The Lightning Thief

Fans of the books hated the movies. They liked the musical but it's small scale hurt it in a Broadway house. Now Disney's making a TV series which has given the fans fresh hope.

Hadestown

"It's a sad song. We're gonna sing it anyway."

I don't like this show. The score's not my style and I don't agree that Orpheus should be forgiven for his failure because "he tried." But I respect the folks who do. Here's a collection of the Broadway reviews.

Lysistrata Jones

It's not a war. It's a basketball game. Stakes are low. Why exactly do the men want to play basketball if they're choosing to throw the games? Why do the gay players care about the cheerleader sex strike? Don't overthink it. Lysistrata Jones wants to be an old fashioned tired businessman musical with lotsa jokes and legs. There will always be an audience for that, though not always at Broadway prices.

Marie Christine

If you've heard of Medea you know what she did. The question of any adaptation is why. The cast album did not make this clear to me. Audra MacDonald's Marie sounds remarkably self-possessed, boasts of her magic powers and is clearly too good for Dante Keyes. The libretto told me more.

In Marie Christine LaChuisa spends time developing the world Marie is fleeing from. Act One's Louisiana is no more home to her than Act Two's Chicago. Her magic is questionable as well. She boasts of her power to seduce men but uses her magic to manipulate and murder other women. She has no biscuit or ribbon to hold on to Dante. Her obsession with Dante becomes a fatal flaw. She "will not let go" and she cannot change enough to fit the new life he leaves her in. 

Children complicate the matter. If she simply fled with them she'd have no means to support them. If she left them to Dante they'd become servants. Perhaps that would have been better but she'll never know. 

Cole Porter series part 3

Can Can. Music and Lyrics by Cole Porter. Book by Abe Burrows. 1953 Broadway.

Out of this World. Music and Lyrics by Cole Porter. Book by Dwight Taylor and Reginald Lawrence. 1950 Broadway.

In the past 4 shows the leading man pursued a lady. In these 2 shows the leading lady pursues a man. Both Can Can and Out of this World have had concerts at Encores but their books are too weak for Broadway revival. The Paper Mill Playhouse produced Can Can with Kate Baldwin and a new book, but the production did not have legs.

Can Can featured some juicy backstage intrigue. Leading lady Lilo was upstaged by supporting player Gwen Verdon and apparently seethed with diva rage. Both scores have their klunkers but Can Can features "I Love Paris" and "It's All Right With Me." Out of this World has the delightful, if forgotten, "Cherry Pies Ought To Be You."It starts as a compliment duet for the lovers. Then Juno and a gangster enter and turn it into an insult duet.

I know GoodTickleBrain has drawn a Can Can comic as well. It's buried in the archive but if I find it I'll post a link.

Edit: Here it is!

Xanadu

Camp is hard. Good camp looks effortless, but for every Little Shop of Horrors there are ten Rachael Lily Rosenblooms. Douglas Carter Beane had a low bar to hurdle as the film was a notorious flop. He was also wise to keep it to a 90 minute run time. Other comedies would benefit from such brevity. Add a viral marketing campaign and some backstage drama and you've got a modest hit.

Performance Clips
Suddenly
Evil Woman
Don't Walk on By

One Touch of Venus

Marlene Dietrich dropped out of the show calling it "too sexy and profane." Stage fright seems more likely. She was replaced by Mary Martin. Martin had made a splashy Broadway debut in 1938 singing "My Heart Belongs to Daddy" in Cole Porter's Leave it To Me. Her legendary moment in Venus came when she sat on a chair on an empty stage and crooned the song "That's Him." The brassy comedy suddenly had a heart and the audience was spell bound.

A film and TV broadcast have faded from memory and the show is seldom revived. Kurt Weill purists have dismissed this slight show for a lack of politics. However if you squint at this gentle  farce there is social commentary to be found. Venus inspires more fear than lust from those around her and is dismayed by the lack of romance in the modern world.

By Jupiter

A forgotten play starring Katharine Hepburn as an Amazon warrior...

Became a forgotten musical starring Ray Bolger as the unhappy Amazon king. The show was their longest running hit.

New York Times, 1942: “Mr Bolger… can cross the stage like a waif, or a king, he can sing or mug. He can play the unhappy, mincing consort of Hippolyta before the Greeks brought the breath of new thought into the kingdom of the Amazons, and afterwards he can bellow like an injured Senator. There is much for him to do and Mr. Bolger is not one to back away from a part. He is magnificent.”

Larry Hart was not at his best of health in 1942. The comedy based on reverse gender roles (Women acting likemen? Crazy!) was stale in revival and the Rodgers and Hart score was dismissed. 

New York Times, 1967: “This particular score – which always was a second-best in the Rodgers-Hart canon- is full of tunes that are little more than titles. Someone got a bright first idea, jotted it down as it stood, and then never did bother to turn the juice on.”

We won’t be seeing this one at Encores any time soon, but here are some clips of the big numbers.

The Frogs

“In Aristophanes' account, Dionysus must choose between Aeschylus and Euripides as the playwright to revitalize rotten old Athens. Shevelove, whose first (nonmusical) version of ''The Frogs'' was performed in 1941 when he was an instructor at Yale, subsituted Shaw and Shakespeare. When the show was resurrected in 1974, Shevelove enlisted Mr. Sondheim, with whom he had collaborated on an earlier, happier slice of singing antiquity, ''A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum”… Though the (1974) production, which starred Larry Blyden, ran only a week, it has since acquired a mythic, Brigadoonish haze in the land of showbiz, thanks in part to its exotic (and acoustically disastrous) aquatic setting and a student chorus that included Sigourney Weaver, Meryl Streep and the playwright Christopher Durang.” ~ New York Times

The Golden Apple

And now for the other musical based on The Odyssey. It threw in The Illiad and The Judgement of Paris for good measure.

If The Golden Apple was so brilliant, why didn't it run longer on Broadway? There were those who maintained that it was somewhat lacking in emotional involvement, but emotion is there in the music for Penelope and Ulysses, and the sheer theatrical imagination of the piece provides sufficient excitement to make up for any lack of feeling... Most of the shows in this book failed their audiences; it was the audience that failed The Golden Apple. ~ Ken Mandelbaum, Not Since Carrie.

Latouche... conceived the work as a satiric illustration of America's change from a rural culture to an urban one, dotted with a few jabs at the militaristic mentality. But his funniest material is more literary than political, depending for laughs on the audience's familiarity with Homer's epics--a sure way to please the cognoscenti, but no guaranteed ticket to wide popularity. ~ Albert Williams. Chicago Reader.

Check the blog tomorrow for something completely different.

Home Sweet Homer

Mitch Leigh and Joan Deiner never re-captured the success of Man of La Mancha but that didn't stop them from trying. Home Sweet Homer only lasted one performance on Broadway but before that the team suffered through a monstrous tour. Yul Brynner swiftly returned to revivals of The King and I.