Broadway's Most Wanted (3 page)

Yet another musical directed by Des McAnuff (the
auteur-
by-right of contemporary rock musicals, it would seem) and developed in La Jolla, California, and at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, prior to opening on Broadway in April 1985,
Big River
took on no less a Herculean task than Mark Twain’s
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Playwright William Hauptmann pruned Twain to fit the stage, keeping Huck as the narrator as well as a participant in the adventures. Folk-rock troubador Roger Miller wrote the score, delivering a simple, pleasing treatment of Twain’s novel largely devoid of his “can’t roller skate through a buffalo herd” smart-aleckness. The ballad “River in the Rain” and the country-waltz “You Oughta be Here With Me” were highlights.

In an unusually timely project in the wait-and-see arena of Broadway musical production, singer-songwriter Harry Chapin rushed this revue/rock show to Broadway in 1975 to capitalize on the popularity of his hit single “Cat’s in the Cradle.” The song was not heard in the show however, theater fans saw through the spectacle, and the revue had only a short run on Broad
way. Chapin’s songs, however (including some from an earlier sci-fi musical called
Zinger),
are distinctly story-like in nature, and his off-Broadway musical
Cotton Patch Gospel
(Christ’s life as told by “Matt the Revenuer”—Saint Matthew—and set in rural Georgia) and the regional theater revue
Lies and Legends
are testament to the enduring popularity (and theatricality) of his songs.

Rupert Holmes made his career as a writer, producer, and performer in Los Angeles, most notably with the number one single “Escape (the Pina Colada Song).”

Despite its easy-listening trappings, “Escape” was a song with a true narrative, so it came as no surprise when Holmes’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’ unfinished novel
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
opened at the Delacorte Theatre in New York’s Central Park. What
was
surprising was that Holmes wrote all of it—book, score, and orchestrations—and inserted an ingenious second-act twist: he let the audience, by vote, solve the mystery every night, effectively finishing what Dickens never wrote. After a hit engagement in the Park in the summer of 1985,
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
soon moved to Broadway and became a multi-Tony-winning hit. Holmes has written two straight plays for Broadway since
Drood:
the thriller
Accomplice
and the one-man multimedia whatizit
Solitary Confinement

The great songwriting team of Leiber and Stoller gave the pop music world hit after hit in the ’50s and ’60s. In
1995, a flashy revue of their biggest hits, called
Smokey Joe’s Café,
came to Broadway.

Previously produced in Chicago (under the name
That’s Rock and Roll!),
director Jerry Zaks and choreographer Joey McKneely were brought in to polish up the work of the revue’s creator, Otis Sallid.
Smokey Joe’s Cafe
opened in the 1994-95 season, the worst Broadway season ever for new works, and lost all its seven Tony nominations. But the inventive staging, sexy advertising (featuring the short skirts and long legs of actress DeLee Lively), and familiar song titles (“Hound Dog,” “I’m a Woman,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and, of course, “On Broadway”) helped make
Smokey Joe’s
one of the longest-running eligible Broadway musicals to have never won a single Tony.

The following ten musicals add up to much more than ten. But who’s counting? Five, six, seven, eight…

This cheeky musical comedy (by Maury Yeston and Larry Gelbart) is based on the first five books of the Bible. Originally offered by Manhattan Theater Club, it was revised later as
History Loves Company
and
In the Beginning.

This 1970 musical based on Clifford Odets’s play
The Flowering Peach,
concerning Noah and the building of his Ark, was most notable as one of Richard Rodgers’s last shows, and for the return of Danny Kaye to Broadway. It was his last visit.

This grand musical dealt with the drafting, debating, and signing of the Declaration of Independence during
the long, hot summer of the titular year. Thanks to this Peter Stone-Sherman Edwards musical, it was indeed a very good year.

This was not such a great year. Meredith Willson’s Christopher Columbus musical had the great Chita Rivera as Columbus’s patron, Queen Isabella. Willson’s facility with musical comedy was not well suited to the European costume trappings necessary for
1491,
and the show never made it to Broadway.

A sad sack named Nomax gets advice on life and love from five fellows named Moe (Big Moe, Little Moe, Four-Eyed Moe, Eat Moe, and No Moe) in this high-spirited tribute to swing composer Louis Jordan, conceived by Clarke Peters. A big hit in London, it was less potent in the States.

Give the boy a banjo! British boy singer Tommy Steele’s big splash on Broadway was
Half a Sixpence,
a Brit hit of a Cockney fable about a “workin’ lad ’O inherits a bleedin’ for-choon.” Song-and-dance man Steele and choreographer Onna White got the best reviews.

John Kander and Fred Ebb wrote this musical (with Norman L. Martin), very loosely based on the British film
Make Mine Mink.
The residents of a retirement home decide to rob a furrier, apparently just to prove
they’re not too old to rob a furrier. The whole enterprise was too cutesy-poo to cut very deeply at all.

One of the most effective film-to-stage musical transfers,
42nd Street
was a straightforward retelling of the corny backstage film of the same name. Many, many people came to meet those dancing feet hoofing their way through Gower Champion’s classic dances. (The original 1981 production didn’t play at a theater on 42nd Street, though the 2002 revival did.)

The imaginative 1981 Tony winner, based on Fellini’s film
8 1/2.
Tommy Tune’s inventive staging and brilliant color shadings heightened the tale of a once-great film director in crisis with his art and with the women in his life.

Tenderloin
has a highly enjoyable score (by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick) and is based on a true story. It concerns the Reverend Brock, a Gay Nineties holy roller intent on cleaning up the Tenderloin, New York’s seedy downtown sin district. The fact that the Reverend Brock was less appealing than the media figures and skin traders he was fighting is the main reason this show flopped.

Where do you long to be? Away from the humdrum? These ten musicals will indulge your fantasy quotient.

This quaint musical from 1960 was based on a novel by B.J. Chute, who set his tale in Greenwillow, a mythical village where the male members of the Briggs family were apt to follow the “call to wander.” Remarking on the elusiveness of the eponymous village, Chute himself said of Greenwillow’s location, “I have been told variously that it is located in such diverse regions as Vermont, Corsica, Denmark, and the Kentucky mountains.”

Broadway legend Frank Loesser (
Guys and Dolls, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying)
wrote the score, which is easily his most bucolic. Musical theatre neophyte (and later Oscar-winner for
The Sting)
George Roy Hill was the director, and Anthony Perkins was the star.

One of Broadway’s most glorious scores comes from one of its most satirical musicals. Set in Rainbow Valley in the state of Missitucky, the 1947
Finian’s Rainbow
is a political satire about a corrupt senator who clashes with the tobacco sharecroppers of the valley.

The sharecroppers are spearheaded by the daughter of Finian McLonergan, an Irishman who has stolen a pot of gold from a leprechaun back in Ireland in order to plant it next to Fort Knox, where it will grow bigger. Considered wildly liberal in its time, the show gave us standards like “Look to the Rainbow,” “Old Devil Moon,” and “How are Things in Glocca Morra?”

Between the classic 1937 Frank Capra film
Lost Horizon
and the 1973 dud remake came this 1956 stage version of James Hilton’s novel of a Himalayan paradise. The premise was much the same as the film: Travelers searching for Paradise find the real thing in Tibet.

But convincingly showing Shangri-La on stage (where the mountains were clearly made of plastic), confining it to the proscenium, was harder than showing it on film, and the inevitable comparison to the movie ensured the musical would flop. Shows like this prove the rule that fantasies and special effects are better done by the movies.

Al Capp’s classic comic strip seemed to cry out for musicalization and got it in this superb 1956 stage version. All the denizens of Dogpatch were there, notably Stubby Kaye as Marryin’ Sam and Julie Newmar, who
stopped the show (and the hearts of more than a few tired businessmen) as Stupefyin’ Jones.

The score was by Gene DePaul and Johnny Mercer, with superb and very physical choreography by the great Michael Kidd. His “Sadie Hawkins’ Day Ballet,” in which winsome Daisy Mae and evil Appassionata Von Climax vie for the heart and mind of our hero, Abner Yokum, is considered a classic.

The great Judy Holliday gave a legendary performance as Ella, the Susanswerphone girl, in
Bells Are Ringing,
but her next show,
Hot Spot,
which never opened on Broadway, unfortunately left the comedienne high and dry. She again played a nice girl who gets mixed up in someone else’s problems, this time as a Peace Corps emissary to the tiny island of D’Hum. That the name of the island was pronounced “dumb” all night gives an indication of what kind of show this was. Holliday was in financial straits at the time (1960) and only took the show to pay debts. Sadly, she died soon after it closed out of town.

What’s a Flahooley, you ask? Well, the show’s authors (E.Y. Harburg of
Finian’s Rainbow,
Sammy Fain, and Fred Saidy) said it was the only word they could think of that you couldn’t spell backwards. (It’s really an Irish word describing a flight of fancy.)

That was the mindset behind this certifiably crazy musical, set mostly in Capsulanti, USA, at a toy factory where a young toymaker, with the help of a genie from a lamp (don’t ask), creates his new doll, the Flahooley, which laughs when you shake it. The genie floods the
market with Flahooleys (he doesn’t want to return to the lamp), causing a depression, and the public outcry is palpable.

A 1951 Korean-War-era satire on postwar business and political ethos,
Flahooley
never found an audience on Broadway, despite the presence of such pros as Barbara Cook, Ernest Truex, and the mysterious Yma Sumac as an Arab princess with a penchant for throat singing. But
Flahooley
has charm and wit in abundance (the opening number is called, with tongue firmly in cheek, “You Too Can Be a Puppet,” in which the toy-makers of Capsulanti urge America to “Come out of the woodwork, brother/And join the Brotherwood of Man.”), as well as that sharp satirical edge.

“Someday: The earth will be perfect. Humans will be beautiful and all the same color. And making love will be easier than making friends.” So said the ad copy for
Via Galactica,
a 1972 outer-space musical with a space-age flavor. A rock musical set in outer space seemed like a groovy idea at the time, but despite the efforts of distinguished Shakespearean director Peter Hall and a talented cast,
Via Galactica
just seemed silly when actually staged.

Trampolines dotted the stage of the new Uris Theatre, so the actors bounced around. Those actors who didn’t either tended to move around in cheesy spaceships (again, better done by the flicks) or on wires. Galt MacDermot wrote the score, which, along with his score for the horrific road musical
Dude,
was his second disaster of the season. These two bombs were greatly responsible for hastening the demise of the rock musical.

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s moving musical about the inner lives and dreams of fairy tale characters came to Broadway in the fall of 1987 with one of the strongest casts ever assembled for a musical (and the boot of a giant descending from the roof of the Martin Beck Theater).

The authors examined the lives of Red Riding Hood, Jack (and his beanstalk), Cinderella, and their cohorts to find out what came of their wishes and wants. The characters (plus those of a fairy tale Lapine invented, “The Baker and his Wife”) all have needs, and to get what they need, they have to scheme, lie, cheat, etc., in Act One. Act Two sets the consequences of their actions in motion,
after
Happily Ever After, forcing these fairy tale characters to make real-life choices. Critics made note of the parallel between
Into the Woods
and psychologist Bruno Bettelheim’s “The Uses of Enchantment,” in which psychological problems can be examined through analysis of the Grimm’s tales and situations.

After the legendary Off-Broadway success of
The Fantasticks,
composer Harvey Schmidt and lyricist-librettist Tom Jones had the means to do what they wanted in the theatre, and this very experimental 1969 Broadway show had been percolating for some time. It’s an allegory of youth versus age, poverty and purity versus wealth and corruption, set on “a platform” and featuring an orphan battling against the richest man in the world for the heart of a winsome young beauty.