A few terms with which the novice may not be familiar: A musical, on paper, consists of
music, lyrics
(the rhyming text accompanying the music), which together constitute the score of a musical, and a
libretto
(the
script
), also called the
book
. The
scenic
, costume, and lighting designers, in addition to the music director and the
choreographer
, who invents the dances for the musical, are under the aegis of the
stage director
, who in turn collaborates with all and reports to the
producer
of the musical, all in the effort to create
the best
show
possible. A show
rehearses
, then, after a
preview period
in which one hopes problems are ironed out in front of an audience,
goes up
(opens) on a predetermined date. Then after critics review the show, all and sundry can practice their
Tony Award
speeches. Or, they can get bad reviews and close in a week, adding yet one more title to the list of
flops
to plague Broadway.
That’s basically what happens to a musical. This book will introduce you to various lists of musicals, some fun, some serious, some famous, and some obscure. I hope you’ll be as intrigued as I was the first time I heard a piece of musical theater. If that’s the case, or even if it’s not, just do what I do, and what the Victorians did: Blame it on Gilbert and Sullivan.
The American Theater Wing’s Antoinette Perry Award, shortened in pop-culture parlance to the Tony Awards, are Broadway’s supreme achievement and honor. Here are ten notable winning examples of “distinguished achievement in the theater.”
Harold Prince, the innovative director and producer, is the proud possessor of a staggering 20, count ’em, 20 Tony Awards—more than any other individual. Prince’s Tony tally includes one special award for career achievement, eight for producing (starting in 1955 with
The Pajama Game),
and eight for directing (his last was for the revival of
Show Boat
in 1995). He often combined directing and producing, and came up Yahtzee, most notably for his shows with Stephen Sondheim in the 1970s:
Company, Follies, A Little Night Music,
and
Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Mel Brooks’s riotous musical farce from 2001 is the Broadway show with more Tony Awards than any
other.
The Producers,
based on Brooks’s film of the same name, enjoyed some great buzz when it previewed in Chicago, and there was no stopping it by the time it hit New York. The show is an overstuffed, laff-a-minnit, anything-goes, old-fashioned musical comedy, the likes of which hadn’t been seen on Broadway in years. It was no surprise when the raves and massive lines at the box office prompted Tony voters to reward the show with an unprecedented 15 nominations. So great was the sweep on awards night that the show won for every category in which it was nominated. Its only losses belonging to three actors (Roger Bart, Brad Oscar, and Matthew Broderick) nominated against other
Producers
cast members. By the end of the night,
The Producers
had racked up twelve Tonys.
The greatest composer-lyricist of his generation, Stephen Sondheim is the proud and rightful owner of six Tony Awards (should be nine, but who’s counting? Well, I am. Ahem:
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Pacific Overtures, Sunday in the Park With George.
Discuss.) for his thrilling and inventive scores for
Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods,
and
Passion.
The first three shows on the list gave Sondheim a unique Tony three-peat for the composer and lyricist awards. Tony voters and theater fans alike await his next Broadway musical (hopefully the long-delayed
Bounce)
like a message from Olympus, unhappily for all, it’s nine years and counting.
Before
The Producers
did its Tony smash-and-grab, there was
Hello, Dolly!
The breezy, brassy Jerry Herman-Michael
Stewart musical about everyone’s favorite pushy matchmaker held the record for the most Tony Awards for 27 years. The troubled David Merrick production just barely managed to scrape together its opening night, but it was obviously top-drawer musical theater from the get-go. The press quickly labeled
Hello, Dolly!
a smash, and its hot-ticket status smoothed the way to its winning an then-unprecedented 10 Tony Awards.
Two of the greatest Broadway performers in history share the most Best Musical Actress Tony Awards. Gwen Verdon, aka Sex on a Stage, the adorable red-haired triple threat and muse of Bob Fosse, won for her sensuous Lola in
Damn Yankees,
her sensusous scene-stealing in
Can-Can,
her sensuous Anna Christie in
New Girl in Town,
and her sensuous redheadedness in
Redhead.
Also the owner of four Tonys is the woman who’s basically Verdon’s stage alter ego, Angela Lansbury. The elegant and hilarious character actress won for her Rose in the 1974 revival of
Gypsy,
her Madwoman of Chaillot in
Dear World,
her indelible many-costumed
Mame,
and for her perfect Cockney capitalist, Mrs. Lovett, in
Sweeney Todd.
Frankie Michaels won the Tony for Best Featured Actor in a Musical in 1966 for his performance as young Patrick Dennis in
Mame.
He was also ten years old when it happened, making him the youngest Tony recipient ever. Young Master Michaels never won another Tony and never acted in another show on Broadway. He had had some mild success as a child actor on television
before
Mame,
but his performance in that show, and his place in the Tony history books, are all that theater fans need to remember him.
Eleven-year-old Daisy Eagan became the youngest female performer to win a Tony for her portrayal of Mary Lennox, the juvenile heroine of
The Secret Garden.
Her unsympathetic and proactive performance earned her raves and, on Tony night, a medallion and a kiss on the head from Audrey Hepburn. Eagan then proceeded to give the most adorable acceptance speech in Tony history (or at least since Debbie Shapiro’s “My husband told me not to dither” speech in 1989), calling out to her mom and dad who seemed to be in the balcony of the Minskoff Theater. Unlike many child performers, who have trouble fulfilling their early promise, Eagan seems remarkably well-adjusted. Even though she has appeared on Broadway only once since
The Secret Garden,
in
James Joyce’s The Dead
in 2000, she was featured on Bravo network’s reality series
The “It” Factor,
which followed young actors around the city on auditions, etc. She appears sporadically in theater now and maintains a healthy Internet presence, free of artifice and “child star” posing.
Broadway’s sexy older brother, Bob Fosse, was one of the greatest director-choreographers in Broadway history. He also was the recipient of nine Tony Awards, for projects as diverse as the state-of-the-art hoofing for
The Pajama Game
and
Damn Yankees,
his bizarre but brilliant melding of vaudeville, commedia dell’arte, and strippin’ in
Pippin,
and his stubborn refusal to throw the
kitchen sink into his
Dancin’.
Fosse’s early success on shows like
Damn Yankees
and
Redhead
assured him a place among the leading lights, and this place begat a new, and some would say imperial, way of creating shows, as epitomized by his near-total artistic control over shows like
Pippin
and
Chicago.
But nine Tonys will earn you that kind of control.
A winner of seven Tony Awards for scenic design, Oliver Smith designed sets for more than 125 shows in a career that spanned over 50 years. His Tony-winning musical designs are a trip through the history of musical theater in America:
Camelot, My Fair Lady, West Side Story, Baker Street, Hello, Dolly!, The Sound of Music.
And if the Tonys had existed in 1944, he surely would have won for his awesome sets for
On the Town.
Smith’s career as codirector and designer of Ballet Theater (later the American Ballet Theater) led to his designing and producing for Broadway. No designer has been more honored, or perhaps more influential.
Tommy Tune shares a Tony record with Harvey Fierstein (but two of Fierstein’s awards are for plays, not musicals—so maybe next book, Harvey): Tonys in four separate creative categories (excluding Producer credits). The supremely gifted and Texas-tall Tune started out as a hoofer (one critic called him the tallest chorus dancer he’d ever seen) and, in 1973, won a Featured Actor Tony for his work in
Seesaw,
iced by his very own number, “It’s Not Where You Start.” He won his first Tony for director of a musical in 1982, for his sensational staging of
Nine,
besting his friend and
mentor, Michael Bennett. The next season, he won his Tony as a lead actor, and shared the choreography prize with Thommie Walsh, for
My One and Only.
Tune has won two prizes each for director and choreographer since: in 1990 for his amazing
Grand Hotel: The Musical
and, the next year, for his work on
The Will Rogers Follies.
Back in 1968, a revolution swept through the musical theater when
Hair,
the first true rock musical, ushered in a change that shook Broadway to its foundations and is still being felt today! Nope, sorry,
just kidding.
Most rock musicals were too disposable and untheatrical to carry enough weight to last, but here are ten shows whose composers know at least a thing or two about the rock game.
Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ujlvaeus are better known as the B-for-brain-trust of the Swedish pop leviathan ABBA.
Chess,
written originally in 1985 and released as a pop album (which yielded the songwriters yet another top-10 hit, “One Night in Bangkok”) became a stage musical in 1986.
Chess
is about a love triangle formed during a US/Russia
chess match, with the board game serving as a metaphor for the Cold War. It became a smash in London, though with a new libretto, it was a surprising failure on Broadway despite a powerful cast of singers. Since its conception,
Chess
has, of course, become somewhat obsolete, and, due to its outdated politics and even more outdated synthpop, is not often performed any more.
Andrew Lloyd Webber collaborated with pop composer Steinman (best known as the author of many of Meat Loaf’s biggest hits) on this musical adaptation of the 1961 British film about three children who discover a murderer hiding in their barn and mistake him for Christ. Headed for a high-profile Broadway opening in 1998, the production was scuttled by mutual consent of the authors and director Harold Prince, all of whom perhaps thought the show’s allegorical nature was poorly handled. Washington, DC, was the last stop for the show. The score, as heard on CD, does reassure the listener of Lloyd Webber’s formidable gifts.
The Kinks’ energetic frontman wrote this musical version of Jules Verne’s classic tale of English ingenuity in the early eighties, after his first musical adaptation, a version of Aristophanes’
The Poet and the Women,
which was unfortunately called
Chorus Girls.
Director Des McAnuff developed
Eighty Days
in San Diego, at LaJolla Playhouse, where it stalled on its way to Broadway.
Notorious autocrat Simon had no first-hand experience with the Broadway process and therefore was unwilling (or unable) to relinquish creative control of this moody, almost cantata-like 1998 musical tale of a murder on the
barrio
streets of New York. This creative logjam (modern-dance maven Mark Morris was to direct and choreograph; he was replaced by Jerry Zaks and Joey McKneely when the blood started flowing) was part of the failure of the show, which critics called leaden and unfocused. Simon’s score, written with Derek Walcott and featuring the elegant doo-wop “Satin Summer Nights,” did receive a Tony nomination.
Tommy,
the quintessential rock opera, which had already been filmed successfully in 1975 with an all-star cast, was given the Broadway treatment in 1993 following several quasi-staged all-star concert presentations of the score. Director Des McAnuff gave the show, written mainly by The Who’s Pete Townshend, a stronger narrative, focusing much of the action on the characters’ reaction to the events of World War II and its aftermath on the splintered, dysfunctional Walker family. The dazzling, brilliantly designed, and cinematically staged production was a smash hit, though not the rebirth of the rock musical some predicted it would be.
Songwriter August Darnell is perhaps better known by the
nom de pop
Kid Creole, a zoot-suited wildman
fronting his band The Coconuts. In 1989, Darnell collaborated with the playwright Eric Overmyer on the off-Broadway musical
In a Pig’s Valise,
a wacky and stylish private-eye spoof featuring a not-yet-famous Nathan Lane. The “hardboiled yarn with music,” as Lane described it to
Theater Week
magazine, played New York’s Second Stage.