Broadway's Most Wanted (6 page)

The title is actually longer than the run of this show, which started with a fine pedigree, but somewhere went very wrong. Neil Simon adapting his very funny (and stage-smart) hit film, Tony-winning pros David
(City of Angels)
Zippel and Marvin
(A Chorus Line)
Hamlisch to score it, and Bernadette Peters and Martin Short to star as a fading Broadway hoofer and an up-and-coming thespian.

So. Santo Loquasto’s sets were mainly interiors, and too cartoonish at that, and the book and score never rose to the occasion offered—a sexy musical comedy about two lonely people against the big backdrop of New York Show Business. Simon himself opined that the only good thing about the show was Short’s performance, and Simon later rewarded Short with 1999’s revival of
Little Me,
for which Short won a Tony.

Like the great film that inspired it, 2002’s
Sweet Smell of Success
was a poison-pen letter to New York City— this “Dirty Town,” as lyricist Craig Carnelia called it. Marvin Hamlisch wrote the music, and John Guare adapted the cynical screenplay to the stage.

A story of ruthless ambition run amok, a young press agent is willing to do anything to anybody to curry favor with star columnist J.J. Hunsecker, who still manages to make the young man’s life a living hell.
Despite a commanding, Tony-winning performance from John Lithgow as Hunsecker,
Sweet Smell
failed, probably because its film noir, wormy-Big-Apple outlook was not exactly what Broadway audiences wanted to see after 9/11.

Though not necessarily mutually inclusive (except for Show League softball), the worlds of sports and musicals have much in common: brightly-colored clothing, legions of fans who take their passion far too seriously, corporate-sponsored homes, and scantilyclad women for those not interested in the business at hand. Here are ten musicals all about sports—the athletes and the games.

The story of Joe, a middle-aged couch potato who’d sell his soul to the devil to see his Washington Senators win the pennant over those “damn Yankees,” this cheery 1959 show gave the songwriting team of Richard Adler and Jerry Ross their second consecutive smash, hot on the heels of
The Pajama Game
a year earlier.

The Senators, of course, are a hapless nine (presaging Gotham’s own original Mets) rejuvenated by the arrival of “Shoeless Joe From Hannibal, Mo.,” the rein
carnation of our old couch-bound Joe. Under the eyes of George Abbott and Bob Fosse, the Senators roared to the flag despite the presence of Ray Walston as “Mr. Applegate,” old Scratch himself, and the star turn of Gwen Verdon as Lola, his first-string home-wrecker, sent by Applegate to tempt Joe to distraction.

Three Eastern lads with gridiron skills and their prepphenom friend Manuelito (a young Desi Arnaz) journey west to Pottawottamie College in Stop Gap, New Mexico, at the behest of a rich man intent on providing bodyguards for his spoiled, beautiful daughter.

A fairly run-of-the-mill 1939 Rodgers & Hart college musical,
Too Many Girls
was best as a showcase for its young stars, notably Eddie Bracken, Van Johnson, and the aforementioned Desi Arnaz. Young Arnaz literally stopped the show during the production number “Spic and Spanish” by coming onstage in his football uniform, with his conga drum strapped to his chest, and drumming up a storm.

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Ben Elton’s musical from 2000 is set during the time of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Soccer (“football” in British parlance) is the “beautiful game” in question, serving as a refuge for the young heroes from the Catholic-Protestant violence engulfing the Ulster region. The young soccer players hope that their playing skills will serve as their ticket out of the Troubles, yet they know that the tribal nature of the game they love too easily echoes the sectarian violence ripping their country, their loves, and their lives apart.
The Beautiful Game
has, of this writing, yet to play New York.

Musical bios about famous people don’t usually work, and baseball isn’t a sport easily adaptable to the stage. So a musical about Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier with the Montreal Royals and the Brooklyn Dodgers may not have been the best idea of the 1981-82 season, at least not in the pedestrian version offered in
The First.
Part of what makes biographies hard to musicalize is the believability of famous people singing, and while Robinson himself, played ably by David Alan Grier, may have been a legitimate character for musicalization, it was harder to buy Dodgers Manager Leo Durocher and team owner Branch Rickey as singing characters. The libretto for
The First
was written by ABC-TV critic Joel Seigel, which placed the broadcast and print media who covered the show in a fairly uncomfortable position: that of reviewing the work of a fellow critic.

Another pre-sold hit from Britain, this 1986 musical used a Soviet vs. American chess masters’ match as a metaphor for the Cold War diplomacy between the countries, with some star-crossed romance thrown in for those unmoved by either sports or politics.

With a score by Tim Rice (the lyricist for
Evita, The Lion King,
etc.) and the B-Boys of Swedish supergroup ABBA, Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ujlvaeus, the show was to be directed by the great Michael Bennett, who bought a million pounds’ worth of video monitors to be used as scenic elements, effectively dwarfing a score which he saw as often unstageable. Trevor Nunn took over the direction when Bennett became ill, and it became
a long-running hit in London. The show made it to Broadway, heavily revised, for a short run in 1988.

One of the most popular musicals in American history, Irving Berlin’s classic is set in and around the world of the rodeo—Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, to be precise. But don’t be fooled. This is no SportsCenter highlight reel. A few trick shooting scenes aside, there truly is “No Business Like Show Business,” as Annie Oakley and Frank Butler spar in the center ring and woo each other behind the scenes, all the while insisting they’re as wrong for each other as can be. Uh-huh.

Produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein (no dummies they) in 1946, the show was undoubtedly the best vehicle ever for the original Annie, Ethel Merman. Merman had been a leading lady for years, but Berlin’s tender ballads for Annie showed the public a soft side to Merman that had never been tapped by other writers. For that reason, and despite Merman’s indelible stamp on the role, every female musical-comedy star wants to play Annie Oakley at some point in her career. A revival starring Bernadette Peters hit Broadway in 1999 and found great success with everyone from Susan “Erica Kane” Lucci to country star Reba McEntire doin’ what comes naturally.

The first hit show by the great, proto-American songwriter, George M. Cohan,
Little Johnny Jones
was a typical turn-of -the-century Broadway show, both onstage and off. The admittedly corny, flag-waving story of a Yankee jockey in England,
Johnny
was as basic and calculated-to-please as most of the shows of the
time, with little dramatic tension or story to get in the way of the girls and the socko songs.

Offstage, too, this 1904 show followed the formula of the time, all but unthinkable in today’s theater economy: Open on Broadway, withdraw to the road after the inevitable bad reviews, tour the show and revise it, then hit the Main Stem again, all guns blazing. And blaze they did: Cohan’s score gave us both “Yankee Doodle Boy” and “Give My Regards to Broadway,” either one of which would have guaranteed Cohan’s immortality and the show’s success. It was revived none too successfully, however, in the early ’80s, with David Cassidy not quite believable in the lead role.

Clifford Odets’ potboiling boxing play concerns a young Italian-American palooka intent on fighting his way out of his neighborhood. Neophyte producer Hillard Elkins floated the idea of a musical version of the play to Odets, and once Sammy Davis, Jr. expressed interest, Italian Joe Bonaparte became the Negro Joe Wellington. The score was written by Lee Adams and Charles Strouse, whose previous musical,
All American,
had also been about sports, specifically college football.

The differences between play and musical turned out to be the least of the problems in getting the show on, with Odets dying in 1963 (his work was finished in 1964 by William Gibson) and the original director (and many cast members) getting lost
(i.e.,
fired) in the shuffle. What worked, eventually, were the performance of Sammy Davis and the show’s climactic fight scene, performed to percussion, and thrillingly staged in a real boxing ring by Donald McKayle.

Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber reunited in 1986 to write this short chamber musical about Tim Rice’s favorite sport (he owns a cricket team, writes a cricket column for the London
Daily,
and has published several books on the sport). Trevor Nunn, also a cricket fan, was the director.

The piece was written as part of a Royal Command Performance for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, and was also performed at Lloyd Webber’s Sydmonton Festival. Due to the size and subject matter of the piece, and considering the unique circumstances surrounding its creation, it’s unlikely that
Cricket
will ever be seen professionally in New York or anywhere in the States.

This off-Broadway revue from 1984 was a collection of songs and sketches about the National Pastime, directed by the legendary Harold Prince, and it featured material contributed by over 40 writers, including
Beauty and the Beast’s
Howard Ashman and Alan Menken (though writing separately) and
Cabaret’s
team of John Kander and Fred Ebb.

The upbeat, lighthearted nature of the revue made it obvious that there would be no sketches on labor disputes, no drug references, and no “Ballet of the Rainout Showing of the 1975 All-Star Game Film.” About the most satirical the show got was a collection of blackout sketches taking off on voluble broadcaster Warner “Let’s go to the videotape” Wolf, here impersonated by actor Chip Zien.

The “revisal” is a fairly new phenomenon to Broadway. A revisal is a purely commercial rethinking of an exisiting show which is given the benefit of 20/20 hindsight and supposedly improved by wholesale changes to songs, story, or both. Here are ten revisals that had success at some level, either creatively or commercially.

Gilbert and Sullivan’s classic tale of duty, love, and Victorian silliness was given a full-throttle rethinking in 1980 by the New York Shakespeare Festival. New orchestrations (unfortunately overdone: listen to the xylophone playing sometime!) were a good indicator of the level of wackiness to be had.

Directed (and co-designed) by Wilford Leach, this
Pirates
was an unexpected hit at the Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park, then moved to Broadway for a multi-award-winning run. Incorporating two new songs (both from the other G & S operas) and a clipper ship’s worth of physical schtick,
Pirates
never ever took
itself seriously. Not for the die-hard Gilbert and Sullivan purist, perhaps, but a great deal of fun.

The veddy British musical comedy
Me and My Girl
was a smash hit between the wars in London, running for four years in the West End and even giving birth to a popular dance craze, the “Lambeth Walk.” Richard Armitage, the son of the show’s composer, Noel Gay, decided to remount the musical, about a Cockney bloke who inherits a title but not the attendant snobbishness, in 1984, and oversaw a painstaking reconstruction
of a show largely thought to be lost to the ages. Adding three new old songs and almost completely rewriting the book, the show touched a nostalgic nerve in the West End and rode the “All Things Big and British” wave to Broadway in 1986, winning raves for the show’s star, Robert Lindsay.

Not only is
Candide
the Granddaddy of all flop musicals, it’s also The Show That Would Not Die. After Broadway in 1956,
Candide
was tried with various and sundry revisions to script and score on tour and overseas, then greatly overhauled in 1973 for an off-Broadway production.

Hottest-director-in-the-world Harold Prince was asked to take a look at the show for the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Chelsea Theater Center. His new production was a wacky, juvenile, environmental staging with a completely new book by Hugh Wheeler and some new Stephen Sondheim lyrics to re-jiggered Leonard Bernstein melodies. The triptych-like show moved better than it had before, but it meant less. Which meant nothing to audiences, both off-Broadway and on, who responded to the show’s pedigree and Prince’s status and ate it up.

Prince, and especially Bernstein, kept prodding at the show, re-conceiving it for New York City Opera in 1982, Scottish Opera in 1990, Broadway
again
in 1997 after Bernstein’s death, and for the Community Women’s Church Guild Clock Tower Players Dinner Theater in McKeesport, Pennsylvania, in 1999.

A triumph of borrowed finery,
Crazy For You
is a 1992 musical very loosely based on a previous Gershwin
brothers musical,
Girl Crazy. Crazy For You,
like
Girl Crazy,
concerned a man who ventured out West and fell in love with the town’s only girl.

Girl Crazy
later “became”
Crazy For You,
featuring a new libretto by Ken Ludwig, who added a palatable show business subplot to the proceedings. Bobby, our hero, goes to Nevada to foreclose on a theater and ends up putting on a show and falling in love. A few of the Gershwin songs from
Girl Crazy
were thrown out and other Gershwin songs (“Tonight’s the Night,” “What Causes That?”) supported the standards from the earlier show (“Embraceable You,” “I Got Rhythm”). In its spiffy new duds,
Crazy For You,
directed and choreographed in superbly physical style by Mike Ockrent and Susan Stroman, respectively, was judged to be sufficiently “new” enough to win the Best Musical Tony in 1992.