The Addams Family

So producers ask you to write an Addams Family musical. What story do you tell? The films contrasted the Addam's with "normal" criminals who wanted to harm them. The stage show introduces a fiancee and conservative in-laws. The device has fueled many comedies including You Can't Take It With You, Auntie Mame and La Cage Aux Folles. So that's your spine. But what do you do with the details?

Who are the Addams's? Are they undead? If so are they zombies, ghosts or vampires? Are they just unusually morbid mortals? How much of their BDSM leanings can you mention in a family show? If you put them onstage do you use the personalities from the comics, cartoons, TV sitcom or films?

The stage show went through multiple rewrites before and after the Broadway engagement. The squid was cut for the tour. She certainly isn't in the school version. But the song about squid molestation was in the Chicago tryout and made it to Broadway.

Sherry!

Some musicals eclipse their source material. Others just add songs. The Man Who Came to Dinner remains a delightful comedy while Sherry! is rightfully forgotten. In 2004 an all star cast was assembled for a studio cast album of the score. The problems were laid clear. The three act play was squished awkwardly into two acts and the generic songs never quite fit the characters. The secretary got ingenue ballads (Elizabeth Allen /Bernadette Peters), the diva got the belty numbers (Dolores Gray / Carol Burnett), but poor Sheridan Whiteside (George Sanders / Clive Revill / Nathan Lane) was stuck with dull Henry Higgins patter and a bizarre dream ballet.

A fuzzy recording remains of Dolores Gray belting the title song. Critics agreed she was the best thing in the show but she wasn't onstage long enough to carry the show.

Marc Miller's review of the recording ended with: "The deluxe presentation and drop-dead cast seem a little silly under the circumstances; you can take hamburger, dress it up with spices and fancy cheeses, flip it onto a silver platter and call it steak haché au gorgonzola, but it'll still be hamburger."

The Producers

As Hamilton gets ready to sweep the Tony's it's worth looking back at a previous cultural phenomena. The Producers was the right production at the right time and conquered Broadway in the 2001-2002 season. Replacement cast troubles and an unlucky film have tarnished the shows image. I had the good fortune to see the original Broadway cast. Last night I saw a terrific small scale production and learned two important things:

1. The material doesn't play itself. Mel Brooks' one joke songs require charm, personality and a healthy dose of shtick. 
2. The cast must be balanced. Max can carry the show. Roger can steal the show. But they need an honest Leo and Carmen to play off of. I've since learned that Leo can carry the show too. The parts have enough Roxy/Velma equality that "Till Him" can be the emotional climax if "Betrayed" underwhelms.

I think Hamilton will have a longer cultural footprint than The Producers but it's nice to see that the show can still dazzle in the right hands.

Quick Sketch: Guys and Dolls

Lunch time " work meetings" are cutting into my lunch time art so this will have to be a quick sketch.

Guys and Dolls is regarded by some as a perfect musical. The uneven movie and some poorly received revivals have reminded us that it is not fool proof. You'll notice very little Nathan and Adelaide in the synopsis. They get far too much material to be dismissed as "supporting roles" but Sky and Sarah most definitely carry the plot. 

But then there' s not much plot in act two either. Damon Runyon's original story, The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown, ended with Sarah rolling the dice for Sky's soul. The dice rolling goes to Sky in the musical leaving Sarah little to do in Act Two but sing "Marry the Man Today." None of this is a negative. It's just interesting to re-examine the "perfect" musical's structure after some time away from it.

Adelaide's Lament remains my favorite showtune and I'll always have a special place in my heart for the 1992 revival cast. 

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

And my Sondheim series concludes with his first commercial hit.

"It's noisy, coarse, blue and obvious like the putty nose on a burlesque comedian. Resist these slickly paced old comic routines if you can." ~ Howard Taubman. New York Times. 1962.

"Yet for all of its disguises, mistaken identities, pratfalls and leering jokes, "A Funny Thing" is as sophisticated as anything now on Broadway. In its own lunatic way, it's both wise and rigorously disciplined. Easy sentimentality is nowhere to be found here; in its place: the kind of organized chaos that leads to sheer, extremely contagious high spirits." ~ Vincent Canby. New York Times. 1996.

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

Do Re Mi

The recent Peter Pan Live included several new songs, two of which took set melody's from Do Re Mi to new lyrics.

• Hubie's "Ambition" became Captain Hook's "Vengeance" and
• the record producer's "I Know About Love" became Wendy's "(Is It) Only Pretend?"

The original show won't miss them as it's not likely to be revived any time soon. It was written as a star vehicle for Phil Silvers and seen briefly at Encores with Nathan Lane in 1999, but neither production had much praise for the slight book. It was mainly a launching pad for a star turn.

"Hubert Cram, the bluntly drawn schlemiel of a hero in the musical ''Do Re Mi,'' is not a character to be served without sauce. He needs the twists, fizz and flourishes that only an outsize comic presence can provide, the sort of performer to whom shtick is an intricate and highly evolved art. In 1960, when the show first opened, Phil Silvers was on hand to come up with the necessary embellishments. Baroque shtick was Silvers's specialty, as it was to a whole galaxy of funny men whose style was descended from vaudeville, from Bert Lahr to Zero Mostel." ~ New York Times

Merlin

Doug Henning had built a musical around his magic act in 1974 that ran 1,920 performances. He tried again in 1983 with Merlin but lightning didn't strike twice.

Because Mr. Henning, who plays Merlin, cannot act, dance or sing, the authors must write their show around their title character and build it instead on the shoulders of the secondary players. ~ Frank Rich (New York Times)

The supporting roles were played by the talented Nathan Lane, Chita Rivera and Christian Slater. Clips of the opening number and Chita's first song are online but sadly no clips of the song titled "Satan Rules."

The Nance

Three Panel Musicals

The Nance

Play by Douglas Carter Beane. Broadway 2013.

Nathan Lane's burlesque comic goes cruising for trade and finds a boyfriend.

 Lane refuses to censor the gay content out of his burlesque act.

Mayor LaGuardia shuts down the burlesque houses and Lane self-destructs.

 Not technically a musical but there's enough music in the burlesque interludes for me to sneak it in here. After a short run at the Lincoln Center the Nance was filmed and is currently being broadcast in theaters across the U.S. It's a well-researched piece of theatre history and a titanic performance from Mr. Lane. The whole cast is terrific and Johnny Orsini as the mis-treated boyfriend is heartbreaking... even if Beane's script does make him a bit too good to be true.

Reviews.

Screening Times.

Trailer.