Broadway's Most Wanted (24 page)

Tyro choreographer Matthew Bourne created his
Swan Lake
in London in 1995, the centenary year of the standard Petipa-Ivanov version of Tchaikovsky’s classic ballet. Bourne’s choreographic conception of the tale of alienation and loneliness featured a black-leather swan, goofy royals, and a gay encounter in a weakling prince’s bedroom. The male corps of bare-chested swans created the biggest stir, but despite superb choreography, design, and dancing, most Broadway enthusiasts
wondered why it was being treated as a Broadway musical at all. Bourne’s concept, radical as it was, didn’t disguise the fact that this
Swan Lake
was still a ballet.

A massive tribute evening to the innovative director-choreographer Jerome Robbins, the 1989 show was directed by Robbins with scenes from virtually all his major work for Broadway, from 1943’s
On the Town
to
Funny Girl
in 1964, with many stops in between.

Robbins rehearsed his huge company for the small epoch of nine weeks, during which time he was occasionally seen walking down the street wearing a T-shirt that read, “It’s going fine, thank you.” All the great moments were included:
West Side Story’s
exquisite suite of ballets, the joyful peasant dances from
Fiddler on the Roof,
the musical-comedy magic of
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
and
Gypsy,
and many others, all woven together as a fitting tribute to one of the architects of the Broadway musical edifice.

Perhaps the most innovative musical of the 1990s, 1995’s
Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk
was a riotous celebration of the black experience in America, using hip-hop beats, spoken word (with slam poetry texts by Reg E. Gaines), and much music and dance. And what dance it was.

Noise/Funk
was, first and foremost, a tap show, the dancing illustrating the many chapters of African-American life. A number on a slave ship, with dancers clinking chains and neck irons stood out, as did the
piece de resistance,
“Taxi,” a pulsating tap dance about four young black men (a hip-hopper, student, businessman, and a man in uniform) trying to hail a cab. Over and over we hear the wheels screech away, and the men dance out their frustration. With
Noise/Funk,
Tony-winning choreographer and lead dancer Savion Glover cemented his reputation as the leading tap artist of his generation.

A fairly unique concept: Act One, song; Act Two, Dance. Originally titled
Tell Me On
a
Sunday,
Andrew Lloyd Webber set a two-act tale to variations on Paganini’s A minor
Caprice
and wrote the first act as a song cycle for a young Englishwoman named Emma, who falls in and out of love with a guy called Joe. (We see and hear only Emma.) Act Two sets an entire ensemble dancing, acting out Joe’s adventures in courtship, leading him finally to his Emma.

Despite the pedigree of Lloyd Webber and lyricist Richard Maltby, Jr. and the choreographic chops of ballet master Peter Martins,
Song and Dance
never really added up to anything other than a novelty concoction for two performers, Emma in Act One and Joe in Act Two.

What began as a brief dance interlude at the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest has become an unparalleled worldwide dance phenomenon. Michael Flatley and Bill Whelan’s space-filler has exploded into a gargantuan evening of song and dance and a stirring tribute to the power of Celtic myth.

Riverdance,
as conceived by composer/lyricist
Whelan and principal dancer and choreographer Flatley, became an immediate sensation in Dublin, soon playing to capacity crowds in London and eventually all over the world. The show had played limited engagements in New York before, but finally hit Broadway in 2000, minus Flatley, who left the show prior to its London opening due to creative differences.

Twenty-four Billy Joel songs from several of his hit albums were cobbled together in an attempt to create a narrative about friendships over time. A large corps of dancers was put through its paces dancing not to prerecorded Joel tracks, but by a pit band featuring a Billy Joel sound-alike, Michael Cavanaugh.

Director-choreographer Twyla Tharp unfortunately shaped the material literally (Sergeant O’ Leary walking the beat, Brenda & Eddie still going steady, etc.), and without an original score, the weak material overshadowed the strength of the dancing. The show opened strongly, however, in October 2002.

1999 saw this snappy revue come to Broadway as one of the last gasps of Canadian production company Livent.
Fosse
was a collection of well-executed numbers originally created by the late, great Bob Fosse, focusing on all the media in which he worked—film, television, nightclubs, and, of course, Broadway. As a retrospective, it was splendid, but as a new musical, it was less well regarded (and often compared with
Dancin’),
and, like
Contact,
was a dance show which won a Best Musical Tony in an otherwise weak year.

They say there’s a light for every broken heart on Broadway. What they don’t tell you is there’s a “diva fit” for every broken light on Broadway. Here are ten outrageous moments of offstage antics, weirdness, and just plain diva-hood.

Red, Hot and Blue
was a deliberate attempt to cash in on the success of
Anything Goes:
same librettists (Lindsay and Crouse), same composer-lyricist (Cole Porter), and same leading lady (Ethel Merman). New to this production: Bob Hope, Jimmy Durante, and a laughably egomaniacal billing war.

Durante and Hope came aboard after William Gaxton walked, allegedly after hearing Merman talk about how
huge
her part was compared to
everybody else’s.
Then the egos really took over. Durante and Merman’s people apparently thought each deserved top billing, and no compromise could be reached to suit the stars. The end result still gets a chuckle from the show freak: Cross-billing, Durante’s name running from, say,
eleven o’clock to five, and Merman’s running from seven to one. (Hope’s name ran inoffensively under both.) Not only does one think, “Wow, trained egos!” but also, “Hey, looks like the Scottish flag!”

The pop-opera spectacle
Miss Saigon
was a monster hit in London, but as soon as producer Cameron Mackintosh announced his plans to bring the show, a Vietnam-era
Madama Butterfly,
to Broadway, chaos erupted.

Asian American playwright David Henry Hwang served notice with Equity, the actor’s union, that he and a coalition of theater people objected to Mackintosh’s intention of bringing Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce over from London to reprise his role of the Engineer, a Eurasian pimp. Hwang specifically objected to a pure European playing this Asian role with prosthetic eyelids when an Asian American actor could have played the role naturally.

As the press got wind of the controversy, Mackintosh countered by threatening to scrap the entire production, saying it was his to cast as he saw fit, and that Pryce (and Filipino actress Lea Salonga, also coming over from London) would open the show—or no one would.

Actor’s Equity and Asian labor leaders chastised Hwang for his position, saying he was denying scores of Asian performers future employment opportunities, Ultimately, Hwang dropped his grievances, Pryce opened the role on Broadway (and won a Tony), and Mackintosh made good on his promise to hire Asian American performers to replace Pryce in the role of The Engineer.

The original Broadway production of
Nine
was a blissful exercise in many different musical theater styles. One of the highlights of the show was Anita Morris’s performance as Carla, the larger-than-life mistress of the musical’s lead, Guido (Raul Julia). Clad in a see-through black jumpsuit, she seduces Guido over the phone in the fabulous “A Call From The Vatican.” Hello, Tony Awards!

Except for the inevitable brouhaha. CBS-TV executives pulled the plug on Morris performing her number at the last moment, saying the idea of a grown woman seducing a grown man was too adult for broadcast. So, the number they chose to broadcast instead was “Ti Voglio Bene (Be Italian),” a memory number with Young Guido and his chums being taught the ways of
amore
by the local whore, Saraghina (Kathi Moss). So … hot redhead on the phone? Sorry, no. Colorful whore with a group of young boys? Why, sure! “A vast wasteland,” indeed.

1776
was 1969’s big musical hit, and actor William Daniels’ performance as John Adams, simultaneously charming and frustrating, was the year’s finest musical performance. So fine, in fact, that he refused to play in the same league with his co-stars come Tony time.

Since
1776
was a show with a huge male ensemble cast, no single performer was given star billing with his name above the show’s title. So when the Tony award nominations were announced, Daniels was listed in the Featured (supporting) category. Daniels objected, rightly stating that his was a lead performance, and requested
that the committee remove his name from the Featured category. The Tony committee acquiesced, and the Featured Actor Tony went to Ron Holgate, also from
1776.
Holgate had one show-stopping number and literally about half the stage time Daniels had. Daniels was not nominated in the Lead Actor category.

Andrew Lloyd Webber and Richard Stilgoe’s
Starlight Express
is a musical bedtime story: a tale about trains competing in a race, ultimately won by Rusty, the old steam engine, who embraces the Starlight Express, the God figure of the show.

A decidedly subpar offering from Lloyd Webber,
Starlight Express
tells its rail tale with its actors, on skates, playing the trains. For Broadway, set designer John Napier created a staggering travelogue-of-America set, complete with a mammoth mechanized bridge. Tony voters were less than staggered, though, and nominated Napier’s clever
Starlight
costumes but not his set.

On the night of the Awards, Napier indeed won for his costumes, and a minute later, he won for his brilliant set for
Les Miserables.
He made his thanks to his staff, and then he wondered aloud why his
Starlight
set wasn’t nominated. Seventeen people in the Mark Hellinger Theater applauded, then Napier stated he’d swap his Tony “to have been in the room,” backhanding the Nominating Committee. He then quickly added, “You know? Thanks,” then hit the road, leaving a stunned, silent audience to wonder what had happened. And … let’s go to commercial. (No hard feelings; Napier won again in 1995, for yet another massive, two-level Lloyd Webber set,
Sunset Blvd.)

When Blake Edwards and his wife, Julie Andrews, decided to bring their film musical,
Victor/Victoria,
to Broadway, the gossip immediately began. When rumors of creative trouble on the production started to surface, the gossip started again. And when the 1996 Tony nominations were announced, the gossip went into overdrive.

Victor/Victoria,
the story of a woman pretending to be a female impersonator, was a superb film musical, expertly weaving its storybook-like Parisian musical comedy with sex-farce machinations. Edwards reportedly had trouble successfully adapting his movie for the stage, and the Leslie Bricusse tunes augmenting the late Henry Mancini’s movie songs were not well integrated.

Reviews, except those for Andrews, were bad, and hers was the only Tony nomination the show received. On May 8, 1996, she addressed the audience at the Marquis Theater, after her curtain call, to announce that she was refusing the nomination, preferring to “stand with the egregiously overlooked,” referring to the cast and authors. The Nominating Committee did not honor Andrews’ request, and Tony host Nathan Lane twitted her mercilessly on the awards broadcast.

Producer Adela Holzer had a strange and not-too-successful track record on Broadway; her taste in projects always veered toward the cockeyed. Unfortunately, her business acumen tended to stray from the path as well. Her last Broadway stint was on
Senator Joe.

By all accounts,
Senator Joe
was going to be a routinely
bad rock opera about everyone’s favorite Commie-hunter, Joe McCarthy. Mostly the work of frequent Holzer confederate Tom O’ Horgan, it began its preview period on January 5, 1989, and shuttered forever just two days later. Holzer, jailed shortly after for financial irregularities, had a track record of shady financial schemes, including a recent immigration scam. Actress Tovah Feldshuh, however, puts it all in perspective: “Adela Holzer,” she told online columnist Peter Filichia, “was very good to her actors.”

After Brooks Atkinson retired from the
New York Times,
people should have seen this one coming. Producer David Merrick, the “Abominable Showman” his ownself, played a publicity prank for his musical
Subways Are for Sleeping
that still gets a chuckle and a head shake today.

Merrick found seven men whose names matched the names of the drama critics of the seven daily New York papers. He took them to dinner and the show, they all had a lovely time, and he quoted their “rave reviews” in an ad shortly after. The fact that Merrick printed their pictures next to the names should have tipped off the ad editors, but the ad inexplicably slipped through to the morning edition of the January 4
Herald Tribune.
There is no more
Subways Are for Sleeping.
There is no more
Herald Tribune.
’Nuff said.