Skyscraper

~ Let's take a movie star and write a musical for her!

~ Sounds great. Can she sing?

~ Not really but we'll write charm songs for her and give the big ballads to the leading man.

It worked for Rosalind Russell and Lauren Bacall. It flopped for Katherine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, and many others. They leave behind broken dreams and fascinating cast albums. Take the Julie Harris vehicle Skyscraper. She's charming and the audience wants to root for her but the show won't have it. The music, plot and ultimate victory got to the men. 

In 1941 Lady in the Dark used dream sequences to psychoanalyze the star. Here they were mostly filler. Peter Marshall's architect makes the feeble argument that skyscrapers are a "way to the stars." He, and Charles Nelson Reilly's clown, somehow persuade her to sell her home and business for the sake of urban development.

“Skyscraper qualifies as one of the weakest shows ever to receive favorable reviews... The final version of Skyscraper borrowed only the heroine’s name and the idea of her daydreaming from Rice’s play, and the daydreaming was now just a gimmick to pad out a thin evening.” ~ Ken Mandelbaum. Not Since Carrie

"It stank. A good idea needs more than a good cast and a good choreographer [Michael Kidd]...  The score generally lacked delight." ~ Ethan Mordden. Open a New Window. 

1776

Even if we're not familiar with the history we think we know the ending. The success of 1776 owes less to the score than the clever book which manages to generate suspense and leave the ending in doubt.

Being cast in the show is a fun but strange experience. The soloists tend to sing their song then vanish. The congressmen are on stage for most of the show but many stop singing after the opening number.

Edit: Fixed a typo and increased the font size.

Titanic

“In early 1986 the Space Shuttle blew up and that’s when I realized that we still haven’t learned the lesson of not putting our unconditional faith in the infallibility of technology. Now we really need to tell the story so that we can live and learn from it... Now Peter had written the show 1776, and had taken an historic event, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and convinced the audience by the end of the play that they were not going to sign it! I said, Peter, you are the perfect man to write Titanic because you are somehow going to convince the audience that the ship is not going to sink or at least hope that it won’t." ~ Maury Yeston

"It's good to be reminded that most of those who perished were travelling to the US to make new and better lives for themselves." ~ Guardian. 2013.