Broadway's Most Wanted (9 page)

TV’s greatest sitcom was set in the New York suburb of New Rochelle, its star working as head writer for a Sid Caesar-style variety show in the city. It stood to reason that much of the show’s classic humor would be Broadway-related. After debuting on Broadway in
The Girls Against the Boys,
Dick Van Dyke gave a memorable performance as Albert Peterson in
Bye Bye Birdie;
he also headlined the 1981 revival of
The Music Man.

His TV costars, Rose Marie
(Top Banana)
and the versatile Morey Amsterdam, who wrote two original Broadway revues, added much-needed authenticity. Mary Tyler Moore, as hottest-housewife-ever Laura Petrie, never appeared on Broadway in a musical, but was Holly Golightly in the legendary road disaster
Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Sarah Jessica Parker, the star of HBO’s
Sex and the City,
has appeared on Broadway four times, three of them in musicals (working her way up the orphanage to star in
Annie,
as the star of the 1997 revival of
Once Upon a Mattress,
and opposite her soon-to-be husband Matthew Broderick in
How to Succeed inBusiness Without Really Trying). Sex and the City
lives and breathes its New York locations, and as such, the cream of the Broadway crop is often featured, such as Nathan Lane as a society pianist, or Mary Testa as a cabaret siren.

Jamie-Lynn DiScala plays Meadow Soprano, troubled daughter to a mobster, on HBO’s great drama series
The Sopranos.
DiScala, who has also released a pop album, made her Broadway debut as Belle in
Disney’s Beauty and the Beast
in the fall of 2002. Her
Sopranos
grandfather, Tom Aldredge, is a two-time Tony nominee and a favorite of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, who have used him in
Into the Woods
and
Passion. Sopranos
Production Designer Bob Shaw is a favorite designer at the Public Theater as well.

With a few exceptions, all daytime soap operas are taped in New York, so many actors do soaps all day, then head to the theater at night. Actor James Mitchell, who plays Palmer Cortland on
All My Children,
is a Broadway hoofer from way back, appearing in the original cast of the classic
Brigadoon
as sword-dancing Harry Beaton. He was also seen in shows as diverse as
Mack and Mabel
and
Carnival,
as well as in a memorable role in the great movie tuner
The Band Wagon.
And, of course, the glamorous Susan Lucci, a/k/a Erica Kane, de-glammed for a stint in
Annie Get Your Gun
back in 2000.

There is a category of Broadway show known as the “tired businessman show.” These shows feature corny plots, big sets and costumes, and girls, girls, girls, all designed to soothe the gray-flannel type who has collapsed into his seat. Here are ten musicals that hit close to home for Joe Bottomline.

Maybe the funniest musical in Broadway history,
How to Succeed
… won the Pulitzer Prize for 1961–62, and multiple Tonys as well. Adapted from Shepherd Mead’s satirical novel of the same name, it concerns a ruthless young climber of the corporate ladder and the many rungs he encounters on his way.

What makes the show so funny and so successful is that there really are no heroes. Every single character is pretty horrid (or boldly ambitious, at least) in his or her own right, and book writer Abe Burrows and composer-lyricist
Frank Loesser never let heart or sentiment get in the way of the laughs or the show as a whole.

A riotous spoof of big business and the conventions of the stage musical,
Urinetown
was 2001’s “Little musical that could,” moving from off-off Broadway to the big time and three Tony awards.

Urinetown
concerns UCG, Urine Good Company, a pay-toilet monopoly in a metropolis with a water short
age. UGC tells everyone, Huxley-like, that it’s a “Privilege to Pee,” and the no-good big boss Caldwell B. Cladwell keeps a tight fist on the big bucks. Sparks fly as the good folk of the village rebel against the System, and all is done with an eye winking madly at the audience (the security guards at UGC are Officers Lock-stock and Barrel, the heroine is named Little Sally, etc.) and lines in the script directly addressing the question of why musicals are written the way they are. Due to its great success,
Urinetown
may well be the future of the musical theater as we know it: small, relatively cheap, and deconstructionist.

Generally regarded as a mediocre show with perhaps the stupidest plot of the postwar era,
How Now, Dow Jones
at least has a catchy title and the semi-standard march tune “Step to the Rear.” But oh, that plot!

If you can stand it, read on: Kate, who announces the Dow Jones numbers, has a boyfriend who won’t marry her until the Dow Jones hits 1000. (Oh, dear.) She gets pregnant by another guy and arbitrarily announces the DJIA has hit 1000. (Oh, my.) After the market collapses, the oldest man on Wall Street buys everything, and all and sundry are paired off in the end. (Oh, forget it.)

Lyricist Carolyn Leigh was to blame for the idea, and “Abominable Showman” David Merrick was to blame for bringing the show in to Broadway in 1967. Shame, shame, stupid shame.

A wild satire of politics, capitalism, and fanaticism,
Flahooley
was about a toymaker who develops a new doll,
the Flahooley, that saturates and then collapses the market. That’s a thumbnail outline, because
Flahooley
had plot enough for five shows.

The market floods because Flahooleys are being made by a genie who doesn’t want to return to his lamp; the lamp has been brought to “Toycoon” B.G. Bigelow by an Arabian consortium intent on solving their oil crisis; Flahooleys are burned in public and the genie is hunted down with McCarthy-like zeal; the puppets from the toy factory
sing
the opening number. A truly fine score by Sammy Fain and E.Y. Harburg offset the wacky book by Harburg and Fred Saidy, which many saw as too critical of the American way and uncomfortably non-conformist, especially in the wake of World War II.

The great songwriting team of Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick
(Fiddler on the Roof, Fiorello!)
wrote this 1971 musical, along with librettist Sherman Yellen. Hal Linden played Mayer Rothschild, the head of the legendary European moneylending family.

As musical biographies go, it was solid, if unremarkable, save for the use of European anti-Semitism as a plot device. Attacks on the family’s property continue unabated through their lives, and, despite their success, they are also taunted, often by children, as second-class citizens. The musical ends at court, with Europe’s crowned heads finally recognizing the family’s greatness, bowing to Rothschild’s sons as they are made baronets.

A sequel to the 1977 hit
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas,
which told the semitrue story of the Chicken
Ranch, an illegal but cherished Texas institution, 1994’s
The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public
took the idea of a legal brothel and applied some mid-90’s business savvy to it.

Madam Mona Stangley, the heroine of the first show, is asked to run another brothel by an old flame, and soon she decides to float the place on the stock exchange. The IRS gets wind of it, and chaos ensues. Called to Washington to testify, Mona charms Congress, the press, and the American people, who soon elect her President. Rrrright.

Public
was a sixteen-performance flop, mainly because the “titillation factor” inherent in seeing a show with a dirty title back in the ’70s has all but vanished. The Vegas-tacky sense of grunge permeating the whole enterprise didn’t help, either.

Another Yip Harbug-Fred Saidy triumph,
Finian’s Rainbow
(with music by Burton Lane) is scattershot satire with a perfect score. Mainly a political satire, there are still many swipes at big business and the postwar boom.

Irishman Finian McLonergan has stolen a crock of gold from a leprechaun and has traveled stateside to place it next to Fort Knox, where, like all US dollars, it will grow. Finian unites with sharecroppers to foil a crooked Senator and reclaim Rainbow Valley. The sharecroppers cheerfully harvest tobacco because it’s all they know how to do. When they get wind of the gold, they call up the great chain store of Shears, Robust and have an orgy of buying, represented by the
rousing numbers “The Great Come-and-get-it Day” and “When the Idle Poor Become the Idle Rich.”

The age-old battle of labor vs. management is the issue in
The Pajama Game,
a thoroughly charming 1954 musical about union problems at the Sleep Rite Pajama Factory in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (Full disclosure: The author attended college in Cedar Rapids, and no such factory exists, and if it does, the employees certainly don’t sing and dance there.)

Since it’s a musical,
The Pajama Game’s
leads (he’s management, she’s labor) must fall in love, but more interesting is what goes on around them. Pre-dating
How to Succeed
… ’s musicalized coffee break and rooftop party,
The Pajama Game
sets to music a company picnic (the joyous “Once-a-year Day”) and even a union meeting (the insanely cued but sizzling “Steam Heat”).

Love and sex masquerade as business and power in this 1968 musical version of the classic 1960 film
The Apartment.
Jerry Orbach played a likable corporate Everyman whose bosses often used his nifty apartment for their trysts. The schlub then falls for his boss’s latest conquest, played by the appealing Jill O’Hara.

A state-of-the-art show,
Promises
was the last of a dying breed. Its success made it one of the final old-fashioned musical comedies to work on Broadway. Neil Simon wrote the ingratiating book, and Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s score explored pop sounds relatively unfamiliar to Broadway at the time. Their use of
a vocal group in the pit pre-dated the “Vocal Minority” pit voices in
Company.

The Westernization (and, ultimately, industrialization) of Japan by the United States was examined in this powerful 1976 Stephen Sondheim-Harold Prince musical. Prince directed the show, with a book by John Weidman, in Kabuki style, using only actors of Asian descent, to examine Commodore Perry’s voyage to Japan from the Japanese point of view.

One striking book scene examined American missionary/businessman Jonathan Goble, who invented the rickshaw (“Powered by Japanese”), and the finale of the musical, “Next,” threw Japan from the agrarian mid-nineteenth century into the highly industrialized post-war twentieth century. An uncompromising but ravishingly beautiful show in both look and sound,
Paciflc Overtures
was a Bicentennial poison-pen letter to both big business and politics.

As a direct marketing tool, the Original Cast Album ranks up there with the “George Foreman Grill” and the “ThighMaster.” Cast albums are so persuasive that they can often disguise a flop as a brilliant-sounding hit. Thanks to their original recordings, here are nine shows that sounded better than they actually were, and one show that actually worked in reverse: wringing a terrible cast album from a masterpiece.

The granddaddy of all flop cast albums. The Leonard Bernstein-Richard Wilbur score (with additional lyrics by John LaTouche and Dorothy Parker, plus Bernstein himself) is one of the musical theater’s very, very best, working wonderfully as operetta, operetta parody, even twelve-tone serialism.

Unfortunately, the score, as preserved on the priceless 1956 original cast album, obscures the fact that the show was indeed a failure, Lillian Hellman’s McCarthy-allegory libretto registering as too heavy-handed
and untrue to Voltaire’s picaresque tale of Candide and his one-joke optimism. Tyrone Guthrie’s drag-queens-at-the-prom staging didn’t help, either. Better to revel in the performances of Barbara Cook, Robert Rounseville, and William Olvis.

(Note:
Candide
re-entered the Broadway consciousness in 1974, thanks to that original cast album. Harold Prince’s environmental staging at off-Broadway’s Chelsea Theater Certer was brought downtown and installed at the reconfigured Broadway Theater. The cast album of
that
production, Hugh Wheeler’s new dialogue included, does the show a mild disservice, reducing the orchestra almost to combo size, and emphasizing the production’s madcap, thrift-store atmosphere.)

Frank Loesser wrote this musical adaptation of B.J. Chute’s novel, a fantasy of a twee little village where cows act as currency, folks bake bilberry tarts, and two ministers (Mutt and Jeff, basically) preach the Word at opposite ends of the spectrum. “Loesser goes bucolic” is how many describe the score. “Really good” is another way of putting it, as this Son of Tin Pan Alley adapted well to the folkish atmosphere of Chute’s novel. “The Music of Home,” “Clang-Dang the Bell,” “Could’ve Been a Ring”—these are not titles one would exactly mistake for numbers out of
Guys and Dolls.

The cast album, led by Anthony Perkins (really!) and the marvelous Pert Kelton, makes the show seem better than it really is. The book, written by Loesser and Lesser Samuels, meanders as much as Greenwillow’s Meander River, and it runs out of steam in the second act (the aforementioned cow is the centerpiece of
much of the drama).
Greenwillow
is an uneven show, but the cast album shows us that the score captured the hoped-for mood much better than the book, design, or direction did.