Broadway's Most Wanted (16 page)

“Lazy Afternoon” is sung by Helen as she seduces Paris (not the other way around) in her front yard, singing a superbly idiomatic lyric (“my rockin’ chair will fit yer and my cake was never richer”) accompanied by undulating vibes, winds, and bass. “Lazy Afternoon” has been a cabaret staple for years, and the song was recorded by alt-rockers The Reivers in 1989 in what is a rocking but fairly respectful tribute version.

Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach’s 1933 musical
Roberta
was a successful post-Princess Theatre musical about a college football star whose Aunt Minnie runs a dress shop in Paris (as the titular mam’selle Roberta). The show, based on the Alice Duer Miller novel, was star-studded, featuring an aging Fay Templeton, a young Bob Hope, Fred MacMurray, and George Murphy, and if Harbach’s book was typically inane, Kern’s score was not, for it gave us “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”

The critic and historian Martin Gottfried has said
that the great composers can be rightly judged by the strength of their greatest song, and for Jerome Kern, that song is “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.” With Kern’s tune wedded to one of the greatest lyrics ever written for an American popular song, “Smoke” was popular in the show and became more popular in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers film version of
Roberta.
But most people must know this great song from the single cut by the Platters. Number One on the charts for three weeks in 1959, the Platters’ version rescued a dormant title (a feat publicly acknowledged by no less a high priest than Oscar Hammerstein II) and made the song sing to future generations.

One of the twentieth century’s great works of theater,
The Threepenny Opera,
yielded one of the century’s great melodies, Kurt Weill’s A-minor “Moritat von Mackie Messer,” with Bertolt Brecht’s brilliant, cynical lyric translating as “The Moritat (ballad) of Mackie the Knife.”
The Threepenny Opera
came and went quickly on Broadway in 1933, but the piece gained acceptance as a classic, particularly in Europe, and was revived off-Broadway in 1955 at the Theatre de Lys. Marc Blitzstein’s Eisenhower-era bowdlerization of
Threepenny
slowly became one of the biggest hits in off-Broadway history.

It was this Blitzstein translation that crooner Bobby Darin had worked into his nightclub act, and he laid it down on vinyl in 1959, with a swingin’ band behind him, subverting and somewhat neutralizing the lyric about the robber-killer Macheath, a/k/a Mack the Knife. The public snapped it up despite the subtext of
the song, and Darin’s recording hit Number One on the charts and became
Billboard’s
number two song of the year.

The dichotomy of the two versions of the song was not lost on the creators of the 1994 movie
Quiz Show.
Robert Redford opened his film with folks rushing to get home to see the popular quiz shows of the day, accompanied by Darin’s version, and ended with a grainy Kinescope of grotesque audience faces laughing, oblivious to the scandals, as singer Lyle Lovett’s somber version of the “Moritat” played.

Meredith Willson’s 1958 musical was hailed as a classic almost from the beginning, but amidst all the trombones and Shipoopis, the tender second act ballad of realization, “Till There Was You,” was somewhat lost. Again, we can thank the kids for bringing it into the national consciousness: After pop songstress Peggy Lee recorded her version in 1961, the Beatles recorded it in July 1963, apparently influenced by her non-sentimental version, and included it on
With The Beatles
(known as
Meet The Beatles
in the US).

The Fab Four had been carrying “Till There Was You” around with them for some time (at least as far back as their audition for Decca Records), and they gave it a new feel, with Spanish guitars and a beguine beat, ending on a most un-Willson-esque F major chord with a major seventh. This version is easily the most famous of all, and many first-time listeners are surprised to discover the song wasn’t originally a Latin number at all.

Johnny Carson’s favorite song comes from what is easily the most obscure musical on this list.
Carnival in Flanders,
based on the award-winning 1936 French film
La Kermesse Heroique,
was a six-performance bomb as chaotic as a Breughel painting and about as easy to decipher. Wouldn’t
you
think Johnny Burke, Jimmy Van Heusen, and Preston Sturges were the right guys to pen a medieval tuner set in a small Flemish town? Anybody?

Carnival in Flanders
nevertheless gave us “Here’s That Rainy Day,” another wistful ballad for a rough year, and wisely gave it to Dolores Gray, who defined Sexy Middle Age on Broadway during the Golden Era. The late, great Gray won her Tony for 1953’s
Flanders,
the shortest-running show to ever net a performer a Tony, and “Here’s that Rainy Day” entered the jazz band and torch song repertoire, while at the same time capturing the attention of a certain talk-show host from Nebraska.

Unless you count Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” written for the 1982 film version of
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
and made world famous by Whitney Houston ten years later, “One Night in Bangkok” is the last hit song from a musical to make the top of the pop charts.

A catchy piece of ’80s junk-pop from the ’80s junk-pop musical
Chess
made famous by the Murray Head single, “Bangkok” was written by Tim Rice, Benny Andersson,
and Bjorn Ujlvaeus. The pre-sold success of the song insured the high profile of the show.

Stephen Sondheim’s one and only hit song (by himself, that is—
West Side Story
and
Gypsy
have done him just fine, thank you) wasn’t yet a smash when
A Little Night Music
won six Tony Awards in 1973. It took pop singer Judy Collins (and her musical director, Jonathan Tunick, also Sondheim’s orchestrator) to make it truly famous.

On her 1975 hit album,
Judith,
Collins delivered a simple, piano-accompanied version of “Send in the Clowns,” preserving the undercurrent of regret and sadness inherent in the song (while somewhat obscuring the nocturne setting of the piece). Collins’s version won Sondheim the Grammy Award for “Song of the Year” for 1975, and gave the song an entry into the popular consciousness it never would have received through the superb but somewhat rarified
Night Music.

As beautiful a song as “September Song” is, it’s actually quite a manipulative little piece in context.
Knickerbocker Holiday
concerns the life and times of Pieter Stuyvesant, the aging governor of New Amsterdam, and the Kurt Weill-Maxwell Anderson song is sung to convince his nubile young intended, Tina, to consider his suit in marriage, peg-leg, eye patch and all, instead of the young troublemaker she really loves, and to do it now.

“September Song” was written for the actor Walter Huston, a craggy persona with no real singing voice and no real vocal range. Weill wrote a verse which was short-lined and a chorus which was limited as far as range, leaving Huston ample opportunity to “act” the song and put it over that way. This he did, and his studio recording of the song was a hit even after the show closed.

Huston did not re-create his role in the 1944 film version of
Knickerbocker Holiday
(just as well—it’s a bit of a bomb), but the song was still put over well by Charles Coburn, furthering its popularity. But Huston is the performer most people associate with “September Song,” and since he was not primarily a musical theater talent, most people don’t realize the song comes from a musical, let alone one as little-known as
Knickerbocker Holiday.

Here’s one for the sports fans out there. The theme song of the most successful team in the history of English football (“soccer” to us Yanks) has as its motto and theme song a 1945 show tune by Rodgers and Hammerstein. But Liverpool FC and
Carousel’s
Billy Bigelow have much in common.

As Billy lays dead in
Carousel,
Nettie Fowler sings “You’ll Never Walk Alone” to his grieving widow, giving her the strength to carry on. In 1966, with English football at the top of the world (hosting and winning the World Cup), Liverpool Football Club was on top of the domestic game. The supporters of the club unofficially adopted the version of “Walk Alone” performed by Liverpool band Gerry and the Pacemakers, the lyric
matching the life-and-death importance the English give their football. The song is played as the players take the pitch to this day, and the club crest boasts the words “May you never walk alone.” Even Pink Floyd incorporated a version of it into their 1971
Meddle
LP.

What people in the theater seem loath to acknowledge is that the state of the Broadway musical is almost as creatively bankrupt as the much-maligned movie industry—which is why the majority of the below listed titles are current. Here are a few examples of stage musicals adapted from movies.

The film that many consider the pinnacle of the movie musical, it’s a flawless, joyous celebration of movement. The hilarious script (by Betty Comden and Adolph Green) deals with Hollywood’s awkward steps from silents to talkies as well as the need for quality rainwear.

The 1985 stage version, however, upset the sleek screenplay by dropping in unnecessary extra numbers (“Hub Bub,” an extended “Wedding of the Painted Dolls”) and giving other characters extraneous and often downright unpleasant dialogue. Modern dance pioneer Twyla Tharp directed and choreographed, but
the show had little effect on a real live stage, where even the water seemed extraneous.

This great 1933 movie musical was a backstage fable to begin with, and even as re-authored by Michael Stewart for a 1980 audience, it was pure showbiz corn from the word go. The classic story—Girl Off Turnip Truck who Dances Like an Angel gets job understudying Temperamental Star with Rich Boyfriend, Girl gets Fired by Star, Star breaks Leg, Desperate Producer Hires Girl back, Girl becomes Star of Biggest Hit Ever— was played with a clear-eyed sense of Broadway as Wonderland.

Thanks to director-choreographer Gower Champion, the show strutted in high style, with tap, jazz, ballet, and good old hoofing all on view in a chorus dancer’s dream. The Abominable Showman himself, David Merrick, had his last great hit producing
42nd Street,
and the death of Gower Champion on the show’s opening day added to the legend of this long-running show.

The fine 1978 disco movie, the coming-of-age story of Tony Manero, a working-class mook who finds himself on the disco floor on Saturday nights, was fleshed out for the Broadway stage in 1999. The legendary Bee Gees tunes from the film were augmented with other songs from the movie’s soundtrack album, plus other disco-riffic hits of the era.

The show was clearly an attempt at ’70’s nostalgia, and the attempt to shoehorn the songs into the book was clunky (and probably doomed to failure). The lack
of John Travolta’s star presence didn’t help either—the show boasted no stars, although it created one in the monomial Orfeh.

One of the finest musicals ever conceived for film, this 1954 adaptation of the bucolic tale “The Sobbin’ Women” featured glorious CinemaScope photography and two of the best musical numbers ever shot, “Lonesome Polecat” and the immortal “Barn Raising,” with choreography by the estimable Michael Kidd.

Opening on Broadway in the summer 1982, it should have been obvious that no stage adaptation could ever match the peerless film version, and the well-cast but ultimately pointless stage version closed in less than a week. It has gone on to a better life in regional theaters.

Disney’s phenomenally popular 1994 animated film was adapted by some old friends (film composers Elton John and Hans Zimmer, lyricist Tim Rice, and librettist Irene Mecchi) as well as many new hands. But the guiding hand belonged to director and costume designer Julie Taymor.

While the film of
The Lion King
is occasionally lovely and visually worthy of the veldt setting, the 1998 Broadway version became a vision of almost unparalleled beauty and creativity. Taymor and the other designers, scenic designer Richard Hudson, and lighting designer Donald Holder, met the cinematic challenges in brilliantly theatrical ways, making the stage show a tribal ritual unfolding as the storytellers enact the tale for us, the audience.

A
fin de siécle
affection for all things ’80s and kitsch is the only explanation for this dumb year 2000 stage adaptation of the dumb quasi-movie musical hit from 1982. If you care, it’s about a free-spirited kid who’s just gotta dance, and who has the misfortune to move to a town where no one is allowed to dance. No compelling reason is given as to why jitterbugging is ix-nayed, but Bad Preacher Daddy is involved. Let me guess: Since it’s a
musical,
I bet everybody ends up cutting a big rug at the end. Yes, indeed.

A smash that made New York and the world giddy with smash-hit-itis,
The Producers
is the stage version of Mel Brooks’s great 1968 film comedy. The changes made to the movie for its adaptation to the musical stage in 2001 are a model example of the genre.

Brooks (and his co-librettist, Thomas Meehan) wisely re-set the tale in 1959, the end of Broadway’s Golden Age, to point up Max Bialystock’s many previous failures (shows like
South Passaic
and
High Button Jews,
for example). The songs Brooks added to the show delineated the characters better than dialogue would have, but the real ace in the hole was Susan Stroman’s no-holds-barred direction and choreography. Maxing out her budget, she created one outrageous gag after another, sometimes with the help of the design team (singing pigeons with Nazi armbands) and sometimes with just an outrageous flourish (a chorus girl twisting herself into a swastika at the end of “Springtime for Hitler.”)