Cabaret,
Joe Masteroff, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s 1966 masterpeice of decadence unchecked, visited Broadway in 1998 in a production from London’s Donmar Warehouse. While many shouted “Wilkommen” at the new production, others quietly said “A Bientôt” to the show’s inherent subtext.
While the 1966 production of
Cabaret
shocked a complacent Broadway with its garish stage pictures and the adult treatment of its grim subject matter, the 1998
Cabaret,
directed by Sam Mendes and choreographed by Rob and Kathleen Marshall, was completely and proudly vulgar while it was in the cabaret (which the audience, seated at nightclub tables, was, all night long). Not only was the show’s Emcee (a thrillingly androgynous and insatiable Alan Cumming) an
agent of evil in the Cabaret, but he also hovered over the show’s book scenes, underscoring, with little subtlety, the impending disaster.
America’s seminal musical play,
Show Boat
suffers from a kind of schizophrenia. As the show that straddled the gap between operetta and a new kind of musical drama,
Show Boat
is often accused of being too much of one or the other, leaving purists of both art forms sharply divided on how to do justice to this masterpiece.
Show Boat
has undergone countless revisions in its 75-plus year history; indeed, it’s possible that there have never been two productions exactly alike on paper. Broadway’s two most recent productions of
Show Boat
vividly illustrated the dichotomy inherent in the piece. Director Jack O’Brien’s 1982 production was a florid, oversized, near-operatic reading of the piece, while Harold Prince’s 1995 version was sleek, brilliantly streamlined, and bore striking resemblance to a contemporary musical. Tony Awards and lengthy tours followed. The one constant in both productions? The presence of actress Lonette McKee, as doomed chanteuse Julie.
Asian-American playwright David Henry Hwang, a fierce protector of Asian-American heritage, was approached to rewrite Oscar Hammerstein’s libretto to his 1958 musical (written, of course, with Richard Rodgers)
Flower Drum Song. Flower Drum Song,
based on Chin Y. Lee’s novel, tells a fairly basic tale of assimilation versus obligation in San Francisco’s Chinatown,
where a young man must choose between a traditional Chinese bride and a brash, sexy Chinese-American dancer.
Hwang’s new book dealt with considerable back-story and filled in the politics behind the arrival of these Chinese immigrants, and the new Broadway production (2002) altered the tunestack to fit the new story. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a success in this new version, and while the show may not be tried again in either version, one might suggest not interfering with the architectural brilliance of
any
Hammerstein libretto, no matter how noble the sentiment.
Cole Porter wrote one of his very best scores for this 1934 shipboard farce. The first draft of the show concerned a shipwreck plot, but after the S.S.
Morro Castle
sank, the plot had to be re-written on the fly. The necessity of a quick fix introduced the world to the hugely successful writing team of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, who were brought together at director Lindsay’s insistence for help in patching up the book.
In 1962,
Anything Goes
was revived off-Broadway, with six other Porter songs interpolated to help prop up the typically creaky 1930s book. A brand-new version sailed into Lincoln Center in 1987, featuring four more new old songs, and a completely reworked book by John Weidman and Russel Crouse’s son, Timothy. Patti LuPone’s blazing performance as Reno Sweeney, evangelist-chanteuse, brought sex appeal back to the role, which had fallen into the hands of too many Jo-Anne Worleys over the years. Also noteworthy were the characters of Luke and John, “two Taiwan Chinese” named Ling and Ching in 1962, who figure in the comedy
subplot and are actually somewhat empowered in the 1987 version, as opposed to being mere caricatures in 1962. Whichever version you see, the real pleasure is in hearing some of the greatest songs ever written for the theater, courtesy of one of the masters, Mr. Cole Porter.
Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s agitprop classic first premiered on Broadway in 1933 (in an English-language version not prepared by Brecht). This bitterly political, audience-alienating
zeitoper
wasn’t exactly what depression-era crowds were looking for, and it lasted only twelve performances. However, a 1954 production mounted at the Theater de Lys off-Broadway after Weill’s death, and starring his widow, Lotte Lenya, was a monster hit, running for 2,611 performances.
This popular version of
Threepenny
was prepared by the gifted composer and lyricist Marc Blitzstein, who, in this version, gave the world the sobriquet “Mack the Knife” for the show’s antihero, Macheath. Unfortunately, the text and political thrust of the show were considerably (albeit understandably, considering the Ike-era politics) bowdlerized.
Broadway has seen
Threepenny
twice since, most notably in a production directed by Richard Foreman in 1976. This version, translated and de-santitzed by Ralph Mannheim and John Willett, brought much of the political, scatological, and sexual energy of the piece back to the fore, and Douglas W. Schmidt’s audience-alienating scenery, with its low-hung lamps and puzzlingly-placed strings criscrossing the audience’s field of vision, contributing to the truly Brechtian atmosphere.
When the idea was floated in 1972 to revive the 1919 musical comedy
Irene
and make it palatable to new audiences, the hardhats went on and the work began. To overhaul the book, producer Harry Rigby hired two of the best, Joseph Stein
(Fiddler on the Roof)
and Hugh Wheeler (who was also represented that season by his Tony-winning book for
A Little Night Music),
to revise his own adaptation.
The original score, by Harry Tierney and Joseph McCarthy, was considerably altered, with new songs, many by theater vet Wally Harper, inserted alongside the show’s classics like “Alice Blue Gown.” The presence of Debbie Reynolds, as lovely Irene O’Dare, gave new-fangled star power to the evening, and old pros like George S. Irving and Patsy Kelly made the whole show, despite its many coats of paint, look like a new old-fashioned show, rather than an old vehicle with a tune-up.
Every so often, a musical will hit the boards with an air of familiarity about it. And often that familiarity is justified: Many musicals share an original source with another show. These twenty musicals examine that kinship.
Some would consider a musical version of Rostand’s classic play
Cyrano de Bergerac
a waste of time, since the play itself is so beautiful and lyrical. But the period trappings, the romance, and, indeed, the lyricism of the play are surely what draw musical authors to the classic tale of a brilliant yet unattractive man wooing and eventually dying for his vision of perfection.
The 1972 season saw Anthony Burgess adapt his own superb translation into a musical libretto, with music by Michael J. Lewis. The production, an import from Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theater, starred Christopher Plummer as Cyrano, and he won raves and a Tony Award, but the production was dismissed as unmemorable.
A similar fate befell the version that hit Broadway in 1994 as
Cyrano, the Musical.
This version was a big success in the Netherlands, and the producers decided to chance it on Broadway in a weak season that saw only two successful new musical entries
(Disney’s Beauty and the Beast
and
Passion).
The great wordsmith Sheldon Harnick was asked to polish the lyrics, which were not exactly Broadway-worthy (one example: Cyrano refers to his nose as “a snorer or borer or odor-explorer.”
Achoo!)
Despite an energetic performance from Bill van Dijk as The Nose,
Cyrano, the Musical
went the way of
Cyrano
the musical, and faded fast.
Two musicals based on the Arabian Nights have made it to Broadway, and they’re actually the same show, or almost.
Kismet
(1953), first out of the box, was a colorful, stylish telling of the Arabian tales based on the play
Kismet
by Edward Knoblock, set to the music of Borodin’s “Polovetsian Dances,” adapted by Luther Davis, Robert Wright, and George Forrest. Starring Alfred Drake as the poet Hajj, it was a smash hit.
Davis collaborated with Charles Lederer on the 1978 “African” version,
Timbuktu!
Set in the Mali capital instead of Baghdad for this version, director Geoffrey Holder, following his similarly Afro-centric
The Wiz,
punched up the tribal-ritual trappings inherent in the new setting and gave the role of Saheem-La-Lume, the evil Wazir’s bored, sexy wife (known simply as Lalume in
Kismet)
to Eartha Kitt, who entered borne aloft on brawny shoulders, and pretty much didn’t come down all night. Both
Kismet
and
Timbuktu!
remained
true to the themes of love, life, and death as played against the shifting sands of time.
Joseph Moncure March’s epic poem
The Wild Party,
about the Jazz Age revels of a fading vaudeville couple, got two, count ’em, two different productions in New York in 2000, both featuring scores by up-and-coming New York composers.
Off-Broadway saw Manhattan Theater Club’s production of
The Wild Party,
with a book and score by Andrew Lippa, who had two new songs featured in the Broadway revival
of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown
the season before.
The Wild Party,
version 2.0, was developed at New York’s Public Theater and had a score by Michael John La Chiusa and book by La Chiusa and director George C. Wolfe.
Following much media tongue-wagging focusing on the unusual happenstance surrounding the two shows’ proximity, the Lippa version played its subscription run and hoped to transfer to Broadway, but didn’t. The Public Theater version did move uptown but won none of its seven Tony nominations, and shuttered soon after the awards ceremony. Both versions of
The Wild Party
got points for trying, but neither was quite able to do justice to the decadence and desperation of the March poem.
Perhaps nothing short of the Bible (or the Koran) is less suited for Broadway musical adaptation than Homer’s
Iliad
and
Odyssey,
at least when played straight, and that’s the reason for the wildly different shows that share the source material here.
Home Sweet Homer
concerns itself with Homer’s quest to return to his wife Penelope, and as a vehicle for the always-intense Yul Brynner, the piece tended to take itself rather too seriously for its own good. Following a legendarily tempestuous and difficult tryout period,
Home Sweet Homer,
totally humorless and charmless, opened and closed on a single day in January 1976.
1954’s
The Golden Apple,
on the other hand, is one of the most underappreciated musicals Broadway has ever seen. Composer Jerome Moross and librettist-lyricist John Latouche fashioned a brilliant musical (or, rather, to co-opt a title of a previous Moross-Latouche collaboration, a “Ballet Ballad”) from the two Homer epics—first act,
Iliad,
second act,
Odyssey
—but pointed up the theatricality of their enterprise by re-setting the legend in turn-of-the-century Washington state, with its Mount Olympus and golden apples, at the time of the Spanish-American War.
Ulysses and the heroes, agrarians all, are back from Manila and Cuba, unsure of the new industrial century challenging them in the form of the city of Rhododendron, down in the valley. Paris, the very symbol of industry and urban chicanery, is a traveling salesman who dances Helen away in his balloon. Ulysses wins Helen back in a bare-knuckle boxing match before Mayor Hector, the citizenry, and the sirens pick the heroes off little by little, leaving Ulysses alone to re-examine the new century, his wife, and their marriage.
That these weighty ideas play with the speed and breeze of a cyclone is a testament to the authors, who used early-twentieth century musical forms and rhymes (and no dialogue—take
that,
Mr. Brynner) to remove any pretense. About the only thing
Home
Sweet Homer
and
The Golden Apple
have in common, other than the source material, is that
The Golden Apple
was a commercial flop as well.
The Gospel According to St. Matthew is undeniably great drama, and by the evidence offered in these two shows, not bad musical theater either. Stephen Schwartz and John-Michael Tebelak had previously musicalized the story of Christ’s last days (Schwartz writing tunes) for Tebelak’s master’s thesis, and in the anything-goes off-Broadway scene of the early ’70s, they put it up with great success. The 1971 production was irreverent and groovy (Jesus was a benevolent clown with a Superman ‘S’ on his shirt, his disciples lovable ragamuffins) but never blasphemous or overtly preachy.
Harry Chapin’s
Cotton Patch Gospel,
from 1981, used the same Gospel (by way of Dr. Clarence Jordan’s
Cotton Patch Version of Matthew and John)
to tell Christ’s story as a revival-tent show in Gainesville, Georgia. Tom Key and Russel Treyz’s book created more obvious modern parallels to the ancient story than
Godspell
(Herod bombs a church nursery to try and kill Jesus; Christ is eventually lynched by Governor Pilate’s henchmen), and the mood and the music were contemporary country, with several superb, moving Chapin songs, most notably “Jubilation” and “When I Look Up.”