, “great sets.” My Darlin’ Aida closed after only eighty-nine performances.

  Disney Theatricals’ Y2K spectacle Aida, on the other hand, is still going strong after three-plus years. A blazingly abstract take on the story, Aida has a Tony winning score by Tim Rice and Elton John and book by director Robert Falls, David Henry Hwang and Linda Woolverton. The conceit of this Aida has contemporary characters meeting in the Egyptian wing of a museum, ineluctably drawn together as Aida and Radames were long ago, the story subsuming them.

  With Elton John supplying good, catchy pop tunes, as is his wont, and Rice doing his usual bit with uninspired lyrics, Aida works best as a showcase: visually, by way of Bob Crowley’s stunning, abstract-modern sets and costumes, and musically, with killer pop roles in Aida, Radames, and spoiled little rich girl Amneris.

  The Wages of Sin

  TV Shows Featuring Broadway Stars

  Broadway has long been the proving ground for television and movie success. If you don’t think so, look up the calendar year that actress Mercedes Ruehl had between May of 1991 and April of 1992. Following are ten television shows featuring performers from Broadway’s musical stages.

  1. OZ

  HBO’s just-ended unflinching prison drama featured three fine musical performers in vastly different roles: J.K. Simmons (Guys and Dolls) as pitiless neo-Nazi Schillinger, B.D. Wong as Father Ray, and Rita Moreno as Sister Peter Marie. (Wong played Linus in the revival of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown; Moreno was in the one-performance disaster Gantry.) Both Wong and Moreno are Tony winners for plays, and Moreno, of course, won an Oscar for her superb performance as Anita in West Side Story.

  2. WILL AND GRACE

  The chic sitcom about ultra-hip New Yorkers is riddled with ultra-professional Broadway talent. Emmy winners Eric McCormack (who played in Meredith Willson’s The Music Man in 2001), as good-guy Will Truman, and Megan Mullally (Rizzo in Grease, Rosemary in 1995’s How to Succeed… revival), who plays quippy socialite Karen Walker, trade the witty, bitchy repartee that is their show’s trademark. The late Gregory Hines, whose Broadway musical career spanned almost 40 years, used to pop up occasionally as Will’s boss, Ben Doucette. He’s been replaced by Willy Wonka himself (or is it Leo Bloom?), Gene Wilder, who recently won an Emmy for his portrayal of mercurial Mr. Stein.

  3. ONE OF THE BOYS

  One of the who? Nineteen eighty-what, now? This forgettable NBC sitcom from 1982 is worth mentioning only for its cast: Amidst the predictable sitcom detritus were future stars Dana Carvey and Meg Ryan, joined by a manic character guy named Nathan Lane. Lane is Broadway royalty now, with two Tonys and tons of fans and goodwill.

  The old guard was represented by veterans Scatman Crothers and Mr. Mickey Rooney. Rooney made a belated Broadway debut in 1979’s burlesque riot Sugar Babies. His last Main Stem appearance to date was in the waning days of The Will Rogers Follies, as Will’s father, Clem.

  4. THE WEST WING

  Fictional First Lady Abigail Bartlet is played by the magnificent Stockard Channing, who made her Broadway debut in 1971’s Two Gentlemen of Verona and was also in They’re Playing Our Song and took over for Liza Minnelli in The Rink. On the West Wing set she canswap backstage stories with Dulé Hill, who plays Charlie Young, the personal aide to the President. Hill scored on Broadway in 1996’s Bring in ’da Noise Bring in ’da Funk. The West Wing seems to be gathering Tony winners like kudzu; recently joining the cast were the fabulous Joanna Gleason (Into the Woods), as counsel Jordan Kendall, Mary-Louise Parker (2001’s Best Play Proof), as Amy Gardner, and Lily Tomlin (1986’s The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe) playing the President’s secretary, Debbie Fiderer.

  5. LAW & ORDER

  The song-and-dancing-est cops on TV are Ed Green and Lenny Briscoe, or, as they’re better known, Jesse L. Martin and Jerry Orbach. Law & Order’s detectives both boast Broadway musical credits, Martin making a splash as the first Tom Collins in the mega-hit Rent Orbach has a list of credits as long as your arm, among them creating the role of El Gallo off-Broadway in The Fantasticks, singing the role of Lumiere in Disney’s great film version of Beauty and the Beast, and creating roles in Carnival and Bob Fosse’s original production of Chicago. Their TV boss, S. Epatha Merkerson, scored a huge triumph as Billie Holliday in Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill off-Broadway in 1987.

  6. LATE SHOW WITH D
AVID LETTERMAN

  Broadcasting from the heart of the theater district at 1697 Broadway, Late Show With David Letterman often hosts big-time Broadway stars to go along with Dave’s Big-Ass Ham. And look, behind the keyboards! It’s Paul Shaffer! Letterman’s longtime musical director got his start in Canada, and, following a legendary production of Stephen Schwartz’s Godspell in Toronto, Shaffer took the job of Musical Director for Godspell’s move from off-Broadway to Broadway in 1976. Shaffer also served as Musical Director for Gilda Radner’s live evening on Broadway in 1979.

  7. THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW

  TV’s greatest sitcom was set in the New York suburb of New Rochelle, its star working as head writer for a Sid Caesar-style variety show in the city. It stood to reason that much of the show’s classic humor would be Broadway-related. After debuting on Broadway in The Girls Against the Boys, Dick Van Dyke gave a memorable performance as Albert Peterson in Bye Bye Birdie; he also headlined the 1981 revival of The Music Man.

  His TV costars, Rose Marie (Top Banana) and the versatile Morey Amsterdam, who wrote two original Broadway revues, added much-needed authenticity. Mary Tyler Moore, as hottest-housewife-ever Laura Petrie, never appeared on Broadway in a musical, but was Holly Golightly in the legendary road disaster Breakfast at Tiffany’s.