A supposedly naughty show which actually held no
surprises at all—everyone pretty much saw right through this one—sniggered at its characters where a better musical might have sympathized with them. The book and lyrics were by Allan “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh” Sherman, and while his parody lyrics are clever, they obviously can’t supply enough material for a whole book musical.
This off-Broadway musical from 2002 was based on the, uh, classic 1977 porn film. In these situations, plot is very important, so here goes: Debbie wants to be a professional cheerleader and is willing to make her dreams come true. Despite an earnest performance by Sherie Renee Scott in the title role, and the presence of a whole lot of music,
Debbie Does Dallas
failed.
Why, do you suppose? Well, maybe because stupid retro musicals are bad enough, but when you make one out of a hardcore porn film, you’ve obviously got nothing to hang your satire on. What are you going to do, show us? Of course not. It’s a cynical way to create a musical, and was rewarded in kind.
Sex gets experimental in composer-lyricist Michael John LaChiusa’s take on Schnitzler’s
La Ronde.
LaChiusa’s conceit was to take the bones of Schnitzler’s dirty little tale and transport it to the twentieth century. We see the stock characters (“The soldier,” “The whore,” “The nurse”) jumping in and out of bed with each other while jumping back and forth between the decades. Again, graceful staging (by Graciela Daniele) served LaChiusa’s writing well, saving what could well have been a dirty little nothing.
Editors love complete sentences; they make for easy editing and fun reading. Broadway producers don’t usually like musicals with long titles; they’re hard to grasp while walking down the street. Here are ten musicals whose titles probably tested their producers’ patience.
Cole Porter scored this charmer about a bon vivant German baron and his simple English valet who switch identities in the hothouse environment of a Paris hotel suite. Unwisely blown out of proportion (against the authors’ wishes) to include a singing, dancing chorus prior to its Broadway engagement in 1938, it was a 78-performance flop. But luckily for all, this jewel box of a musical farce has, with some re-shaping, finally been scaled down to six characters in search of “At Long Last Love.”
This Jule Styne-Betty Comden-Adolph Green tuner about the happy-go-lucky homeless (by choice!) denizens of New York City’s subways seemed less than quaint even in 1961, and obviously its central conceit hasn’t aged well. The most interesting thing about the show was the life-imitates-art episode in which New York’s real homeless began interpreting the show’s posters as an invitation to spend the night on the trains.
The incomparable Barbra Streisand shot to stardom as frumpy secretary Miss Marmelstein in this poison-pen love letter to the roguish antihero Harry Bogen (played by Elliot Gould), who was making a name in Manhattan’s garment district at the expense of literally everything else in his life. While not overly charming, Harold Rome and Jerome Weidman’s show was praised as being true to its rather cynical Seventh Avenue milieu.
A novelty musical from the novel minds of Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, by way of playwright Jan de Hartog. His play
The Fourposter
was musicalized faithfully, as only two performers (originally the dream team of Mary Martin and Robert Preston) enacted fifty years as man and wife, the songs acting as scenes (“Love Isn’t Everything” detailed two Blessed Events) or as commentary (the hit “My Cup Runneth Over”).
A nearly perfect musical with a passionate following, this charming musical was adapted by Joseph Stein,
Jerry Bock, and Sheldon Harnick from Miklos Laszlo’s play
Parfumerie,
which also served as source material for the films
The Shop Around the Corner
and
You’ve Got Mail.
Tone is everything in the telling of the familiar tale of two co-workers who fall in love through anonymous correspondence, yet can’t stand each other face-to-face.
She Loves Me
was the directorial debut of musical titan Harold Prince, and the three writers, with Prince producing, went on to create the classic
Fiddler on the Roof
Cy Coleman and Michael Stewart’s swingin’ ’70s musical about, well, swingin’. Wordsmith Stewart had seen a sexy French boulevard farce loosely translated as
Come On Up To My Place, I’m Living With My Girlfriend
and became intrigued with the idea of musicalizing the at-the-time in-vogue hobby of wife-swapping.
The show hit Broadway, where the musicians were in full view onstage, and costumes were changed (and often discarded) in sight of the audience, adding to the anything-goes vibe of the evening. Coleman’s score and director Gene Saks’s relatively sensitive yet very funny handling of this potentially crude material helped carry
I Love My Wife
to an 857-performance run.
Indeed you do, courtesy of Broadway’s own Waltz King, Richard Rodgers. Stephen Sondheim was the lyricist and Arthur Laurents adapted his own play
The Time of the Cuckoo,
which had previously been filmed, with Katharine Hepburn, as
Summertime in
1955.
Legendary squabbles between the collaborators
have soured many on this 1965 musical, dealing with a middle-aged woman who vacations in Venice and longs for romance. The air of vulnerability and longing inherent in the Hepburn film and Laurents’s play were missing from the musicalization, which some saw as too representative of the oil-and-water Sondheim-Rodgers partnership.
Prior to waltzing with Rodgers, Stephen Sondheim partied with Plautus, Titus Macchius Plautus to be specific, in this riotous Roman spoof from 1962. That the title sounds like the set-up to an old vaudeville gag is no coincidence: Librettists Larry Gelbart and Burt Sheve-love conceived their show as a modern-day musical paean to the comedies of Plautus, finding in this Father of Comic Situation a corollary to the schtick-meisters and low comics of the zany days of burlesque. (Milton Berle, apparently not getting the point, reportedly passed on playing the lead because he thought it was “old schtick.”)
In 1965, Alan Jay Lerner teamed with the long-inactive composer Burton Lane for an unusual little musical about ESP and reincarnation. (Yep, it was the sixties, all right.) John Cullum played a flashy doctor treating a patient (the flighty yet adorable Barbara Harris) who believes she has been reincarnated.
Daisy Gamble (Harris) took the audience back with her to her previous existence in Regency England, giving Lerner a chance to indulge his expertise in
My Fair
Lady-like verbiage (and, incidentally, pad out the thinplot).
A fine score, including the sensational “Cosy and Tosh” and “Come Back to Me,” was nearly all that was salvaged from this 280-performance disappointment.
Another Cole Porter show (1939), an adaptation of Sam and Bella Spewack’s wacky spoof of Communism and geopolitical values
Clear All Wires. Leave It to Me!
is most fondly remembered today for Mary Martin’s Broadway debut, wowing ’em as she stripped off her Raoul Pene DuBois fur to the strains of “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” Audiences of the time also enjoyed the vicarious pleasure of seeing a Nazi get the crap kicked out of him by the American Ambassador to Soviet Russia while Stalin pranced about the stage.
Think writing and performing a musical is hard? Try writing a
satire
of a musical. Then make it funny. Not as easy as it seems. Here are ten very funny musical spoofs from other arms of the pop-culture octopus.
Conan O’Brien’s “Monorail” episode is a riotously funny (hence the title of this chapter) take-off on
The Music Man’s
”Ya Got Trouble,” but the prize for the best
Simpsons
musical spoof goes to
Oh! Streetcar!
Marge, feeling neglected, tries out for a community theater production of
Oh! Streetcar!,
a musical version of the Tennessee Williams classic. Guest actor Jon Lovitz scores big time as the musical’s
auteur,
Llewellyn Sinclair, who routinely insults his charges while wearing a ridiculous muumuu.
Oh! Streetcar!
takes off on
Les MisÉrables
(as the curtain rises on a revolving turntable featuring the Louisiana Superdome on one side and the Kowalski/Hubbell apartment building on the other) and other ’80’s spectacles (Marge flies through the air on wires, in the
middle of a laser light show), and mercilessly skewers bad musical theater with awful forced rhymes (“Mardi Gras” with “party, hah”) and just plain inappropriate writing. One song describes the innermost feelings of Blanche’s paperboy, and the upbeat, doo-wacka finale “You Can Always Depend on the Kindness of Strangers,” is pure gold.
The Pythons were all academics who started on the stage, and their legendary sketch comedy show often satirized musical theater, usually British music-hall styles. But one sketch in Episode Nineteen, an interview with Mr. F. L. Dibley, tells us he is a filmmaker who has all his great ideas “stolen” before his movies get back from the developer. (The Interviewer: “Mr. Dibley, some people have drawn comparisons between your film
if,
which ends with a gun battle at a public school, and Mr. Lindsay Anderson’s film
if
which ends with a gun battle at a public school.”)
Mr. Dibley’s latest masterpiece is
Finian’s Rainbow Starring the Man from the Off-Licence
(the English equivalent of a liquor store), and we see a film clip of
Python’s
Michael Palin in a dress, looking uncomfortable, trying to run from the screen, and, finally, doing a most unconvincing little dance. Dibley (Terry Jones) puts it bitterly: “a real failure that was. Ten seconds of solid boredom.” Maybe, but hilarious nonetheless.
Animaniacs,
the crazy, often side-splittingly funny Warner Bros. animated trio, were tended by writers with a great sense of the history that had made their postmodern, retro-hip look at the world of animated cartoons
possible. To many, the greatest pleasure of
Animaniacs
was the use of a Carl Stalling-like orchestra of what seemed like thousands, playing zany musical cues at the drop of a hat (or, in the case of Yakko, Wakko, and Dot Warner, the drop of an anvil).
Often, their adventures were of a musical nature, and writer/director Paul Rugg created the episode
H.M.S. Yakko
as an unabashed homage to Gilbert and Sullivan, in particular the two “maritime” shows,
H.M.S. Pinafore
and
The Pirates of Penzance.
The Warners are merely riding a whale to the beach to relax (don’t ask), but they run afoul of the evil pirate Captain Mel, who is so evil and inept that he has two peg legs. Included in the zaniness are song parodies of startling fidelity to spirit of the Messrs. Gilbert & Sullivan, the comic patter songs (“I Am the Very Model of a Cartoon Individual,” Yakko sings) specifically.
Also stepping out in finery borrowed from
Les Miserables
is Mel Smith’s 1990 film
The Tall Guy.
It’s the story of a luckless American actor (Jeff Goldblum) appearing as the very second banana in a West End revue. After his boss (Rowan Atkinson, a flinty Napoleon-type) fires him, he gets a job as the non-singing (because he’s tone-deaf) lead in
Elephant! The Musical,
based, of course, on Bernard Pomerance’s
The Elephant Man.
Bandied about by the director at the opening night party is a musical version of
Richard III,
with a tune called “(I’ve got a hunch) I’m going to be King.”
A very funny send-up of the Brit-popera formula,
Elephant!
includes a soft-shoe danced by actors in elephant masks (which concludes with the ensemble yanking on their trunks), lyrics like “Here he comes, Mister Disgusting!,” and a finale entitled “Somewhere Up in Heaven, There’s an Angel With Big Ears,” sung
by a walk-to-the-footlights chorus as the Elephant Man’s bed is raised to the heavens.
Joss Whedon, the creator of TV’s hugely successful
Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
penned the songs and script for this episode,
Buffy’s
contribution to the “musical mania” that swept through network TV in the early part of the new millennium.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
staked (sorry!) its ground by using the wolfsbane-and-ass-kicking travails of its heroes as metaphor for the fears and phobias of everyday lives of teenagers and young adults. The postmodern deconstruction of the show carried over into this episode, as the residents of Sunnyvale burst into song and dance for no good reason, Buffy’s gang included. Turns out they are under the thumb of a song-and-dance demon (played to the hilt by three-time Tony winner Hinton Battle) who wants the populace to dance themselves to death until he can take his queen back to the underworld.
Whedon’s songs, while containing several good lyrics, are not particularly distinguished musically, and no great step forward from the typical styles of middling Disney animated films. Still, the cast, all of whom can at least carry a tune, deserve points for trying.