Jacques Demy’s 1964 musical masterpiece
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
is as cinematic a musical as there’s ever been; it’s a superb application of French New Wave film techniques to the movie musical genre. Fifteen years later, it was seen on the stage in New York under its English-language title,
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
The score for
Umbrellas
is all-sung, with much of Michel Legrand’s and Demy’s score featuring standalone songs and recurring musical motifs which predate the European pop-operas to come from the likes of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Boublil and Schonberg. New York’s Public Theater hosted the show, which was staged by Andrei Serban, a director with a noted eye for gorgeous stage pictures. Sheldon Harnick and Charles Burr translated the piece and used its English title, and while many agreed it was good to look at, it couldn’t compare to the riot of color and level of experimentation seen in the movie version.
Gigi
was the Best Picture Oscar winner for 1958, a beautifully stylized
bonbon
based on Colette’s novel of Gay Paree. A Broadway musical version, offered up in 1973, looked good but offered no improvements on the classic film.
The wondrous Alfred Drake was along to sing the Maurice Chevalier role, and audiences predictably enjoyed watching him “Sank Hay-ven for leetle gaaals,” but aside from Drake and attractive décor, audiences found little to savor. Perhaps the novel’s premise, a girl
basically being purchased by an older man, was not a socially acceptable topic for a musical by the 70s.
Here we go again. Like
Gigi, Meet Me in St Louis
was an attempt to take a classic MGM film musical and adapt it to the stage. And like
Gigi,
once again, the result was less than satisfying. Maybe the film’s director, Vincente Minnelli, would have made the difference.
Audiences again saw little need to plunk down big bucks to see a stage show of a film they could easily rent on video, even though the 1989 version looked great and moved well. The additions made to the simple story, like a Halloween Skeleton’s Ball, didn’t help either.
Tales of the sea often conjure up romantic images of hardy sailors and bloodthirsty pirates—images ideally suited to musical theater. Here are ten musicals that were all wet.
The seminal American musical, adapted and produced in 1927, from Edna Ferber’s grand novel. Flo Ziegfeld produced it, and a good thing too, because an ordinary-looking production of this show might have killed it.
Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II forever separated the musical from the operetta by letting the libretto and the songs cue the characters. As much about the Mississippi and, by extension, America as it was about the titular boat, the
Cotton Blossom, Show Boat
is without question the American theater’s most important musical.
A very loose adaptation of Aristophanes by Burt Shevelove, with songs by Stephen Sondheim, originally
performed in the Yale University swimming pool in 1974. It’s supposed to be a spectacle, but with two of the authors of
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
on hand, you never know just what kind of spectacle you’ve got. “The time is the present. The place is ancient Greece.”
Dionysos is traveling to the underworld, but gets waylaid by Charon and some frogs while on the river Styx. Or something like that. Then Shakespeare and Shaw start debating the value of art in society. Or something like that. Sondheim squeezes in a gorgeous setting of Shakespeare’s “Fear No More,” and the actors don’t need to shower before they leave.
A rightly forgotten one-performance bomb, this 1969 rock musical took as its source Herman Melville’s novel
Billy Budd. U
nfortunately, they played it for anti-war counterculture points instead of grasping the political and sexual allegory inherent in the Melville novel. Fortunately, no one cared. When people weren’t looking at Ming Cho Lee’s rope-ladder-playground ship set, they had to focus on the action. Too bad.
When the
Lusitania
sank, Cole Porter’s idea of a shipwreck musical sank with it. Years later, he wrote a shipboard story instead, and
Anything Goes
was the result. Great songs and the presence of first-class talent elevated this typical 1930’s screwball farce plot into a classic show.
Ethel Merman was Reno Sweeney, ship’s entertainer and part-time evangelist (so Porter could write a faux-spiritual, “Blow, Gabriel, Blow”) and William Gaxton
and Victor Moore were the clowns. The
echi
-thirties plot involves rich socialites, wacky gangsters, and Chinese guys. It’s more fun than it sounds.
The great American novel, Mark Twain’s
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
was adapted into a Broadway musical in time for the 1984-85 Broadway season, following a gestation period at American Repertory Theater and La Jolla Playhouse. La Jolla’s Artistic Director, Des McAnuff, appealed to country songwriter Roger Miller to supply the score, and Miller’s simple tunes and Spartan lyrics suited the show just fine.
Set largely on Huck and Jim’s raft, the show won seven Tony Awards (including the first Scenic Design Tony awarded to a woman, for Heidi Landesman’s brilliant evocation of the Mighty Mississippi; the river became almost a character itself) and ran for 1,005 performances on Broadway.
This ultra-spoofy 1968 off-Broadway musical hit was about, well, showbiz and boats. Bernadette Peters made her first big splash (ahem) in this homage to shipboard musicals, à la
Anything Goes,
and backstage musicals, à la
42nd Street.
A musical set on a ship has to perform on a ship for real after that nasty ol’ Depression tears the theater down. Sweet chorus nobody Ruby (Keeler?) saves the day, with the help of her Uncle Sam.
This delightful Broadway operetta from 1928 is perhaps the last of the great “Broadway operettas.” Sigmund
Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein II gave audiences one of the strongest scores in history, with hits like “Softly, As In a Morning Sunrise,” “Lover, Come Back to Me,” “Wanting You,” and the classic march “Stouthearted Men.” The typically grandiose plot concerns dashing French revolutionaries, beautiful maidens, and terror and heroism on the high seas, as the
New Moon
sails from France to the Louisiana territory.
Noel Coward’s 1961 shipboard musical comedy starred the priceless Elaine Stritch as Miss Paragon, the put-upon cruise director aboard the S.S.
Coronia.
Stritch’s part was built up in previews, when it was apparent that a darker subplot, involving an unhappy wife on a solo cruise, was not working. Coward did his usual all-me writing job and was greatly amused when critics attacked the piece for being paper thin and almost plotless, when Coward obviously had been writing fluff all along.
A somewhat troubled show in previews, due to its technical requirements, this elegant setting of the doomed ocean liner’s only voyage survived much tinkering to win the Tony for Best Musical in 1997 (and, FYI, it came out before the movie did).
Composer-lyricist Maury Yeston and librettist Peter Stone took characters from history (the Astors, ship’s architect Andrews) and invented others drawn from history (crew members, three Irish girls named Kate). Yeston’s music soared, particularly in the choral writing, and praise was unanimous for Stewart Laing’s
marvelous geometric sets, which tilted ominously as the evening went on.
This middling British pop opera from 1985 was based on
Mutiny on the Bounty.
Written by English pop artist/actor David Essex and Richard Crane, and starring Essex, it played for a year and a half in London’s West End. A truly spectacular set and good intentions notwithstanding, if a show has a song called “Breadfruit,”
and
features an exclamation point in the title,
and
doesn’t take place in Oklahoma, then you’re asking for it.
Most musicals are a fight between the forces of good and evil. Here are ten musical baddies, all wretched, all memorable, all juicy.
One of the creepiest characters to ever grace a musical,
Sweeney Todd’s
Judge Turpin is a miserable, pious lech who ruins an entire family before meeting his bloody comeuppance. Turpin condemns barber Todd to prison in Australia and rapes his wife, driving her insane. Todd finally slits the Judge’s throat as he sits in Todd’s barber chair.
Gaston Leroux’s gothic villain is a hideously deformed creature living in the bowels of the Paris Opera House. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1985 musical version, masterfully directed by Harold Prince, presents the Phantom, memorably portrayed by Michael Crawford in London and New York, in all his dark glory. Though physically repellent, The Phantom harbors a deep romantic passion
for art and beauty. Driven by an obsessive love for opera ingenue Christine Daae, he extorts, murders, and kidnaps to feed his neurasthenic needs.
With his physical unpleasantness, remote personality, and dank hideout,
Oklahoma!’s
Jud Fry is a sort of cousin to the Phantom. Jud, Aunt Eller’s ranch hand, lives out back in the smokehouse. Also like the Phantom, he has his own obsession, this one with Eller’s niece, Laurey. Not so much villainous as just plain creepy in the first act, his rage at losing Laurey to cowboy Curly turns truly dangerous in the second act, as he sets fire to a haystack during Curly and Laurey’s wedding shivaree.
She’s often hung over, she smokes like a chimney, and she likes to spank her charges. Well,
Annie’s
Miss Hannigan certainly wins no points for Mother of the Year. And yet, in her greatest act of villainy, that’s exactly what the lousy orphanage moll tries to do: Pass a friend off as orphan Annie’s mother to get next to Daddy Warbucks and claim his fortune. Every actress, from Dorothy Loudon, Nell Carter, and June Havoc onstage, to Carol Burnett onscreen, and Kathy Bates on television, has gotten her Depression-era grasping for the good life on “Easy Street” just right.
At least Mordred comes by his bitterness honestly: He’s King Arthur’s illegitimate son. (That must look awful on a resume.) As soon as he’s an adult, or what passed for an adult in the days of Lerner and Loewe’s 1960
musical
Camelot,
he declares “Fie on Goodness” and proceeds to take up arms in protest of his father’s moral code. Purely distilled by Alan Jay Lerner from Mallory and T.H. White, he’s easily interpreted as the Nazi element threatening Arthur’s democracy.
Bill Sikes is a typically Dickensian villain, and he’s given appropriately rude and crude music to establish him in Lionel Bart’s colorful score for
Oliver!
Bart disobeyed many of the American ground rules for musical writing, and simply had the murderous Sikes thunder on, stand in a doorway, and tell everyone how awful he is. We see just how awful at show’s end when he murders his Nancy.
The Li’l
Abner
comics were full of colorful characters blown up from reality. General Bullmoose was creator Al Capp’s ruthless capitalist, an Eisenhower-era baddie derived from Ike’s Secretary of Defense, Charles E. Wilson (“What’s good for General Motors is good for the country”). Bullmoose (about whom is sung, “What’s good for General Bullmoose/Is good for the U.S.A!”) wants to corner the market on Yokumberry tonic and is prepared to kill Li’l Abner to do so, but he’s hyp-mo-tized by Evil Eye Fleegle into admitting the truth. A typically satirical end for this Cappian creation.
Not too far from Bullmoose on the demagogue scale, Sen. Billboard Rawkins was a caricature of reconstructionist Senators Bilbo and Rankin. In
Finian’s Rainbow,
he’s a buffoon who wants to evict the honest sharecroppers of Rainbow Valley from their land in order to profit from the wonders of uranium. He’s turned black (oh, great) by a wish on an enchanted crock of gold, and after walking a mile (and dancing “The Begat”) in the sharecroppers’ shoes, he repents and spreads goodwill to the folks of the Valley.
A special sub-category of villain, the principled villain, is headed by
Les MisÉrables’
Inspector Javert. In every incarnation of Hugo’s epic tale, Javert is a single-minded nemesis to the hero, Jean Valjean. As Valjean seeks to put his past life of petty crime behind him, Javert stays on his trail, doggedly pursuing his elusive prey regardless of circumstance. “My duty’s to the law, you have no rights,” he sings as he first corners Valjean, in the 1985 musical smash. When, near the end of the musical, Valjean saves Javert’s life and escapes again, Javert, unable to cope with the perversions of justice and logic, takes his own life.
“Eve! You four-star bitch! Thank you!” So cries Margo Channing at the conclusion
of Applause,
the 1970 musical version of the legendary story and film
All About Eve.
Eve Harrington is a schemer, plain and simple, determined to become a famous actress at any cost. She wins the trust of her heroine, Margo, then proceeds to win almost everything else in Margo’s life, ruthlessly climbing the ladder of success all the way to the Tony Awards, where Margo, prodded out of complacency by Eve’s scheming, finally realizes that her most prized possession is the love and trust of her man.