Hallelujah, Baby!

Being good just won't be good enough

I'll be the best or nothing at all

In 1968 Hallelujah, Baby! won 5 Tony Awards: Best Actress, Best Featured Actress, Best Producer, Best Original Score and Best Musical. So why did it close after 293 performances? 

Arthur Laurents's libretto had a tricky concept. Leslie Uggams traveled through 50 years of American history while remaining 25. The book is focused the progress of civil rights. The score is focused on Uggams' showbiz career. It's Roots meets Funny Girl and critics found it a tough sell. The New York Times referred to the 1967 production as "Civics One" and a 2004 revisal as "bland and anachronistic." 

In a 2011 interview Arthur Laurents stated that the show was written for Lena Horne. He felt it lost it's edge when the sweet Leslie Uggams replaced her. Edgy or not Uggam's star-making turn is what the show is best remembered for now. You can watch her performances on the Ed Sullivan Show and the Tony Awards broadcast to see why.

Gypsy

I've tried to avoid the classics on this blog unless I could find an interesting take on them. In this case I've decided to compare Gypsy and Funny Girl.

Arthur Laurent's libretto for Gypsy has been heavily analysed and highly praised. The show lived past Ethel Merman's original star turn for three revivals, two films and counting. Funny Girl's book was dismissed as weak. The film was heavily edited to focus on it's star Barbra Streisand and subsequent attempts at revivals have yet to secure backing.

Some similarities: Both musicals have backstage rise-to-fame plots, VERY LOOSELY based on real-life stars and scores by Jule Styne. Fanny and Louise both clash with their mothers. Nicky and Herbie both abandon their leading ladies after a dressing room confrontation. Both shows end act one with a rousing song of unhealthy determination.

Later this week I'll look at how the shows differ, and why a Funny Girl revival may be better in our imaginations than in reality.

Anyone Can Whistle

Anyone Can Whistle is really two musicals, two very different, not entirely compatible musicals. It's part absurdist social satire, breaking the fourth wall, acknowledging itself as theatre, rejecting naturalism and sometimes even logic; and part romantic musical comedy, complete with love songs and a happily ever after for the hero and heroine (and even the villains). So many people have tried to stage the show but have crashed and burned because they couldn't reconcile the two distinct styles. ~ Scott Miller


The idea that it’s the wackos who are sane, and vice versa, was a cornerstone of 1960s counterculture. (That was a decade when “You’re crazy” became the highest of compliments.) And I suppose that it could be argued that “Anyone Can Whistle” was ahead of its time in advancing this notion, given that movies with similar themes, like “King of Hearts” and “The Graduate,” would soon become talismanic favorites of young Americans. ~ Ben Brantley, New York Times.

Do I Hear a Waltz?

The fiercest critic of this 1964 American musical is one of its co-creators. It was Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics to Richard Rodgers's score, who dubbed it a "Why?" musical, meaning a perfectly respectable show that has no reason for being. Actually, it's rather better than that and, in this rare revival by Charles Court Opera, exudes a pleasant, watery charm...

But it is Sondheim who provides the salt to go with Rodgers's sugar, and although the relationship between the two men was notoriously fraught, you periodically find the young lyricist pushing the old composer into new territory.~  Guardian. 2014.