Rise

Stop me if you've heard this before. Inspirational teacher puts a hot jock and some minorities in a show where they learn to live and love and... oh you have? Well how about we give half the kids abusive families... and make the teacher a monster? No, not a funny monster. Just extremely unpleasant. Unpleasant enough to inspire hostile reviews and scare audiences away.

Ted Sutherland brings charm to his coming out storyline, though it gets about 5 minutes of screen time per episode. Stephanie Block brings gravitas to the potentially campy role of his loving conservative mother.

The choice of Spring Awakening was an interesting one. It's still considered edgy. Will age give it the same respect that West Side Story, Grease and even Rent have gained from most school boards? Skip to episode 9 and 10 if you want to see the talent young cast performing the songs. Hopefully there will be better shows in their futures.

9 to 5

In 1973 a group of women founded the 9to5 organization to campaign for the same pay and treatment as their male co-workers. When actress and producer Jane Fonda met with them the idea for a screenplay was inspired. The film Nine to Five went through multiple rewrites before its release in 1980. A drama about workplace harassment became a black comedy about three secretaries attempting to murder their boss. The final product softened the murder to a kidnapping but kept the social commentary.

Singer/songwriter Dolly Parton wrote the award winning title song and made her film debut in the role of Doralee.  When Robert Greenblatt, president of entertainment at Showtime Networks, Inc., pitched the idea of a musical adaptation he secured Ms. Parton to write the score and co-screenwriter Patricia Resnick to write the libretto. Ms. Resnick told reporters she was sad to see how little had changed in the modern workplace. Nine to Five was as relevant in 2009 as it was in 1980.

9 to 5 at the 2009 Tony Awards.

The Pirate Queen

I fought my wars on land and sea
To be a woman strong and free
I should have learned, at journey’s start,
No woman’s free who ignores her heart.

Boublil and Schonberg avoided adaptation for The Pirate Queen and created a libretto whole cloth from a historical anecdote. The collaboration with the producers of Riverdance meant that there would be long stretches of dance (at a wedding, a funeral, and a christening) leaving the plot to be quickly shoved into short scenes (like the one where Grace gives birth aboard a ship, gets out of bed to sword fight British soldiers, then belts an angry divorce song at her husband).

Grace's crew was deadly earnest while her Gaston-y first husband and Queen Elizabeth's court were played for high camp. The famous treaty between Grace and Elizabeth, arguably the purpose for adapting this story, took place off-stage while the courtiers gossiped.

Ben Brantley wrote: The Pirate Queen” registers as a relic of a long-gone era, and I don’t mean the 1500s. The big-sound, big-cast show pioneered by Messrs. Boublil and Schönberg is now as much a throwback to the 1980s as big hair and big shoulders. 

The Pirate Queen ran 85 performances and 32 previews.

Falsettos

William Finn wrote three short musicals about the bisexual Marvin and his family (In Trousers, March of the Falsettos, Falsettoland), before combining the latter two into the full length Falsettos. While the AIDS crisis had been addressed on stage Falsettos was the first musical to deal with the topic, two years before Rent.

The Broadway production was nominated for 7 Tony Awards. It won best book and best score but lost best musical to the fizzy Gershwin scored Crazy for You. In Peter Filichia's novel Strippers, Showgirls, and Sharks: A Very Opinionated History of the Broadway Musicals That Did Not Win the Tony Award he suggests that it was the adultery, rather than the homosexuality, that upset the Tony voters. The monogamous gay couple in La Cage Aux Folles won best musical in 1984 but Marvin leaves his wife in Falsettos and nobody is punished. In Crazy For You boy leaves upper class girlfriend for cowgirl but no one felt threatened by that.

Falsettos on the Tony Awards.
Scott Miller's Analysis of March of the Falsettos.
Background reading.