Tag: Glory Days

Flop Revival

There was incredible excitement around some blogs and message boards yesterday because there was a private industry workshop reading of the legendary 1988 failure Carrie. It’s the show so well known for its failure that it even inspired the title of a book on the subject of failed musicals (the essential Not Since Carrie by Ken Mandelbaum). Fans of flops shows have reveled in the bootleg audio and video recordings, marveling at what is good – there are some good moments, especially for Betty Buckley – and howling at some of the campiest material this side of Whoop-Up. (This is the show that featured “Out for Blood” with the lyric “It’s a simple little gig, You help me kill a pig”). The buzz that the show was being revisited was intense – almost as though the show were a cult hit, rather than cult flop.

As I looked around various sites this afternoon, I couldn’t help but notice that there are several high profile flops other than Carrie that are being given another look this season. Glory Days, the only musical in over twenty years to close on opening night, is getting a cast album (no matter the quality, I feel every show should get a recording. It’s a piece of history). However, on top of the album there will be a reunion concert later this month at the Signature Theatre in VA where the piece originated before its misguided transfer to Broadway in May 2008.

Last season’s early failure, A Tale of Two Cities, also refuses to quit. The show is the long-runner of the ones I mention here, clocking in at a whopping 60 performances. The show has already been resuscitated in concert form in England, where producers preserved it. The concert will air on PBS Thanksgiving Day, with plans for a DVD and “International Cast Recording.”

It was also announced that Enter Laughing: The Musical last season’s off-Broadway revival of the failed musical So Long, 174th Street is poised to return to Broadway. Based on the book by Carl Reiner and its subsequent play by Joseph Stein, the show ran for 16 performances at the Harkness Theatre (a hitless Broadway house on 62nd and Broadway razed in 1977). The musical was a surprise success for the York Theatre Company last season, garnering some strong reviews and enough audience buzz to warrant a several extensions and a return engagement. The star of that production, Josh Grisetti, who was poised to make his Broadway debut this week in the ill-fated revival of Neil Simon’s Broadway Bound, is being sought after by the producer to reprise his Theatre World Award winning performance.

This April, to celebrate Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday, Encores! is giving us the better known Anyone Can Whistle, which packed it in after 9 performances in 1964. The score offers some gems even if it can’t get past Arthur Laurents’ silly libretto. It’s due to Sondheim’s later success that the show is given its attention, but perhaps works best as an album or a concert. There have been revisions made to the script by Laurents, but nothing appears to have come from those regional productions. It’s not unusual for Encores! to present failed musicals: Allegro, Out of this World, St. Louis Woman, Tenderloin, House of Flowers, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, 70 Girls 70 and Juno were all critical and/or financial flops in their original productions. If nothing else, the show should be praised for bringing Angela Lansbury to Broadway – Jerry Herman happened to see the show during its brief run, and the rest is history.

You know me, I love my flops and I love the opportunities to see them. However, it’s unusual that so many failures are being given such high profile treatment. Usually, it was left to Musicals in Mufti to revisit a show like Henry Sweet Henry or Carmelina, often bringing in the creators or similar scholars to help fix the shows. Perhaps next season, Encores! will finally give me Darling of the Day with David Hyde Pierce and Victoria Clark, or the Bernstein estate will be nice enough to let me resuscitate 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I’d also enjoy seeing Donnybrook, A Time for Singing, Dear World, Prettybelle, Lolita My Love…

Here’s my question to you: what failed musical would you like to see revived/workshopped/recorded?

One Performance Wonders on Record

A news item twittered via our good friend Steve alerted me to the fact that the failed musical Glory Days will be recording an original cast album. The show, an export of the Signature Theatre in Virginia, opened and closed on the same night in May 2008. Out of town reviews were encouraging (if constructive) and a transfer to NY, especially without any revision was a wholly haphazard thing to do. The original cast will reunite in a recording studio next month to lay down the tracks. Incidentally, Glory Days was the first musical to fold after one performance since the 1985 Goodspeed revival of Take Me Along at the Martin Beck.

It got me thinking about what other one performance wonders (as I like to call these fast flops) have received an Original Broadway Cast Album…

This is what I found:

Here’s Where I Belong – opened and closed at the Billy Rose Theatre on March 3, 1968. Ambitious musical adaptation of John Steinbeck’s allegorical masterpiece East of Eden was penned by Terrence McNally (who requested his name be removed prior to opening), with music by Robert Waldman and lyrics by Alfred Uhry. There was considerable reticence on my part to include this one here as the cast album on Blue Pear LP appears to be a glorified bootleg, however, I since there is an LP with artwork that was available, here it is.

The Utter Glory of Morrissey Hall – opened and closed at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on May 13, 1979. You may recall that I brought this one up to Marilyn Caskey at Angus McIndoe’s after the closing performance of Gypsy this past January. Written by Clark Gesner of You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown fame, the show had a well received engagement in San Francisco in 1976 starring Jill Tanner as a British headmistress driven to insanity by the pranks of her students. Three years later, the show was revamped for its new star Celeste Holm, who was dreadfully miscast and out of her element (which can be evidenced on the record). The show stayed a week at the Hellinger, though it managed to get out an album and is licensed by Samuel French (I have the libretto!)

Onward Victoria – opened and closed at the Martin Beck Theatre on December 14, 1980. Larger than life historical figures have often made for interesting musicals. 1776, Gypsy, Fiorello!, among others come immediately to mind. However, this musical about Victoria Woodhull, a millionaire stockbroker turned suffragette presidential nominee didn’t quite live up to the standard. Starring Jill Eikenberry as Victoria, the show had music by Keith Hermann and book & lyrics by Charlotte Anker and Irene Rosenberg. Woodhull had long been considered for musical theatre, with proposed shows starring Lisa Kirk, Carol Channing and an out of town failure Winner Take All starring the sublime Patricia Morison.

Cleavage – opened and closed at the Playhouse Theatre on June 23, 1982. The show was a bawdy camp piece written for the Sheffield Theatre Ensemble that had a brief tour in the South before transferring to NY for its brief tenure. The score was by comedy writer Buddy Sheffield and the book was co-written by Sheffield and David Sheffield. It appears to have played successfully in New Orleans and it transferred to NY cast intact for literally a week. It featured such memorable moments as Jay Rogers in drag singing “Boys Will Be Girls”… it was that sort of show.

Dance a Little Closer – opened and closed at the Minskoff on May 11, 1983 and was jokingly referred to as Close a Little Faster by its detractors. The musical was an adaptation of Robert Sherwood’s Idiot’s Delight starring Len Cariou, George Rose, Liz Robertson and Brent Barrett with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Jule Styne. The creators updated the antiwar play by putting the characters at the brink of nuclear annihilation. The show’s cast album was recorded two weeks after the closing but was left unreleased until 1987.

Two other shows would receive later recordings. Kelly (February 6, 1965), quite possibly the most notorious of all the one-night stands, received ample coverage in Lewis Lapham’s legendary Saturday Evening Post article (and reprinted in Steven Suskin’s Second Act Trouble) got a studio cast album in 1998 restoring the composer and lyricist’s deluded intentions for the utterly misguided, misdirected and misproduced effort. Heathen! (May 21, 1972) resurfaced in New Zealand in 1981 under a new title Aloha! and that cast took the show into the recording studio.

What Do You Do on a Friday Night Alone…?

I blog. Or as I already know and you will soon find out, I ramble.

Had an interesting week. I almost did something theatrical. I missed out on a ticket to the final preview of the legendary flop of the season Glory Days, the one-night stand at the Circle in the Square that came into town against everyone’s better judgment (as per the bloggers and chatterati… then came the reviews… ouch). The one performance flop is that rare phenomenon – a show with either the arrogance or blind faith that they will be a hit, not seeing the writing on the wall during previews, rehearsals, try-outs, etc. The most recent one night closure was The Confederate Widow Tells All in 2003. Aside from that, many flops try to push as far as they can, like Urban Cowboy’s rescinding their initial closing notice to run a few more weeks. Amour’s 17 performances comes readily to mind. In spite of that show’s drastic failure, it still copped several Tony nominations, including Best Musical – once again proving that anything is possible. (I believe Rags, with its 4 performance run in August 1986 holds the dubious distinction of shortest lived Best Musical nominee). It was surprising to see the musical fold so abruptly, you’d think they would have tried to eke out some sort of a run however brief. It was deemed ineligible for Tony consideration, which I think is more because the nominators didn’t have time to see it as opposed to its actual quality, however poor.

Freed the house from the shackles of the oppressive Cablevision and their evil optimum for Verizon FiOS… (Let the Marxists among you bask in the irony of that statement). So far, so good. The internet is a faster and more reliable connection. On the amazing front – I get TCM, FXM, IFC, Showtime, Sundance, and every show I ever wanted on demand. Oh the goodies. I have season three of Weeds and season four of Entourage at my disposal. (I can actually watch a first-run episode of Weeds, what? Choir of angels is that you hosanna-ing on high? Yes. Wondrous). Seriously, its just nice to feel further in the digital age. Hell, we even got wi-fi going on in here. This is some impressive technology, folks. Not to mention as all this exciting new-age digital technology was being installed, my parents were having the windows replaced. All of this happening on one of the wettest days in recent memory. Yeah, we all got all sorts of wet.

I’m uber-psyched for Sunday morning brunch. I look forward to meeting other bloggers and having a generally kick-ass sort of day. There’s a poll. I can tell you’ve all devoured the idea with ravenously reckless abandon (all two voters… one of which was yours truly…). Oh well.

Did anyone catch the 30 Rock season finale…? Ohhhhh my. Some interesting goings-on with our favorite Lemon. Only wish there were another Stritch appearance. (Does anyone else share my enthusiasm for wanting Jack to encounter Nathan Lane, Molly Shannon and Stritchie in a good ol’ fashioned Irish-Catholic Walpurgisnacht?) I’m also looking forward to the season finale of The Office next week. Oh what a weird and tragic year for the sitcom in general. Hopefully we can be spared an encore with the negotiations involving SAG & AFTRA.

I have to admit I’m surprised at myself. May 4-7 came and went and I didn’t even think to blog about my beloved 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Been a crazy week folks, a crazy week. Hopefully, next week brings nothing but good things.

Tony nominations will be revealed shortly, as will the recipients of the 2008 Theatre World Award. It may surprise you, but I’m more excited for the latter than the former. Perhaps that’s because I’ve actually attended the Theatre World event in the past and it is a good time had by all. You get a feel of that community that industry professionals talk about when they work in NY theatre. Nothing but positive energy all around – and since there are no nominees, there’s no sense of competition. As I’ve said before, when it comes to the Tonys, I’m interested in the plays and revivals, but not the new musicals. Sad to say it, but not one title that has opened this year has made me go “I’ve got to run and see this!” That’s already not true of next season, because Billy Elliot is opening at the Imperial. I am uber-psyched for this one (Elton John’s score, while hardly Sondheim, or even Schwartz, is his best theatre composition yet). And the fact that they aren’t dumbing down the show’s political undertones and anti-Thatcher sentiments makes me even happier. Other shows have got to learn: trust your audience once in a while, sometimes we can be insightful, intuitive and understand context and subtext. Then again, if we live long enough, someone might write a musical adaptation of The Hottie and the Nottie. I realize that you are laughing, but that laughter is tinged by your underpinnings of fear because you and I both know it could happen.

I also re-read Marc Acito‘s How I Paid for College and the recently released sequel Attack of the Theater People this week. (I am an incredibly fast reader: I’m already well into book three: Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris, a first person plural narrative about the goings on in a Chicago ad agency on the skids). It was fascinating to revisit the first book, since I hadn’t read it in about two and a half years. I was still in New Paltz at the time and we had a wonderful independent bookstore in town called Ariel’s (that sadly closed my final semester of college) and I happened upon the title accidentally. When I noticed “musical theater” on the cover, it sounded like it would be an interesting time. It certainly was. The characters created, while on the broad side, bring to mind many of the theatrical people I knew both in high school and college. While extreme in their actions (ohhh the reveling in crime), at heart the characters genuinely care for another (in spite of their severe aversion to monagamy). As the title suggests, you follow protagonist Ed Zanni’s highly illicit heists and capers to secure his tuition for Juilliard (master-minded by his nerdy sidekick Nathan Nudelman, who, really, is the hero of us all – and the character with whom I most identify, minus the interest in dubious financial practices). The follow-up takes us two years down the line to Edward being rejected from his third year at Juilliard by Marian Seldes, who wants him to discover life and rediscover the raw truth that was present at his audition, but never in his classwork. Many of the old crew are along as he unwittingly becomes involved in illegal insider trading, masquerading as a British vee-jay for a party planner and once again fights off his mortifyingly unbearable ex-step-mother Dagmar. A lot of the gang is along for the ride, The Music Man with a deaf Harold Hill, Starlight Express is a major plot point (and hilariously described by Ed) and we get a few new additions, the most notable being Willow the sprightly, not quite there, but lovable actress (sort of the Juilliard equivalent to Luna Lovegood). It’s too involved and farcical for me to describe, just pick up the book.

In spite of all the fun to be had, it’s Acito’s two wonderful choices in the later chapters that left the greatest impression on me. In lamenting the then-current state of the fabulous invalid, his protagonist encounters an older woman who ushered in Broadway theatres for years and years, and magically recounts the moment when the opening night audience gave itself over wholeheartedly to My Fair Lady. It’s magical. Plus, Ed and Paula have what I call musical theatre zen when they second act Barbara Cook’s A Concert for the Theater. I especially relate on the latter, having seen Ms. Cook’s Mostly Sondheim a few years ago, she remains one of my all-time favorite solo performances. Everything that he feels, my friends and I felt as well (even at 75, she could still hit the B natural in “Ice Cream” and how). However there are certain questions that I have for Marc: what happens to Mr. Lucas? Why is Kelly’s mother missing from the story this time around? and when does the third book come out? (oh, you’ve got to…)

For reasons I won’t reveal here, I’m in a very bizarre mood. When I get into this particular mood I usually spend money to make me feel better. Needless to say, a brand new laptop is suddenly looking really, really lucrative right now… Oh boy, temptation is a wonder, ain’t it?

But should I see No No Nanette on Sunday instead? Oh, the decisions… And I just realized I forgot to pick up a MegaMillions ticket for tonight. Well, maybe next time…