Broadway's Most Wanted (11 page)

Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland made approximately 7,000 movies together, all about the same thing: Hey kids, let’s put on a show! And then we’ll take it to Broadway! These incredibly realistic showbiz tales are exemplified by
Babes on Broadway,
directed by (who else) Busby Berkley. The film is basically an excuse for a series of wacky production numbers, in which Judy and Mickey and the kids put on a show and then take it to Broadway. In a theater the size of a Hollywood sound-stage.

Mel Brooks’s first movie was the basis for the 2001 hit musical of the same name. Set at the time it was made, 1968 (unlike the stage show), it concerns a second-rate producer (Zero Mostel) who cooks up a scheme to make a killing by producing a flop musical. That flop is, of course,
Springtime for Hitler.
Brilliantly cast and completely unafraid, it’s not only one of the most quotable movie comedies ever, but also very canny about the theater, thanks in large part to choreographer Alan Johnson’s hilarious
Springtime
staging.

Hungry? Most Broadway theaters have a snack bar for the intermission munchies, but here are ten musicals to satisfy your appetite for something more (which is also the title of a musical, but not a musical about food).

Brilliant, near-operatic resetting of Homer’s
Iliad
and
Odyssey
in turn-of-the-century Washington state. In this version, written by John Latouche and Jerome Moross, Helen is a randy (and bored) farmer’s daughter married to Sheriff Menelaus, and Paris is a dancing salesman who spirits her away in his balloon. General Ulysses and the heroes, cleverly renamed (Bluey for Philoctetes, Thirsty for Tantalus, and Doc MacCahan for Machaon) are back from the Spanish-American War and are eventually guilt-tripped into laying waste to Rhododendron In order to get Helen back.

This 1973 musical adaptation of Lorraine Hansberry’s classic play
A Raisin In the Sun
is fairly faithful to
Hansberry’s powerful study of a family’s dreams deferred by outside and inside influences. The Judd Woldin-Robert Brittan score got down and dirty when called for (“Booze,” where Walter Lee Younger envisions his new liquor store), but also soared, especially in the superb “Measure the Valleys,” a mother’s plea for understanding of her son.
Raisin
brightened a lean year for Broadway musicals, and it won the Best Musical Tony in 1974.

The late Dolores Gray (as sexpot movie queen Lorraine Sheldon) tried her best to liven up this leaden musical adaptation of
The Man Who Came to Dinner,
with TV’s
Inside the Actors Studio
host/suckup James Lipton partially to blame; he wrote the lyrics. Critics and audiences pointed right away to the unnecessary expansion of the great Kaufman-Hart play, here blown up to include scenes of the whole town of Sherwood, Ohio (“Smalltown, U.S.A.”—how original), with the zany locals brought on for pointless and needless production numbers. It lasted less than two months in 1967.

Jule Styne and Bob Merrill adapted the great film comedy
Some Like it Hot
for the stage in 1972. Not directed by Billy Wilder. Not in black-and-white. Not starring Marilyn Monroe. What’s the point? Broadway audiences felt likewise, despite the presence of old hands like Robert Morse and Tony Roberts and a drop-dead gorgeous Elaine Joyce as Sugar Kane. But the show (often retitled
Some Like it Hot,
for obvious reasons) continues to thrive in regional theater, whose audiences more readily appreciate the drag comedy and
inevitable roaring-twenties hoofing. Tony Curtis toured the show in the role of nerdy Osgood during 2002 and 2003.

Jerry
”Hello, Dollyl”
Herman waxes affectionate for Israel in this 1961 musical about new settlers and tourists in the Holy Land. Yiddish theater vet Molly Picon leads a pack of middle-aged Jewish-American widows looking for husbands. Herman’s Broadway debut gave a glimpse of the great things to come (although his “Hymn to Hymie” was not a tribute to
My Fair Maidel,
rather a widow’s paean to her dead husband). The first Broadway musical actually
set
in Israel,
Milk and Honey
was warm but also realistic about the trouble facing settlers in the territory.

Irving Berlin wrote the score, George S. Kaufman wrote the book, and it starred the Marx Brothers. It’s about a mayonnaise factory in Idaho. Just kidding. It’s Minnie’s boys running amok in the resort hotel business, circa late 1925. Not one of Berlin’s most stellar scores, the brothers filmed it in 1929, giving them a leg up on the art of screen comedy, which they would soon redefine, despite the staginess of this particular film. (Now you know why the film version of
The Cocoanuts
looks like a filmed stage musical: because it was.)

Mickey Rooney as Top Banana and Ann Miller as The Legs in this unabashed, smash-hit tribute to the great days of burlesque, with jugglers, ventriloquists, corny gags (in one sketch, Miller, as Mrs. Westfall, is referred
to by the leering Judge Rooney as “Mrs. Breastfall” and “Mrs. Bestball”) and pretty chorus gals galore (the Sugar Babies of the title, here swinging like Evelyn Nesbit, and there dancing like Lillian Russell). A hit in 1980,
Sugar Babies
was perhaps the last successful evening of burlesque that Broadway will ever see.

Hal Linden won a Tony for his portrayal of Mayer Rothschild, paterfamilias of the legendary European moneylenders. This show did not shy away from the anti-Semitism endured by Rothschild and his sons, but rather used the many attacks on their property and persons (“Jew, do your duty!” they were often told, meaning they were expected to bow and scrape in public) as dramatic motivation for their triumphs. The book, by Sherman Yellen, and the score, by the estimable Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, played mainly to the Jewish theater-party crowds and saw
The Rothschilds
to a middling 505-performance run.

Rudolf Friml’s 1928 operetta version of the Dumas classic, which somebody thought was just right for revival on the Broadway scene in 1984. Nope. A new libretto by the estimable Mark Bramble held forth the promise of a modern take on the Friml-Wodehouse-Grey warhorse. Unfortunately, nothing could offset the basic fustiness of the genre and the costume-drama trappings. Instead of settling in for a Marathon run and a nice Payday, this Dum Dum’s version of
The Three Musketeers
drew nothing but Snickers and became a nine-performance Milk Dud.

The legendary Phil Silvers gave a blazing performance in this 1950 show about a burlesque clown (named Jerry Biffle, but bearing a resemblance to a certain TV funnyman whose name rhymes with “Hilton Girl”) and his increasingly obsolete TV show, ladling the schtick on top of the corn like melted butter. The score was by Johnny Mercer, but there was no “Moon River” or “Ac-Cent-Chu-Ate the Positive” in this one; the show was really a flimsy excuse for Silvers and some other assured comic hands to cut up, early and often.

The most heinous crimes often demand the most serious examination of our values. So it’s no mystery why killers might occupy the minds of many musical authors.

This 1979 musical is near the top of many musical “Best” lists. Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s “musical thriller” is based on the English legend of Sweeney Todd, a crazy barber who slit the throats of his customers while they were in his chair, and gave the corpses to his neighbor, Mrs. Lovett, to use in her meat pies.

Though the legend usually depicts Todd as a villain, this musical version is based on a dramatization that made Sweeney a victim of perverted justice. Sondheim was the catalyst for this project, and as directed by Harold Prince, this
Sweeney
took no prisoners and spared no sensibilities. Perhaps the supreme achievement of the show—other than its breathtaking virtuosity—is the
humanizing effect the authors have on the two central characters—Mrs. Lovett is a lovelorn capitalist, while Todd himself emerges a wronged husband and father driven to madness.

This small-scale musical, which was booked in the Helen Hayes—the smallest theater on Broadway—still seemed too small for the Main Stem, and it unfortunately shows up on many “Worst of the ’80s” lists. It’s a rock-opera semi-satire on the methods and madness of a tabloid newspaper, in particular their treatment of a serial killer on their front pages.

Critics were united in their dislike for
The News,
which seemed to have no real handle on its subject matter, trivializing both the paper (which bore a masthead resemblance to a certain paper rhyming with “You Pork Ghost”) and the serial killer who winds up dating the editor’s daughter. Mostly the work of Paul Schierhorn, who was nominated for two Tony awards for this four-performance flop,
The News
was mostly sung, and a good thing, too: Coming in for most of the credit were Cheryl Alexander as a reporter and future Tony winner Anthony Crivello as the killer.

The enjoyable musical setting of Roger Corman’s zerobudget horror film
The Little Shop of Horrors.
In movie and musical, nerdy Seymour tends the cannibalistic plant Audrey II (named for his boss’s daughter, the object of Seymour’s affections). As Audrey II grows, her appetite for human blood grows as well, and Seymour must feed his plant or suffer the consequences.

A huge off-Broadway hit (by Alan Menken and
Howard Ashman), which was subsequently made into a successful and stylish film,
Little Shop
told its tale in 50’s shoo-bop style, with a Greek-chorus-like trio of girl singers (cleverly named Chiffon, Crystal, and Ronnette, after the girl groups of the period) guiding us through the action.

Stephen Sondheim’s dark side strikes again! With the misery index nearing an all-time high, and the country suffering through a recession and a controversial war, Playwrights Horizons in Manhattan presented Sondheim’s
Assassins
off-Broadway in the winter of 1991. Critics were divided, with most enjoying the score but not the concept.

A bleak look at those unhappy folks who assassinated, or at least tried to kill a U.S. President, Sondheim and librettist John Weidman saw them as a sort of loser’s club of Americana, with every member having a story to tell. Sondheim excelled here, presenting these historical characters through the time in which they lived (a Coplandesque folk ballad for “pioneer” John Wilkes Booth, a Carpenters parody for would-be assassins John Hinckley and Squeaky Fromme), using the pastiche as both biting commentary and superb storytelling.

One of the most notorious flop shows of the ’80s,
Legs Diamond
made the twin mistakes of trying to musicalize the story of a gangster and then trying to use his desire for a showbiz career as an excuse for his criminal activity. The bomb detonated on the stage of the Mark Hellinger Theater was so huge it took the power of a
higher being to rescue it, as the Times Square Gospel Church took over the theater after
Legs
ran away.

The great playwright Harvey Fierstein was partially responsible for the book, which aimed for Runyonesque color and grit but had too much unintentional gay camp beneath the surface. Cabaret performer and recording artist Peter Allen wrote the score and played the title role. He was unconvincing both as the songwriter and as the titular gangster and lothario.

Legendary songwriter Paul Simon’s ill-starred musical, based on a true story a 1959 murder in the streets of New York City. The piece, despite noble intentions, was never convincingly theatrical, and many critics called it cantata-like, citing a lack of a coherent stage motor to drive it.

Sixteen-year-old Salvador Agron knifed two innocent men when his gang, the Vampires, went looking for the Irish gang the Norsemen. (Agron was identified by witnesses by his red and black cape, hence the nickname.) Agron’s life and times (sentenced to death, his sentence was commuted, and he served 20 years), which might have made a stunning musical, were unfortunately somewhat trivialized.

This 2002 quasi-glamour project, created by hot director-choreographer Susan Stroman and even hotter composer-lyricist Harry Connick, Jr., was a musical adaptation of Emile Zola’s novel
Thérèse Raquin.
The result, despite the pedigrees of its creators, was an unfocused, often troubled show with moments of quality.

The musical followed Zola’s plot closely, but switched
the action from Europe to post-war N’awlins, allowing Connick to indulge his Southern jazz roots by writing a steamy score. Stroman’s work was very dance-heavy; this talented choreographer seemed to fall back on the weak libretto band-aid of extraneous dance. Of the cast, most of the plaudits went to Norbert Leo Butz, as Thérèse’s schlubby husband Camille, who was ultimately driven to rage by his wife’s betrayal.

As a showcase for the remarkably talented Audra McDonald, this 1999 Michael John LaChiusa musical was pretty successful. In most other respects,
Marie Christine
was less so. This musical retelling of the
Medea
tale starred McDonald as the doomed wife and mother of the title, driven by her passions and the prejudices of the day. Like the aforementioned
Thou Shalt Not, Marie Christine
reset its classic tale in steamy, sensuous New Orleans.