A 1978 flop,
Rockabye Hamlet
is folly made flesh: Let’s musicalize the greatest play in Western history! And make it a rock musical! That’s really a concert! Here’s the downside, though: It’ll suck. (Cast member Meat Loaf called it “the most horrifying experience of my life.”)
Hello, Dolly!
director Gower Champion was a little at sea with this rock setting of
Hamlet,
the brainchild of Canadian Clifford Jones. Too much pumped-up, concert-style bombast couldn’t hide the serious shortcomings of the amateurish score, which had songs called “Pass the Biscuits, Mama,” “The Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Boogie,” and Ros and Guil’s set-up for Hamlet, “Have I Got a Girl For You.” Stephen Sondheim, who makes pancakes better than
Rockabye Hamlet,
might have sued over that last one, if he gave a damn.
Another post-modern update of Shakespeare, this one takes
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
and sets it in the glam world of New York disco clubs. It opened in 1999 and has proven tremendously popular.
Subtitled
A Midsummer Night’s Disco, The Donkey Show
(so named because of Bottom’s transformation) concerns club owner Oberon and his Puckish sidekick, Dr. Wheelgood, who feed four nightclub patrons a potion to set their emotions in motion. Spectators can join the company in shaking it on the dance floor or watch from the rafters.
Perhaps it’s the cross-dressing, perhaps it’s the exotic locale, perhaps it’s those most musically apropos
opening lines, but
Twelfth Night
has spawned numerous high-profile musical adaptations, including Broadway’s
Play On!
in 1997, which moved the action to a swingin’ Harlem and used Duke Ellington songs, and
Love and Let Love,
which around the same time of the previously mentioned
Your Own Thing,
but fared much worse. Two thousand two brought
Illyria,
by Peter Mills, to New York.
Which brings us to 1976 and
Music Is.
Legendary showmeister George Abbott authored the book, with lyrics by Will Holt and music by the great Richard Adler (a longtime Abbott collaborator, dating back to
Damn Yankees
and
The Pajama Game).
Adler’s work was probably the best thing about this unimaginative, straightforward treatment of
Twelfth Night.
Some musicals can seem almost impossible for one reason or another, yet they end up being wonderful. But some ideas for musicals are just so hard to believe that to learn of their very existence is to smack one’s forehead. Here are ten musicals whose existence remains, as the King of Siam said, a puzzlement.
Perhaps the all-time head-scratcher, this six-performance 1986 bomb was the work of folks who decided there was something Broadway-worthy in the Holy Shroud of Turin. All serious questions of faith aside, how does one make scientists and religious figures look credible when they have to sing and dance? And since the shroud’s veracity is still an open question, what’s the point?
This 1981 horror is People’s Exhibit A as to why sequels never work in musicals. The great
Bye Bye Birdie
told its tale and went its way, and there was no pressing need to pick up with these characters twenty years later. Especially not when Birdie is an overweight Elvis clone, teen couple Kim and Hugo are nowhere in sight, and Rosie and Albert’s kids are in a punk rock band. But a smash is a smash, and many felt the desire to update the tale, suggesting that economics really ruled the day. Four performances later, everyone felt much, much dumber.
Another ill-advised catch-up job,
A Doll’s Life
examined what happened after Nora Helmer slammed the door and walked out of her husband Torvald’s life in Ibsen’s
A Doll’s House.
Why, exactly? Add to this the conceit of having the actors playing these roles in rehearsal for a production of the Ibsen play, only to warp into the musical’s reality, and the head-scratching increases. Despite the presence of old pros Harold Prince, Larry Grossman, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green, 1982’s
A Doll’s Life
never made much theatrical sense.
A show with a defiantly gay-camp point of view,
Rachael Lily Rosenbloom
(the extra “A” in “Rachael” being the one Barbra Streisand dropped) told the rags-to-bitches story of the eponymous heroine, from kittenish maid to ferocious movie star. Tom Eyen (who later
mainstreamed this story into
Dreamgirls)
and Paul Jabara wrote it, and a weird, in-no-way-coked-out-of-everyone’s-mind time was had by all. Until it closed after a week of previews.
The great Jule Styne
(Gypsy, Bells are Ringing)
collaborated with playwright Herb Gardner
(I’m Not Rappaport, A Thousand Clowns)
on this 1980 eye-blinker about a tunesmith who intends to kill himself for our entertainment. The show proper was the back-story to the aforementioned suicide, but why anyone ever thought it should have been a musical is a question for the ages. It closed during its try out period en route to Broadway.
Yes, indeed. The grandest, most spectacular tale ever told on film was given the musical treatment in 1973, and to the surprise of many, it wasn’t laughed out of the country. Actually, it
started
out of the country, in Japan in 1970, as
Scarlett,
with a score by the estimable Harold Rome and staging by Joe Layton. Playwright Horton Foote came aboard for the pre-Broadway try-out, when the name changed to
GWTW,
starring Lesley-Ann Warren and Pernell Roberts. The show closed on the road to Broadway after the critics weighed in with predictable pans. While much of the show was intriguing, just why they bothered to try making it a Broadway musical is still a mystery.
Well, at least this one was kind of a hit.
Beatlemania
was, basically, a cover band. Basically just four guys
who may or may not have looked and/or sounded like the Beatles, playing instruments and wearing a huge variety of time-specific costumes and wigs in front of time-specific “1960s” projections. Listen up, everybody, four guys up on stage dressed in Sgt. Pepper outfits
doesn’t make them the Beatles.
And it ran for 920 performances! And then they made a movie out of it! What the hell is wrong with us?
There seem to be two Cy Colemans: Classy Cy, who writes
City of Angels, Sweet Charity,
and other sleek shows, and Tacky Cy, who indulges his trashy impulses and puts them onstage. Results include
I Love My Wife
(’70s swingers),
The Life
(hookers and pimps in Times Square), and the least successful of these shows, 1989’s
Welcome to the Club.
Welcome to the Club
concerns a bunch of stereotypes in alimony jail, with only their thoughts to bail them out. Seemingly as stuck in the ’70s as the other two Tacky Cy shows, its leering, Leroy Lockhorn-style take on women and relationships was well out of place in 1989, not to mention cheaply produced.
Composer/lyricist Frank Wildhorn had some success with two late-1990s musicals,
Jekyll & Hyde
in 1997 and
The Scarlet Pimpernel
in 1998. Both these shows featured power-pop scores rather well suited to their “Classics Illustrated” sources, and enough fan interest to make their progress at least interesting. His next Broadway show, 1999’s
The Civil War,
was more, and ultimately less, of the same. The
Civil War,
with lyrics by Jack Murphy, began as a double pop-album project,
with Wildhorn’s pop-soup ballads and pastiche rousers recorded by the likes of Hootie and the Blowfish and Travis Tritt. While the recording again stirred some interest, the lack of a linear story line to hang these songs on (the book was cobbled together from letters and speeches of the period) should have been evidence enough that it wouldn’t work onstage, and indeed it didn’t. Critics and audiences dismissed the show as eminently unworthy of its subject matter.
Yet another show ill suited to Broadway, 2002’s
Dance of the Vampires
(adapted from the movie
The Fearless Vampire Killers)
is a piece of Euro-trash retro fitted for a camp audience in New York. To New York’s credit, it didn’t take. At all.
Adapted from the Viennese pop-opera smash
Tanz der Vampire,
songwriter Jim Steinman collaborated with playwright David Ives and original author Michael Kunze on the new version.
Vampires
is set in, oh dear, Lower Belabartokovitch and concerns the restless Count von Krolock, locked in a good-and-evil struggle for the soul of … someone to bite, maybe?
Peppered with lines like “God has left the building,” the new book obviously aimed for good campy fun, but the score was not suitably altered to match the book, and it showed.
Vampire
never would have risked Broadway were it not for the presence of its star, Michael Crawford, whose magnetic performance in
The Phantom of the Opera
went a long way toward obscuring that show’s goth-camp flaws.
Since the dawn of theater, a man dressed as a lady (and, later, vice versa) has been a great way to get a laugh, and it’s no different in musicals. Often, however, musical theater writers have used drag characters and situations for something more substantial.
1948 brought
Where’s Charley? to
Broadway.
Charley,
featuring Frank Loesser’s first Broadway score, was adapted by George Abbott from Brandon Thomas’s 1892 farce
Charley’s Aunt
The type of play for which the term “warhorse” was invented, it involves forbidden romance, spinsters, lovestruck youth, and mistaken identity. And a man in drag.
Legendary clown Ray Bolger played lovesick Charley Wykeham, who dresses as his own spinster aunt to gain access to his beloved Amy Spettigue (played by the lovely Allyn Ann McLerie). Madcap hilarity ensues. Bolger took the show’s hit, “Once in Love with Amy,” and turned the gentle stroll into an audience sing-along
number which endeared him further to the crowds, helping to turn the charming show into a 792-performance hit.
The plays of Plautus were the basis for this supreme farce, in which the drag doesn’t occur until late in the second act. The musical’s authors, Stepehen Sondheim, Larry Gelbart, and Burt Shevelove, made sure that the inevitable cross-dressing propelled the action, rather than distracted from it.
Pseudolus, a slave who will do anything to win his freedom, has enlisted the help of the ninny slave Hysterium, who must dress as a warrior’s deceased virgin bride-to-be in order to fool him, while Pseudolus spirits said virgin away, very much alive, to his master, Hero. (Trust me, it’s funnier than it sounds.) Since every character in this farce is a type (henpecked husband, wizened old man, vainglorious soldier, etc.), all eyes are fooled when Hysterium appears, scored to an ironic reprise of the ballad “Lovely,” as the golden-haired angel. The show reaches its acme in the mad chase that ensues.
A drag musical with a point of view, 1983’s La
Cage aux Folles
takes its inspiration from the French farce of the same name. The main characters are the owner of a drag club on the French Riviera and his lover, the club’s star attraction. The plot is set in motion by the impending marriage of the club owner’s son.
The owner, Georges, and his lover, Albin, are living a fairly domestic life (so Harvey Fierstein’s libretto tellsus),
until they learn that Michel, Georges’ son from a one-night assignation, is engaged to the daughter of a notoriously conservative politician. Jerry Herman’s score (his last for Broadway to date) delineates each lead: Georges, solid and masculine, and Albin, defiantly effeminate. Albin’s anthem of self-assuredness, “I Am What I Am,” ends the first act, as he doffs his wig before storming off stage.
This move backfires later, as Albin, in drag as Michel’s “mother,” doffs his wig by mistake at another nightclub, to the horror of the conservative couple. Finally, to slip past the press, the politician must dress in drag himself. “Honor thy father and mother,” Fierstein stated, was the theme of this smash hit, and though the journey is unusual, the end result is indeed, worthy of the term “family values.”
Rupert Holmes, pop recording artist, picked up a copy of Charles Dickens’ unfinished novel
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
prior to a train trip, and by the end of his journey, he knew he wanted to make a musical out of it. The trouble inherent in musicalizing the moody tale of a young dandy, his troubled uncle, and the woman who comes between them was simple: It wasn’t finished.
Holmes had his project adopted by Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in New York, who presented it in Central Park in the summer of 1985, prior to bringing it to Broadway for a Tony-winning run. Holmes wrote the book, music, lyrics, and the orchestrations, a nearly-unprecedented quadruple.
The task of finishing Dickens’s tale was assigned to the audience, who voted a different detective, murderer,
and set of lovers each night, and the whole show was placed within the context of a “performance” of
Drood
by the Music Hall Royale. As befits a music-hall setting, one of the leads was a “pants” role, a man’s part (Edwin Drood) played by “Miss Alice Nutting,” the diva of the Royale.