Broadway's Most Wanted Page 9

  3. LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS

  The enjoyable musical setting of Roger Corman’s zerobudget horror film The Little Shop of Horrors. In movie and musical, nerdy Seymour tends the cannibalistic plant Audrey II (named for his boss’s daughter, the object of Seymour’s affections). As Audrey II grows, her appetite for human blood grows as well, and Seymour must feed his plant or suffer the consequences.

  A huge off-Broadway hit (by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman), which was subsequently made into a successful and stylish film, Little Shop told its tale in 50’s shoo-bop style, with a Greek-chorus-like trio of girl singers (cleverly named Chiffon, Crystal, and Ronnette, after the girl groups of the period) guiding us through the action.

  4. ASSASSINS

  Stephen Sondheim’s dark side strikes again! With the misery index nearing an all-time high, and the country suffering through a recession and a controversial war, Playwrights Horizons in Manhattan presented Sondheim’s Assassins off-Broadway in the winter of 1991. Critics were divided, with most enjoying the score but not the concept.

  A bleak look at those unhappy folks who assassinated, or at least tried to kill a U.S. President, Sondheim and librettist John Weidman saw them as a sort of loser’s club of Americana, with every member having a story to tell. Sondheim excelled here, presenting these historical characters through the time in which they lived (a Coplandesque folk ballad for “pioneer” John Wilkes Booth, a Carpenters parody for would-be assassins John Hinckley and Squeaky Fromme), using the pastiche as both biting commentary and superb storytelling.

  5. LEGS DIAMOND

  One of the most notorious flop shows of the ’80s, Legs Diamond made the twin mistakes of trying to musicalize the story of a gangster and then trying to use his desire for a showbiz career as an excuse for his criminal activity. The bomb detonated on the stage of the Mark Hellinger Theater was so huge it took the power of a higher being to rescue it, as the Times Square Gospel Church took over the theater after Legs ran away.

  The great playwright Harvey Fierstein was partially responsible for the book, which aimed for Runyonesque color and grit but had too much unintentional gay camp beneath the surface. Cabaret performer and recording artist Peter Allen wrote the score and played the title role. He was unconvincing both as the songwriter and as the titular gangster and lothario.

  6. THE CAPEMAN

  Legendary songwriter Paul Simon’s ill-starred musical, based on a true story a 1959 murder in the streets of New York City. The piece, despite noble intentions, was never convincingly theatrical, and many critics called it cantata-like, citing a lack of a coherent stage motor to drive it.

  Sixteen-year-old Salvador Agron knifed two innocent men when his gang, the Vampires, went looking for the Irish gang the Norsemen. (Agron was identified by witnesses by his red and black cape, hence the nickname.) Agron’s life and times (sentenced to death, his sentence was commuted, and he served 20 years), which might have made a stunning musical, were unfortunately somewhat trivialized.

  7. THOU SHALT NOT

  This 2002 quasi-glamour project, created by hot director-choreographer Susan Stroman and even hotter composer-lyricist Harry Connick, Jr., was a musical adaptation of Emile Zola’s novel Thérèse Raquin. The result, despite the pedigrees of its creators, was an unfocused, often troubled show with moments of quality.

  The musical followed Zola’s plot closely, but switched the action from Europe to post-war N’awlins, allowing Connick to indulge his Southern jazz roots by writing a steamy score. Stroman’s work was very dance-heavy; this talented choreographer seemed to fall back on the weak libretto band-aid of extraneous dance. Of the cast, most of the plaudits went to Norbert Leo Butz, as Thérèse’s schlubby husband Camille, who was ultimately driven to rage by his wife’s betrayal.

  8. MARIE CHRLSTINE

  As a showcase for the remarkably talented Audra McDonald, this 1999 Michael John LaChiusa musical was pretty successful. In most other respects, Marie Christine was less so. This musical retelling of the Medea tale starred McDonald as the doomed wife and mother of the title, driven by her passions and the prejudices of the day. Like the aforementioned Thou Shalt Not, Marie Christine reset its classic tale in steamy, sensuous New Orleans.

  LaChiusa and director Graciela Daniele reset the action in the 1890s, in Chicago as well as New Orleans, where Marie was a Creole fascinated with the mysteries of voodoo. LaChiusa’s score veered from lyrical to wildly hysterical—unfortunately, mostly the latter.

  9. PARADE

  Parade was a critically lauded but commercially unsuccessful 1999 Lincoln Center musical based on the murder of Mary Phagan, a young Georgia girl, in 1913. The crime was pinned on her factory foreman, a transplanted New York Jew named Leo Frank, whose trial was, to put it mildly, biased. Ultimately, the show became a story of strength under duress.

  Musicalizing this story was tricky, and librettist Alfred Uhry, composer/lyricist Jason Robert Brown, and director Harold Prince delivered a dark, nuanced show that focused mostly on the relationship between Frank and his wife, Lucille. Brown in particular was able to wed the many musical styles native to the time (spirituals, rags, marches) to character development, using a chain-gang call-and-response, for instance, when the Governor of Georgia visits a prison farm to interrogate a key witness.

  10. JACK’S HOLIDAY

  This very unfulfilling off-Broadway musical tale about Jack the Ripper journeying to America lasted only twenty-five performances when produced at Playwrights Horizons in 1995. As is the case with many shows in this fanciful vein, the authors, who apparently didn’t trust their source material enough, used show business as a plot device.

  Jack’s Holiday, written by Mark St. Germain and Randy Courts, floats the notion that the notorious London Ripper came to New York in 1892 as part of a visiting theater troupe (uh-huh), supposedly because the evils of New York were worse than those he left behind in England. Well, judging by this flop, the theater must be better in England, anyway. Despite overwhelmingly negative reviews, some praise was heard for Judy Blazer as Irish whore Mary Healey, and also for Jerome Sirlin’s clever sets and projections.

  Every Movie’s a Circus

  10 Legendary Broadway Performers Who Lost Their Roles in the Movie Version

  Every so often, a performer comes along who creates an indelible, definitive performance in a Broadway musical … and then sees the role given to an established star for the movie version. In most cases, the movie performer can’t even compare with what a great stage performer would have brought to the role. Here are ten stage actors who lost it to the movies.

  1. RICHARD KILEY, MAN OF LA MANCHA

  Miguel Cervantes’ classic novel Don Quixote was superbly adapted, in 1965, into Man of La Mancha, and part of the genius of the show is the conceit of putting Cervantes on stage to defend his manuscript in a kangaroo court of prison inmates. He then proceeds to tell the tale of Don Quixote de La Mancha, and becomes Quixote himself.

  Less cynical and more inspirational (and therefore more in tune with the flower-power era that was on the rise) than the novel, Man of La Mancha requires a lead actor with the bravura to portray a noble author, a driven knight-errant, and the dying fool he becomes. That actor is Richard Kiley, who gave one of the most commanding performances in musical theater history, winning raves even from critics who dismissed the show as vulgar, and cleaning up at awards time. Naturally, he’d carry over in the movie version, right? Wrong. Peter O’Toole was tapped to play Quixote in the movie version, and while O’Toole is a commanding actor, his Quixote doesn’t sing or tilt at windmills as movingly as Kiley did on stage.

  2. JULIE ANDREWS, MY FAIR LADY

  Julie Andrews entranced Broadway in a featured role in Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend in 1954, and after Mary Martin said no, Andrews outlasted all others to win the role of “squashed cabbage leaf” Eliza Doolittle in My Lady Liza. By the time it had become My Fair Lady in 1956, the show and its leading lady were pretty much invincible. An almost unpreced
ented smash hit on Broadway and in London, My Fair Lady had movie-musical fans and Julie-worshippers drooling in anticipation of the big-screen version.

  Now comes the hairy part. Andrews was not considered a sufficient box office draw in 1963, when My Fair Lady was filmed, so the part went to the impossibly glamorous, yet mousy, Audrey Hepburn. Some have speculated that while Hepburn may not have been ideal (particularly in the first half), she projected more vulnerability onscreen than Andrews might have, and that’s why Jack Warner went with Hepburn. The well-known upshot of all this hoo-ha is that ultimately, while My Fair Lady won a slew of Oscars, including Best Picture, Andrews won the Best Actress Oscar for Mary Poppins, in which she was marvelous, but about as vulnerable as the Great Wall of China. Hepburn, of course, didn’t sing most of her songs and got no Oscar nomination.

  3. CAROL CHANNING, HELLO, DOLLY!

  If any Broadway performer is more identified with a role than Kiley or Andrews, it must be Carol Channing, who, after triumphing as Lorelei Lee in 1949’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, scored as the one and only Dolly Gallagher Levi in Hello, Dolly! in 1964. Setting Broadway on its ear like no performer since, it was only natural that she play Dolly in the 1969 movie …

  OK, you know it went to Barbra Streisand.

  Younger, and singularly popular in movie musicals at the time, Streisand was still not up to the giddy, clickety-clack weirdness of Dolly Levi, whom she played as a quick-talking, steamrolling Yenta, much the same way she would play Judy Maxwell in Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? three years later. Think of the scene in the Harmonia Gardens Restaurant, where Streisand eats roast chicken and dumplings (and dumplings and dumplings). Now imagine Channing doing it, that wide red mouth, those button eyes, that blond wig hosting a family of peacocks. It was a smash moment on stage, it would have won her the Oscar in close-up on film.

  But just as she lost Lorelei Lee to the icon of the ’50s, Marilyn Monroe, she lost Dolly Levi to the icon of the ’60s, Barbra Streisand. Through it all, she retained her class and good humor, which is why she could still successfully tour Hello, Dolly! into the ’90s.

  4. ETHEL MERMAN, GY PSY

  Ethel Merman capped her career with the fascinatingly repellent (repellently fascinating?) Rose in this Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim-Arthur Laurents 1959 masterpiece, belting out classics like “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” “You’ll Never get Away From Me,” and the horrific, purgative “Rose’s Turn.”

  Since Merman never made much of an impact in movies (exception— It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World— wow!), the double takes were small (except Merman’s, who was reportedly promised the role early and often) when Rosalind Russell signed to play Rose in the 1962 Mervyn LeRoy film. Gypsy on film is fairly faithful to its brilliant stage origins, and Russell gives it her professional best (with her singing dubbed by the similarly throaty Lisa Kirk). But if you’ve heard Merman rip through the score, you realize how much she’s missed, and how much LeRoy missed the opportunity to turn one of the best book musicals ever into one of the best film musicals ever.

  5. ANGELA LANSBURY, MAME

  For Rosalind Russell, before there was Rose, there was Auntie Mame. Russell triumphed in the stage and film versions of the Patrick Dennis memoir, but was never considered for the inevitable musical version. And after many leading ladies were considered, the part fell to Angela Lansbury, who had surprised audiences with her fine singing in Anyone Can Whistle in 1964. As directed by Gene Saks, and co-starring seven thousand costumes, Lansbury seemed the very reincarnation of the irrepressible Mame Dennis Burnside. Hers was a Star Performance in every sense of the word, with the 1966 Tony Award and dressing-room worshippers to follow.

  So why, oh why, did the property languish for eight years? And who, who, WHO thought Lucille Ball was right for the part of Mame at age 63? It had been proven that Ball couldn’t really sing, thirteen years earlier, in Wildcat But by 1974, she was just plain too old (Lansbury was 48, just right) and just plain too “sitcom Mom” for the force of nature that was Mame. Mame is not a mother, that’s the point. Lucille Ball, after playing three sitcom Moms in succession on TV, fell flat.

  6. ZERO MOSTEL, FIDDLER ON THE ROOF

  After Zero Mostel hit huge with his Papa Tevye in Broadway’s Fiddler on the Roof, he made six movies (including the awful version of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) and cemented his reputation as a brilliant, egomaniacal manchild. When it finally came time to turn Fiddler into a movie, however, his difficulties weighed less against him than the fact that he was considered too “big,” too unreal, for the unforgiving camera. (One look at him stretching the fabric of The Producers should convince anyone of that.)

  Mostel was predictably, operatically, crushed when producer Walter Mirisch gave the role to Topol, the Israeli actor who had played Tevye with success in London and elsewhere. The film version of Fiddler won raves and Oscars (Topol received a nomination, but lost to Gene Hackman, for the decidedly non-musical The French Connection) but was opened up and “realized,” as most movie musicals eventually are. Off the stage, and without Boris Aronson’s beautiful, stylized, Chagall-like sets, perhaps the overpowering Mostel would have been inappropriate.

  7. DOROTHY LOUDON, ANNIE

  The well-crafted and touching Annie was a smash-hit success, and much of that success was due to its leads: Andrea McArdle, who stepped into the role of the Little Orphan when the first-choice girl wasn’t working out; Reid Shelton, gruff but lovable as Daddy Warbucks; and the awesome Dorothy Loudon as Miss Hannigan, the sweet-like-a-molotov-cocktail orphanage headmistress.

  The comic villainess is a staple of musical comedy, and Dorothy Loudon has played many of them in her great career. But after a few flops in the ’60s, she got her big chance with Miss Hannigan, who rides herd over her orphans in Act One and schemes to usurp Warbucks’ fortune in Act Two. Hannigan is a character comedienne’s dream come true, with great dialogue and a fabulous “want” number called “Easy Street,” and Loudon bit fiercely into the role and deservedly won a Tony Award. But Loudon, as fine a performer as she is, is not a household name, and since kids and parents across America was waiting for the movie version, it wasn’t really a shock when she lost the role.

  The movie version of Annie was directed by John Huston, and yes, that’s what everyone thought: John Huston? John “We don’t need no stinking badges” Huston? Decidedly unsentimental is one thing, but mercy. He put too much back in the movie (like the unnecessary Punjab and The Asp, from the comic strip), but at least he got this right: He got Carol Burnett for Miss Hannigan. If it’s true that Loudon wouldn’t have sold the movie, Burnett is pretty much the TV-and movies version of Dorothy Loudon, a high-octane, do-anything tornado with enough belt to keep the chorus boys’ pants up.

  8. PATTI LUPONE, EVITA

  Patti LuPone had been steadily working in New York for several years, much of that time as a member of John Houseman’s Acting Company, when she starred in Harold Prince’s production of the Rice/Lloyd Webber Evita in 1979. When London’s Evita, Elaine Paige, was denied the opportunity to recreate the role in New York, names as diverse as Raquel Welch (hmm), Ann-Margret (MMM), and Charo (koochy!) were bandied about by the press. Eventually, LuPone took the role, and when Prince toned down the Fascist-rally overtones of the London production, it fell to LuPone to supply much of the ferocity inherent in the ruthless social climber who became First Lady of Argentina, presumably, according to Rice and Lloyd Webber, through sheer will. LuPone was indeed ferocious, and she wowed even the critics who disliked the show, winning the Tony Award and becoming a huge star.

  That LuPone never played Evita on film is not entirely her fault. The property kicked around Hollywood longer than a Busby Berkeley chorus line, and by the time the cameras rolled in 1995, everyone from Meryl Streep to Barbra Streisand had been mentioned. The part finally fell to the most obvious choice, the one and only Madonna.

  Madonna’s participation in the film and the attendant hysteria surrou
nding it were nevertheless the most measured things about Alan Parker’s overblown, tartedup movie version of Evita. (Actually, put Jonathan Pryce’s Juan Perón in the “measured” category, too.) Unfortunately, by the mid-90s, LuPone was simply too old and didn’t possess the screen glamour necessary to carry a film version of Evita, especially one as terminally stupid as Parker’s.

  9. MARY MARTIN, THE SOUND OF MUSIC

  There was a stage version of The Sound of Music? Indeed there was, sonny, and it bears some resemblance to the movie, though not as much as you’d think. Chiefly, it wasn’t the fully integrated Rodgers and Hammerstein musical play that it had been on the stage. It became, instead, a Julie Andrews Movie. This made perfect sense, considering when the movie was made, but before Julie Andrews on film, there was Mary Martin on stage.

  Mary Martin, the charming, lighthearted heroine of many a musical smash, created the role of Maria Von Trapp in The Sound of Music in 1959, besting Ethel Merman (Gypsy) and Carol Burnett (Once Upon a Mattress) in the Tony Awards race that season, which should have been enough to win her the film role right there. But as even her supporters pointed out, she was too old to have even played Maria on stage, and the camera would have been unforgiving. Not that, at 50-something, she was any bad shakes to look at, but still…