The show itself is best described, as pianist Dick Hyman has said, as a “musical melange.” Many song styles are present—the hit “Love Will Find a Way” hinting at Jerome Kern, as well as the two-step classic “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” which was actually written as a waltz!
A Chorus Line
is the show that gave the anonymous dancers of the ensemble a forum to be heard, and the way director-choreographer Michael Bennett conceived and executed the show is the stuff of theatrical legend.
A Chorus Line
stands as the apotheosis of the showbiz musical, a show so tightly coordinated that its elements are almost diminished by examining them separately.
Michael Bennett loved dancers, and in now-legendary taped bull sessions, his dancers opened their souls to him and to each other. Whose idea it was to take these confessional tapes and fashion a musical from them is much debated, but Bennett had the clout, and the Public Theater’s Joseph Papp had the checks, to allow Bennett to “workshop” his budding dance musical away from prying eyes. Co-librettists James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante formed much of
A Chorus Line’s
confessional nature out of actual monologues from the tapes (including Dante’s own drag-queen
speech, given to the character Paul). The score, by Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban, is a superb amalgam of showbiz cliches and pure emotion.
But the true hero of the creation of
A Chorus Line
is Michael Bennett. Bennett, the great
auteur
of seventies musicals who learned at the feet of the seventies’
other
genius director, Harold Prince, so precisely focused the content of
A Chorus Line
in workshop and rehearsal that its theme—the idea of an audience learning something about dancers as they auditioned for a Broadway show—was immediately clear to all who saw it. Not only a triumph of the “workshop” system and a masterpiece of collaboration,
A Chorus Line
also finally serves as a potent metaphor for anyone who has ever “put themselves on the line”—whether it be at work, in love, or with family.
If their careers were a graph, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II would inevitably have met with the monolithic
Oklahoma!
Think about it—the heretofore witty, sophisiticated tunesmith Rodgers, famous for
Pal Joey
and “Manhattan,” writing with Oscar Hammerstein II, he of the frou-frou trappings of
Show Boat
and
The Desert Song
(or, as one wag labeled their collaboration, “smart meets heart”). We’ll see.
But wait. They’re writing a
western
musical? With no cowboy ballads? No big hoedowns? No dancing girlies? Their musical play, as their producers, the Theater Guild, called it, based on Lynn Riggs’ play
Green Grow the Lilacs, Oklahoma!
broke most of the ground rules of musical theater writing that these two gentlemen had already set down themselves in their previous shows. For the first time, the songs advanced the story
instead of interrupting it, with no pointless chorus blowouts or specialty numbers to distract from the forward motion of the plot.
Also of note was the use of choreographer Agnes deMille’s dances (with a huge assist to her arranger, Trude Rittman). The great deMille’s contributions were highlighted by the first-act ballet “Laurey Makes Up Her Mind,” in which the amorous subconscious desires of our conflicted heroine Laurey are danced out as a part of the story and not as a throwaway fantasy. The effect of
Oklahoma!
on the art form simply cannot be overstated.
Once again, director Harold Prince marshaled his formidable forces to create a new, thrilling type of musical theater. Christopher Isherwood’s
Berlin Stories
was adapted by John van Druten into the play
I am a Camera
, from which Joe Masteroff, John Kander, and Fred Ebb created the musical play
Cabaret
. The musical became a fascinating close-up study of passion and prejudice played against the impending onslaught of Nazism.
Cabaret’s
freshness was in its structure. Three love plots of varying intensity were played in “real life” as conventional book musical scenes and numbers, with thrilling contrasting scenes taking place on the stage of the Kit Kat Klub, the cabaret where heroine Sally Bowles works. As embodied by the Emcee, a rouged-up, death’s-head-looking evil clown, these scenes serve as ironic counterpoint to the action in the “book plot” preceding them, as in the number “Two Ladies,” in which the Emcee and two girls describe their ideal live-in relationship just after Sally Bowles and her friend
Cliff Bradshaw (the Isherwood stand-in) have agreed to their own posslq’d relationship.
Adding to the brilliance of the enterprise was the work of Prince’s set designer of choice, Boris Aronson, who provided his own stroke of brilliance by greeting the audience with a warped mirror hanging in front of the Broadhurst Theater stage, distoring the features of everything it reflected, including the audience. This chilling allegorical flourish was the preamble to a thrilling musical, worthy of its place in the canon.
Musical theater is a tricky business. Most shows never even see an opening night, let alone a New York run of any kind. But here are ten musicals that stayed around through many, many sunrises and sunsets.
This exquisite off-Broadway gem is the longest continuous run of formal (and probably informal) record in the history of American theater. A small (cast of eight, piano, and harp) adaptation of Rostand’s play
Les Romanesques
, which took up residence in the tiny Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village, it opened to good reviews and, well, just stayed around. For
forty-two years!
So ubiquitous was
The Fantasticks
on the New York theater scene that its corner of Sullivan Street was renamed
Fantasticks
Boulevard, and somewhere in mid-run (ha!),
New Yorker
magazine just started printing the number of performances “so far.”
Cats
opened on Broadway on October 7, 1982. When it closed on September 10, 2000, it reigned as the
longest-running Broadway show ever. The best way to explain the worldwide success of Andrew Lloyd Webber and T. S. Eliot’s
Cats
, as a show and as a marketing phenomenon, is the faith in a pure form of theatrical magic.
Cats
is about as deep and heavy as a child’s wading pool, but show fans, casual theatergoers, and ordinary folk all ate it up. The type of mega-hit that sustains the Broadway tourist industry for decades,
Cats
rode high from the first glimpse of the trademark green cat’s eyes, and 7485 performances and nearly eighteen years later, the kitties left the Broadway junkyard for good.
Director-choreographer Michael Bennett’s supreme achievement from 1975 changed the way musicals were created and was the single most important musical of the 1970s. The workshop atmosphere in which the show was created gave it the very collaborative aura necessary to ensure the show’s success.
A very fictionalized audition for a spot on the chorus line in a Broadway show (no director-choreographer at the time would have cared to know “a little something about” his dancers), its theme—people literally putting themselves “on the line” for acceptance—was so universally embraced that the show became a nearly unprecedented phenomenon, with the famous fighting of the great unwashed for tickets as soon as the show opened downtown at the Public Theater. And when it moved uptown to Broadway’s Shubert Theater, you couldn’t find a ticket for love or money. For years,
A Chorus Line
was Broadway’s evergreen seventies phenomenon. Upon passing
Grease
as the longest-running Broadway show ever, performance number 3,389 was
greeted with hysteria bordering on anarchy.
A Chorus Line
finally closed in 1990, after 6,137 performances.
The biggest commercial hit in Broadway history,
The Phantom of the Opera
was a monster hit in London, and, as soon as casting snafus were untangled, was a pre-sold hit by the time it opened on Broadway in January of 1988. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s lush musical treatment of Gaston Leroux’s Gothic horror tale played smartly to the romantic notions inherent in the story and yielded some gorgeous music, including the Phantom’s haunting “The Music of the Night,” heroine Christine’s elegy for her father, “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again,” and the clever Puccini pastiche of “Prima Donna.”
The book and lyrics (by Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe) were not up to the level of Lloyd Webber’s music, but the brilliant scenery and costumes of Maria Bjornson, and Harold Prince’s masterful direction, gave the eye much to take in, and the presence of the Phantom, commanding in a deceptively small role, has assured the show’s long-running success. Oh, and that Phantom mask logo sells a LOT of T-shirts and key chains.
The recently-closed
Les Misérables
was a profiteer of the 1980s Brit-popera phenomenon. About as non-American a musical as you could create,
Les Miz
began life as a French (really?
Wow!
) pop spectacle, adapted from the Victor Hugo novel, which attracted the attention of London’s Royal Shakespeare Company. The superb RSC staging, by Trevor Nunn and John Caird, was
picked up for a commercial run by eight-hundredpound gorilla Cameron Mackintosh, and it is still running in London today.
Broadway audiences clamored for the next big thing (especially since the last two Tony winners had been the not-hot, not-sexy, not-foreign
Big River
and
The Mystery of Edwin Drood)
, and
Les Miz
set a singleday ticket record when the box office opened in January 1987, and rode high for years as the Broadway engagement settled in, and folks who missed it on tour made a New York field trip to see it.
Interestingly enough, deep into the run, the show’s production team canned its entire Broadway cast and retooled the show considerably, citing a terrible staleness to the proceedings. Most long-running shows do attempt to “freshen up” from time to time, but
Les MisÉrables
, in performing a major overhaul on cast and script, went the extra yard and, as a result, ran an extra six years.
The first super-hit musical, and rightly so, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s
Oklahoma!
was a cultural phenomenon that changed the way the Broadway game was played.
Oklahoma!
’s wartime success, unprecedented for any musical, forced Broadway audiences literally at gunpoint to accept and embrace the Rodgers and Hammerstein concept of the integrated musical play and abandon the crudely constructed musical comedies that filled Broadway before it.
Oklahoma!
’s startlingly original stagecraft was wedded to what Oscar Hammerstein called a “heartiness” and a simplicity of message that wartime audiences craved. Word-of-mouth built, as it does with all
hits, and
Oklahoma!
became a template for all the Broadway musicals that followed, both onstage and, thanks to the business acumen of producer Theresa Helburn’s Theater Guild, offstage as well.
Teeny-tiny seems to be the way to succeed off-Broadway. Like
The Fantasticks
before it,
Nunsense
is a very small show with a very simple premise. Also like
The Fantasticks, Nunsense
creator Dan Goggin probably owns a small island by now. By the time it closed it had racked up 3,672 perfromances and spawned countless sequels (including an all-male version,
Nunsense A-Men!)
Goggins’s show—about a small group of nuns (from, uh, Mt. Saint Helen’s School) holding a talent show to raise money—is totally tongue in cheek, yet not really blasphemous (unless an occasional PG curse word knocks your lights out) or disrespectful, and a fairly innocuous evening. Religious groups have obviously gotten a huge kick out of it, and lay folk must get a charge out of seeing roller-skating, ventriloquist nuns as well.
Yet another “little musical that could,” Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey’s tale of better living and loving through doo-wop ran for over eight years, ending its run in 1980 as the all-time long-running champ, with 3,388 performances. From inauspicious beginnings at Chicago’s dingy Kingston Mines club to the heights of Broadway is a strange journey.
Grease
is notable not only for its long run and the inexplicably popular film version, but it also had a
monstrously successful revival in 1994, with many non-Broadway performers like Brooke Shields, Maureen McCormick, Mickey Dolenz, and Jon Secada slipping into and out of the not-exactly-Shakespearean roles of hot-rod guys, good girls, and Pink Ladies.
My Fair Lady’s
success came at a time when America was on top of the world, and Broadway shows were very chic. The biggest hit of the 1950’s,
My Fair Lady
was what the pundits called a “snob hit,” but without the snobbery. A revival of Shaw’s
Pygmalion
might have received polite nods of approval, but a musical version adapted by Lerner and Loewe? Starring Julie Andrews? Cha-
ching!
Like
Oklahoma!
and
South Pacific
before it,
My Fair Lady
was a status symbol show, one that people arranged their lives around in an effort to see. The presence of the
My Fair Lady
cast album in one’s den gave one social Brownie points, and well, dear, if you had tickets, would you like to run for PTA president?
Fiddler on the Roof
surpassed
Hello, Dolly!
to become the all-time longest running musical in Broadway history (not surpassed until
Grease
, many years later). Many elements, not the least of which was its quality, combined to make it a 3,242-performance success.