Broadway's Most Wanted (10 page)

Another small-scale musical out of place on Broadway (it transferred from off-Broadway’s ANTA Theater),
Tintypes
is a revue-style trip through the popular music of the Gay Nineties up to the dawn of World War I. Conceived by pianist-musical director Mel Marvin for a small band and a cast of five, the show lasted through the Christmas holiday in 1980, but closed in January of 1981.

The good news is that Tony nominations (though no awards) followed, and a cast album was released. The original cast recording of
Tintypes
is a double-album (remember those?) feast of over forty songs by over twenty-five songwriters, including Victor Herbert, Scott Joplin, and John Philip Sousa, and winningly performed by the excellent original cast, which featured future Tony winners Jerry Zaks and the late Lynne Thigpen. To add to the good fortune, the fledgling Arts and Entertainment cable network filmed a studio production using the cast album tracks, preserving the whole show, ensuring its future as a regional and community-theater staple for years to come.

Mary Kyte’s musical staging and Gary Pearle’s direction attractively concealed a slight overall concept (distinct song and sketch sets depicting industrial progress, immigration, vaudeville, etc.), but the collection of songs, as performed by the cast who put them over from the very beginning, were what made
Tintypes
so special.

Stephen Sondheim is contemporary Broadway’s dominant composer-lyricist, and as such, every move he makes demands attention. All eyes were on Sondheim, librettist George Furth, and director Harold Prince as they opened their new musical,
Merrily We Roll Along,
in New York, without the benefit of an out-of-town fixit period.
Merrily’s
1981 preview period is legendary, marked by cast changes, a fired choreographer, an almost complete costume overhaul, and some of the worst buzz ever accorded a musical in New York previews. The writing was on the wall when
Merrily
finally opened, and the show had only a two-week run.

Almost all the critics were unanimous in their reviews: Furth’s unappealing, quippy-kooky book was a shambles and not well served by Prince’s decision to cast the show entirely with unpolished teenagers. Also muddy was the entire motive for the show: a backwards-in-time examination of the vagaries of success and friendship as visited upon three longtime friends and colleagues.

What did work, as all acknowledged, was Sondheim’s score, and it remains the most exuberant, fresh, and, yes,
youthful
score he’s written since his first, the seldom-seen
Saturday Might
But while it seems unthinkable that a Sondheim show would go unrecorded,
Merrily,
due to its failure, was never a lead-pipe cinch. But record producer Thomas Z. Shepard, showing the characteristic zeal of the show’s antihero, Franklin Shepard, gave the score a first-class treatment on disc. (The packaging of the album was outstanding, too.)

It was his stated intention to make the show sound better on record than it ever did in the theater, and the
hitherto-raw cast was focused brilliantly in the recording studio. The result was a heartbreakingly emotional recording, with “Good Thing Going,” the cheer-up rouser “Now You Know,” and the brilliantly hopeful “Our Time” particular standouts. Absent the confusing staging concept and George Furth’s odd book, the cast album of
Merrily We Roll Along
sounds like it belongs to a smash hit.

Jerry Herman’s stock dipped a bit after the flop
Dear World,
he waited over five years to return to Broadway. After being approached with the idea of a musical about silent-film king Mack Sennett and his unconventional romance with his muse, Mabel Normand, he took his time working on it.
Mack and Mabel
opened on Broadway in early October of 1974, but only lasted for 66 performances, closing at the end of November. The show’s creative team (producer David Merrick, director-choreographer Gower Champion, librettist Michael Stewart, and Herman) had created a monster hit with
Hello, Dolly!,
but, despite two glowing stars (Robert Preston and Bernadette Peters) and eight Tony nominations, they couldn’t duplicate the feat with
M & M.

The problematic book came in for most of the criticism: Mack Sennett’s lack of warmth (“I won’t send roses,” he tells Mabel over and over) is not endearing, and the overall arc for both characters is bleak. Sennett is made obscure with the advent of talkies, and Mabel Normand died before her time, enmeshed in drugs and scandal. Add to all that the difficulty of capturing the legendary comedy of the Keystone Kops onstage, and
Mack and Mabel
was hamstrung from the start.

But Herman, who had taken the time to get it right
on his end, provided a strong score (controversially, not Tony-nominated) in his usual vein: Clickety-clack character numbers and superb ballads. The cast album leaves the listener, again, wondering how a flop can contain such gems as Bernadette Peters’ ’Hey, Ma’ number, “Look What Happened to Mabel,” or what is perhaps the strongest ballad Herman has ever written, “Time Heals Everything.”

It’s hard to pin down the reasons why this 1954 show didn’t succeed. To listen to the score is to marvel at the good fortune that great writers have in creating songs for dramatic characters; this score positively vibrates with sensuality.

The work of composer Harold Arlen and librettist-lyricist Truman Capote (who got the idea for the tale whilst vacationing in Haiti),
House of Flowers
told the story of Madam Fleur and her “house of flowers,” girls named Pansy, Gladiola, etc., and the arrival of a new “flower” who ignites personal and professional chaos on the island. Pearl Bailey, who nine years earlier had scored with Arlen’s songs in her Broadway debut,
St Louis Woman,
was difficult from the get-go, stealing material from other actors and refusing to cooperate with director Peter Brook after he was fired and rehired.

Then again, Bailey was great onstage, and some feel the very gay point of view of the material was what kept it from succeeding. But oh, that score.

Marc Blitzstein was one of the American theater’s most talented and versatile composers; his work ranged from conventional theater works such as
Regina,
his
opera based on Hellman’s
The Little Foxes,
and his version of the Brecht-Weill
Threepenny Opera,
to
Reuben Reuben,
an avant-garde work about a man who can’t communicate, and
Juno,
based on Sean O’Casey’s play
Juno and the Paycock.

Juno was
faithful to O’ Casey’s play, which is pretty much a laundry list of woe and misery from strife-torn Ireland, circa 1924. Blitzstein’s score, however, soars above the material; “I Wish It So” and “What Is the Stars?” are superb ballads, and the opening number, “We’re Alive,” is a perfect, colors-flying rouser.

Stephen Sondheim, Harold Prince, and John Weidman’s Bicentennial musical is a brilliant examination of America’s policies of manifest destiny and global capitalism. Telling its story from the Japanese side, in Kabuki style, however, pretty much assured the show of going the way of all flesh.

There was nothing amiss in Sondheim’s score, however. Drawing heavily on the Eastern pentatonic scale and avoiding heavy Western rhyme schemes for its Asian characters, the cast album of
Pacific Overtures
is virtually perfect, brilliantly sung by an all-Asian cast. Particularly effective are the numbers “Poems,” and the massive history lesson “Please Hello,” which may be the funniest song Sondheim has ever written.

This bold and creative resetting of
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
was hailed upon its off-Broadway premiere in at the Phoenix Theater in 1954 and was greeted with even better notices when it moved uptown. But the audiences never came to see
The Golden Apple,
and it
closed after only 125 performances. But the fifties saw the cast album explosion, so something this good was bound to reach vinyl.

But since
The Golden Apple
was a genre-bending folk opera, completely sung with no dialogue, cuts had to be made to preserve the score on LP. Lyricist John LaTouche reportedly whipped up rhyming continuity on the spot to patch over the severe cuts made to Jerome Moross’s brilliant music. And brilliant it is: Still heard on the album are the gorgeous “Windflowers,” Kaye Ballard’s hymn of seduction, “Lazy Afternoon,” and much of “The Judgment of Paris,” the hilarious county fair bake-off to win Paris’s favor.

Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman’s brilliant 1971 musical was one of the musically richest shows ever heard on Broadway. So what’s up with the one-disc hatchet job of the brilliant original cast? Again, the song-and-dance team of Ego and Hubris take the prize.

Follies
producer-director Hal Prince was reportedly sore at CBS Studios, who had so brilliantly recorded the previous Sondheim score,
Company, so
he made a rather capricious deal with Capitol Records, which didn’t have a whole lot of experience with original cast albums. The resultant recording was, to put it mildly, a piece of crap. Many of the brilliant pastiche songs were trimmed and large sections of music cut altogether to make the show fit on a single, two-sided disc. “Irresponsible” is the word often bandied about when this album is discussed. In 1985, RCA Victor thankfully recorded the all-star gala
Follies in Concert
with the New York Philharmonic.

Theater is easily the most cinematic art form. After movies. And, ok, maybe TV. And records can be kind of cinematic, too, right? Anyway, here are ten movies which deal with the creation of musical theater.

Mike Leigh’s masterful examination of the great Gibert and Sullivan, the Victorian era, and the circumstances which led them to create their most popular operetta,
The Mikado.
It’s a near miracle that a movie this richly detailed and luxurious, in time as well as content, was made in 1999, even in England.

Glenn Close is a superb singing actress, but it’s doubtful she could sing Wagner. Nevertheless, she plays a temperamental Swedish diva (dubbed by Kiri Te Kanawa) in Istvan Szabo’s film
Meeting Venus,
a pseudo-documentary look at an international production of
Tannhaüser.
The personal affairs and petty jealousies
of the opera folk are amusing (some have seen the mutinational feel of this 1991 film as a metaphor for German reunification), but the climactic
Tannhaüser
itself is dullsville.

Tim Robbins’s delightful 1999 look at the creation of Marc Blitzstein’s political musical
The Cradle Will Rock,
whose opening (and closing) night became famous as the swan song of the Federal Theater Project. Robbins examines big business, the state of the art, and culture wars with a freewheeling cinematic sensibility and a cast of Hollywood stars (Vanessa Redgrave, Susan Sarandon, John Cusack) and New York theater veterans (Paul Giamatti, Cherry Jones, Barnard Hughes).

Pretty Lady
must go on—even if the star twists an ankle. And you, Peggy Sawyer, are going to save the day! That’s the plot of 1933’s great 42
^nd
Street, the corniest and most wonderful backstage musical ever filmed, based on Bradford Ropes’s novel. Lloyd Bacon directed, Busby Berkeley (of course) staged the socko numbers, and Ruby Keeler shone as the girl who went out there a youngster, but who came back a star. Broadway’s version, first seen in 1980, is heavily influenced by the film.

Another great fictional backstager, molded closely on real life. One of Vincente Minnelli’s last great M-G-M musicals, Fred Astaire basically plays himself (star dancer past his prime, looking for one last stage hit),
Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray are basically writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and the tyrannical director is played by Jack Buchanan, basically playing … Vincente Minnelli. Don’t miss Astaire and Cyd Charisse all-timing it to “Dancing in the Dark.”

It’s really about Antonio Salieri’s frustration at Mozart’s seemingly divine genius, but Peter Shaffer’s screenplay of his stage hit, brilliantly directed by Milos Forman, gives us tantalizing glimpses into Mozart’s Herculean
oeuvre,
from the highs of the Royal command premiere of
Abduction from the Seraglio
to the lows of the working-class shenanigans of
The Magic Flute,
all wittily staged by Twyla Tharp.

Nomi’s not a whore, she’s a dancer! Good-yet-violently-unstable girl goes to Vegas, becomes a lap-dancer, then a stripper, then the star of the fabulous Las Vegas review “Goddess,” in Paul Verhoeven’s godawful backstager-for-the-nineties,
Showgirls.
As many people have noted, her career trajectory would probably be reversed, since strippers make more money than showgirls, but hey, a semi-nude job’s a semi-nude job. Elizabeth Berkley is our toothy heroine; watch her trip another bitchy showgirl down the stairs, mwahahaha.

A cinema a clef if ever one existed,
All That Jazz,
egomaniac supreme Bob Fosse’s rumination on his life and work, breathes Broadway from its very pores. A look at talented workaholic and Renaissance man Joe Gideon’s struggles to finish a movie (“The Comedian,”
based on
Lenny)
and get his new Broadway show N
Y/LA
(which gives us the fabulous “Take Off With Us/Air Rotica” sequence) up and running, all while enduring open-heart surgery.
All That Jazz
features many of Fosse’s theater colleagues, some (Anne Reinking, Ben Vereen) playing characters based on themselves.