Broadway braces itself for an identity crisis whenever another of its “golden age” musicals is dusted off, polished up, stretched this way or that, and given a new cast and director for a return visit to the big boards. The journey backwards in time can be fraught with unforseen dangers, for what most distinguishes a show—new or old—is the production that carries it to New York City. Some revivals affirm a musical’s hallowed status. Others hold ancient praise up to scorn and debate. Conversely, a musical that originally flopped may reveal previously undetected charms the second time around. Something like what they say about love.
The precarious world of the Broadway revival teaches us a lot about the elusive dynamics of a singing show, and it reduces to academic drivel much of what is taught on the subject within ivy-covered walls. When all is said and done, the producer rolls the dice and takes his chances like a day trader. When the farcical Red Mill, a 1906 Victor Herbert curiosity, played the Ziegfeld Theatre 39 years later, it doubled its original performance run despite conflicting notices. Pal Joey’s 1952 revival, to the tune of 542 performances, handsomely exceeded its original run 12 years before. Porgy and Bess redeemed its lackluster 1935 reception by the belated acclaim and patronage it enjoyed through subsequent restagings. The same held true for Kurt Weill’s academically valued Threepenny Opera, which suffered almost instant death its first time out in the early thirties.
Cole Porter’s legendary Anything Goes went from huge 1930s hit, to barely profitable off–Broadway revival in 1952, to triumphant 1987 run—804 curtains, nearly doubling its original 1934 harvest. The ambivalently reviewed Kander and Ebb 1968 entry Zorba sold only a few more tickets in 1983, though this second New York visit followed a nationwide tour and was followed, in turn, by more cross-country bookings. Rodgers and Hart’s The Boys from Syracuse and A Connecticut Yankee both did well in reprise. Syracuse declared a profit from only 135 performances. By today’s bookkeeping, such a run would be floporama.
Other less talented tuners were never able to overcome initial public resistance. Mark Blitzstein’s one-sided depression era polemic against corporate insensitivity, The Cradle Will Rock, miserably failed a couple of restagings. Lost in the Stars, by Mr. Blitzstein’s hero Kurt Weill, stayed lost 23 years later when its comeback run exceeded the inaugural one month engagement by a total of eleven performances. While a production can overcome inferior script materials, it can rarely save a show that was not intended to entertain in the first place.
The revival producer faces two conflicting agendas: On the one hand, he has the psychological advantage of courting a more sympathetic press and audience with an already-respected chestnut, and his economic investment will be a bargain compared to the millions required nowadays to get a brand new show into working order before the critics are invited to take a look. On the other, his marketing instincts will compel him to promise a “new and improved” version of that chestnut, which opens the door to all sorts of tinkering. Most early-century musicals are considered so hokey and hastily assembled (librettist Moss Hart was great at setting up first acts full of crackling dialogue that went nowhere) that the makeovers they receive are tolerated, sometimes applauded. Often these frivolous books are overhauled in an effort to inject more “substance” into them, as if cotton candy needed broccoli on the side. Often, too, additional songs by the same composers from other of their shows are interpolated. Audiences get to enjoy the extra melodies and lyrics, the critics still carp about “silly” stories, and the producer might make a bundle. No, No, Nanette in revised format adapted by Burt Shevelove did much better at the ticket windows in 1971, more than doubling its 1925 attendance records. Credit Mr. Shevelove? Or the return of Ruby Keeler?
They tried revising Neil Simon’s script for his and Cy Coleman’s Little Me, a Sid Caesar vehicle that was delightful in the first place and rang up excellent critical endorsements, although it fell modestly short of turning a profit. Perhaps in revival form they were striving for less of what Hobe Morrison, in Variety’s original assessment, referred to as “a certain kind of click American musical … slight story material is put across with fast, loud, taut and comically punchy expertness.”1 The revamped edition attracted fewer souls. Blame the revisions?
The urge to tinker with aging librettos can lead to counter-productive rewrites; worse yet, to the virtual deconstruction of a great art form. Less skeptically treated and not so frequently tinkered with are the so-called golden age classics, considered better constructed, although they too can stumble on the comeback trail, causing us to wonder just how “golden” the age was. The wonderful Bernstein, Comden and Green 1944 treasure On the Town has yet to take the town a second time, and it has tried … and tried. Other shows that share its gasping afterlife include Finian’s Rainbow … and Brigadoon … and Bloomer Girl … and Frank Loesser’s 1944 hit, Where’s Charlie? None has made it into Broadway revival heaven. Cole Porter’s critically cheered 1953 hit Can Can got bombed by the critics who saw it in 1981 when it tried dancing again at the Minskoff Theatre. Steve Suskin blamed a humiliating 5-performance run on the same second-rate materials minus the “colorful choreography” of Michael Kidd and the star power of Gwen Verdon that had helped camouflage the failings of the original production.2
Many of these “golden age shows” are starting to suffer the same stigma of dated triteness and contrived story telling. A musical may fail because it is too “old fashioned”—yet rarely is this complaint logged against the great plays and comedies of world drama. Molière, Strindberg, Chekhov, Shakespeare—they have all survived fairly intact through endless reinterpretations. Few, if any, are carved up and reassembled by out-of-town script surgeons. Furthermore, the romantic musical is not an invention of Kern or Lerner or Loewe. It predated the work of Rodgers and Hammerstein by at least a century. Yet a disturbing number of the better written book shows from this era of innocence and craft are getting libretto facelifts, and there is scant evidence to suggest the operations are necessary or helpful; in fact, they may cause more harm than good.
Walter Kerr in the ’70s railed against two overloaded revivals, Irene and Good News, for interpolating an excessive number of songs from other sources, in Kerr’s opinion not germane to the tone or time of the respective shows. “Whenever this sort of thievery is attempted … it immediately destroys the property, and the pleasure of the property, at hand. We are not seeing Irene or Good News any more, we’re having a random and ultimately indigestible smorgasbord crammed down our throats. We’re also being deprived of likely future revivals of the shows from which well-known goodies have been filched; who’ll want to do them for us now that their tombs have been rifled?”3
The variable fortunes along revival row suggest that major script overhauls can be dangerously premature; that the future remains an open end for musicals of all stripes and track records—thanks again, it would appear, to the people involved. On Your Toes ended up on its heels, a victim of horrible reviews in 1954 at the 46th Street theatre, but thirty years later, with original director George Abbott returning to the helm, bested its original 1936 run. Angela Lansbury played Mama Rose in a 1974 revival of Gypsy that got dream reviews and was ignored by the public. Tyne Daly played the same role fifteen years later, and kept the show in business for half a thousand performances. A golden age star, My Fair Lady, has never come close to duplicating its original three thousand performance harvest, nor has it even made a decent dime or two trying. Not in 1976, when Ian Richardson played Professor Higgins for one profitless year; not in 1981, when Rex Harrison himself returned to Broadway, was blasted by three negative notices, and was out of work in 119 shows; nor in 1993, when Richard Chamberlain took a stab at the Eliza Doolittle challenge in a production that struck some as being directorially capricious. Reviewing the Harrison edition, Don Nelson observed, “Perhaps revivals—a colleague calls them necrophilia—bring with them a certain second hand aura that forbids one the exhilaration of the first time discovery…. My Fair Lady is a great musical yet it probably can never satisfy the romantic preconceptions an audience ‘remembers’ from the past. Maybe that is one reason why this performance did not work well.”4
Because these “golden age” champions can fade as fast on the revival boards as the inferior shows that pre-dated them, the temptation to tinker with them grows. Today’s directors, many of whom did not witness the dawning of the musicals they set out to restage, are egged on by political correctness and by a careless disregard for the fragility of the libretto, the unseen instrument whose job it is to establish a clear dramatic road map and then to maintain order and sensible progression forward. A sound libretto will hold its own against the constant tug and pull of the songs, not all of which may truly belong, and against the distracting look-at-me asides of all those cocky kids—old and young—up there on the stage clamoring for audience adulation. Theatregoers become terribly impatient when all the frivolous fun lacks at least a context, something to firmly grasp as the ride lurches rhythmically on its way. In other words, they need to believe that the frosting has cake.
Forming the invisible spine of the story, a libretto that succeeds in holding our interest, in making us want to return after intermission, can be wrongly criticized for minor non-structural defects, such as corny dialogue or hackneyed characters, and end up being deconstructed out of working order in a desperate fit of suicidal rewriting during previews or out-of-town tryouts. In setting out to fix legitimate minor problems, they end up smashing the whole thing to smithereens. Wrote Richard Rodgers, wisely and ruefully: “When you start rebuilding a show you must always be careful that the number you may feel is delaying the action does not actually support the dramatic structure of the entire play. If you replace a song, you may find yourself with a problem in another scene fifteen minutes later. It’s like pulling out one seemingly inconsequential brick from a wall, only to find the entire wall collapsing. And no one ever really knows why.”5
Rare is the musical not cited by someone for structural flaws in the final stretch, usually caused by lack of focus, the most consistent failure in libretto construction. Failing to define up front a clear dramatic premise (one of Oscar Hammerstein’s mantras), a musical play will likely languish in the final stages, thrashing aimlessly around like a stood-up boxer for lack of a compelling crisis to confront and resolve. What seemed so exciting at the outset (example, Into the Woods) eventually collapses into confusing disarray. Most tuners by and large move more on musical momentum than on narrative conflict, another reason why it can be difficult to reach climax: How do you resolve what you haven’t instigated?
Gypsy struck Kenneth Tynan, one of its most ardent admirers, as a less engaging thrill after intermission, owing to plot redundancies, too few new numbers introduced, and the over-the-top “Rose’s Turn,” an excessive outburst, in his opinion, wherein Ethel Merman “sets about lacerating herself in prose.”6 West Side Story runs into a somewhat anti-climactic second half, too, after the momentous rumble promised and built to in the first act reaches a resounding climax. What follows intermission, while Tony’s rivals sniff him out for revenge, is more contemplative and rueful in tone. So … do you accept imperfect masterpieces or give ambitious directors carte blanche to “fix” them?
If the director’s name is Hal Prince, you agree that maybe Act II could be better, and further down the road to deconstruction slides the golden age musical. I’m talking, of course, about Show Boat. The Jerome Kern–Oscar Hammerstein landmark musical was not a perfect work, yet it remains so fully satisfying, so rich in its own intangible qualities of spirit, as to bring into grave question the never-ending attempts to revise it. The revisionists-to-the-rescue can point for precedent to none other than Oscar Hammerstein himself, who signaled his own insecurities with Show Boat (though not strictly with post-intermission scenes) by the major changes he made to the show for its 1946 revival. Hammerstein eliminated three top-flight songs—“I Might Fall Back on You,” “Till Good Luck Comes My Way,” and the roof-raising Charleston, “Hey, Feller!”; added a new number, “Nobody Else But Me”; excised two complete scenes, and virtually removed a third by drastically rewriting it. Out, too, went “Niggers All Work on the Mississippi.” The upgraded revival, co-directed by Hammerstein and Hassard Short, offered the public brighter sets and costumes, and considerably more dancing; the choreography of Helen Tamiris was said to have set this Show Boat dramatically apart from its original 1927 version. And the revival, according to Show Boat scholar Miles Kreuger, lost money on a 417-performance run.
Show Boat runs low on focus and force after the interval, though it would not be the first musical to lighten up in the second half. In his handbill program notes, Prince explained that he wanted “to restore serious incidents and clarify plot and character motivations.” The Chicago World’s Fair scene was axed as “irrelevant,” too typical of how musicals once started up after the interval with “high energy entertainment devoid of story content.”7 Kreuger, in his book about Show Boat’s creation and production history—written long before the Prince rationale—saw things differently: “Following the bright and colorful spectacle of Act Two’s first scene and its optimistic, dreamlike mood, the grimness of the next sequence is most affecting.”8
Prince added scenes of exposition meant to flesh out the sinking fate of Ravenal in the second act, as if audiences would not understand the penniless plight into which he and Magnolia had slid following their marriage. Prince had Magnolia walk the streets in a manner that suggested she was servicing gentlemen to make ends meet. He reassigned “Why Do I Love You,” originally written for Ravenal and Magnolia, to Parthy, who sings it to her own infant granddaughter in a crib! And he inserted several numbers not heard in the original production. Of particular interest to theatre buffs was the inclusion, midway in Act I, of the haunting “Misery’s Coming Around.” Queenie is given principal access to the song, and her static rendition comes off as extraneous. These superfluous changes did little to advance the action, which at times seemed to stop dead in its expository tracks.
“Misery’s Coming Around” would have been better confined to the utterly magnificent recording of Show Boat music produced and conducted by John McGlinn, just like numerous other luscious Kern tunes that were either cut from the original production before it reached the Ziegfeld Theatre or added to the London company or to the film versions. It is one thing to have available for private listening all the songs associated with the various stage and film presentations of this great American musical. Another to have them implanted at will after the fact by the self-ordained restoration experts. To be sure, a number of dazzling compositions not heard in the original graced the Prince production: “Dance Away the Night,” and “I Have the Room Above Her,” among others. On the other hand, some songs were slighted. Little play time was given to the second-act jazz jumper, “Hey, Feller!” Perhaps it too, in Mr. Prince’s estimation, lacked story content.
William Hammerstein, the son of the man who wrote Show Boat, theoretically should not have been thrilled with any of these liberties taken. In fact, as controller of his father’s estate, he was overruled by the interests of Ferber and Kern when they voted to grant John McGlinn the right to record all the songs. And when McGlinn expressed the opinion that “Misery” should be incorporated into any future productions, Hammerstein promptly disagreed in the most sensible manner. “Misery is a wonderful, moving piece of music, but is was cut for a reason. When experienced knowledgeable people cut material from a show, it’s because it’s not working, and they’re usually right. The well meaning archivists who come onto the scene years later and put back these pieces of material countermand the decision of the creators. I compliment Mr. McGlinn on the making of an historical record that serves a useful purpose by showing how a great piece of work is put together. But it must not be considered a signal for a new kind of production of Show Boat.”9
About ten years later, strangely, the same Hammerstein did not resist the interpolation of “Misery’s Coming Around” into Prince’s renovated floating palace. In fact, the one remaining son of Oscar decided to enjoy the revamped vehicle, which had first been tested on him in the rudimentary form of a staged reading offered by Mr. Prince. “I’m impressed by what he has done,” Hammerstein beamed to Michael Wright of the Daily Telegraph. “There’s been a lot of talk about how the show has ‘changed,’ but a lot of that’s nonsense. Many of the songs have been repositioned, but it’s still the same show. Hal has made some drastic changes, but they’re largely in the staging, not the script. I think they’re wonderful; they help the show without fundamentally changing it.”10 So much for the duration of a belief.
The Prince version received mostly rhapsodic notices. There can be no denying the glorious perfection of its first act. And as to the second, any better? Some of critics still carped about an inbred superficiality, and the purists were not at all pleased. These adventures in rewriting have long-term consequences on a leading American art form, increasingly vulnerable to such tampering whenever it steps back onto the “living stage”—unlike a film that is fixed in celluloid, a book in print, or a symphonic score by protective conductors and musicians. Ominously, the Rodgers and Hammerstein office has begun sanctioning a disturbing number of virtual deconstructions. With or without William Hammerstein around to counter such overtures—or approve them after being courted with staged readings—the properties of Dick and Oscar are increasingly being roughed up, rifled through, cut up and pasted back together. Songs get transferred out of one show for moonlighting duty in another. Perhaps they are bothered by the failure in general of their musicals to succeed in revival. Likely not as many high schools are licensing Oklahoma anymore. In fact, the only R&H work that has done well in return engagements to New York City is The King and I, primarily the editions of it in which Yul Brynner appeared, playing the role of the king, which he inaugurated. The revival of Oklahoma that William Hammerstein directed in 1979, which opened just two weeks before the death of Richard Rodgers, drew surprisingly mixed notices—including an all-out pan—and earned a profit from only 293 performances. Although the Pulitzer Prize winning musical South Pacific is staged now and then in small playhouses and occasionally on civic light opera stages, it is largely regarded within the theatre community as a dated work. And so, fearful of an embarrassing return to Broadway, the Rodgers and Hammerstein office refused even to grant a touring production starring Robert Goulet the right to play in a New York house. The same office did, however, sanction a clumsy, vulgar, and not very funny made-for-television movie of the play in 2001, which starred one of its producers, Broadway veteran Glenn Close, inappropriately cast in the role of Nellie Forbush. Those who fear further damage to South Pacific may take solace in the sensitively wrought 1958 movie version directed by Joshua Logan. Notwithstanding the overly criticized color tints that appear during musical sequences, it is one of the finest film adaptations ever of a stage musical.
Carousel, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s darkest work, finally made it back to New York after first being recycled through the British gothic musical mindset, courtesy of director Nicholas Hytner and the Royal National Theatre. Hytner sought and was given permission to make script changes, all rather minor save for a new opening scene, set in the mill where Julie labors, apparently intended to convey a grim sweatshop atmosphere. Hytner’s aim was to strip away the sentiment which he assumed had built up over the years. That he did, to a degree unmagical, depriving the work of the intangible R&H spirit. Without the charming innocence that Dick and Oscar were always careful to supply, there is little lost happiness to cry over at the end.
In this gloomier Carousel, to which, it was smugly implied, hip younger crowds weaned on Jerry Springer and the O.J. Simpson trial would relate, “The Highest Judge of All” was dropped. Political correctness nearly ruined the evening: Bring on Mr. and Mrs. Snow, played by an African American couple, a delightful alternative. Then add stupidity to enlightenment by having a young blond play their son. Hytner’s unflinching interpretation, praised by many, played it too close to the bone and too far from reality. Judging by the audience at two San Francisco performances, those younger patrons one would have expected (based upon glowing press reports and predictions) were nowhere in sight.
The Sound of Music, which made its first return to Broadway in 1998 at the Martin Beck Theatre, might have benefited from Hytner’s acerbic touch. Given its abundant displays of cute moppet behavior and blasé adult indifference in the face of a mounting Nazi threat, here is a musical that cries out for gravity—or at least comically shaded characterizations—but which seems forever destined to sing and dance in the shadow of the overwhelmingly popular ultra-sweet film version which starred Julie Andrews. Lovable and fascinating Mary Martin, there in the beginning, no doubt brought her subtle impish idiosyncrasies to the role of Maria; the Marias who have followed Martin, starting with Florence Henderson and including Andrews, rarely rise above the role of sugar dispensing machines. Came the Broadway revival, directed with a sharp eye for scenery and song cues by Susan H. Schulman, who promised by implication to remove some of the goo that had formed over the years. Schulman declared herself committed to the play’s more serious political underpinnings, telling reporters she believed the original stage version was “edgier”11 and that the movie had been “sanitized.” Strangely, she also courted the status quo, putting it this way to a Backstage writer: “There is an expectation level among audience members that we do respect…. Seeing the production should be like a visit to an old friend.”12 So much for a vision. Alas, Schulman proved herself a wishy-washy director, unable to escape the intimidating commercial force of that Julie Andrews movie, to which, her battery of producers likely fretted, audiences everywhere would make constant picky comparisons. The recharted fate of six major songs alone illustrates how, degree by degree, the show’s fragile substance has been undermined over the years by additional frosting.
In the original production, “My Favorite Things” is sung by Maria and Mother Abbess, sharing a mutual affection for a list of life’s simple pleasures, and it offers Maria subliminal encouragement from the convent as she embarks on her journey to serve as a governess for Captain von Trapp’s seven children. In Schulman’s version, the number is replaced by the generically innocuous “I Have Confidence In Me,” a song imported from the movie for which Mr. Rodgers had supplied his own words, a song that sounds like something out of Annie or Sweet Charity. The ejected “My Favorite Things” ends up in the storm scene in Maria’s bedroom, as it did in the film, bumping “The Lonely Goatherd,” a number that bore haunting relevance to the storm with its lines “high on a hill was a lonely goatherd” and the nervous yodeling rhythms. The banished “Goatherd” is now introduced at the Kaltzberg concert hall, replacing a deleted reprise of “Do Re Mi,” which in the original version had given the song’s central contribution to the story a nice circular completion.
Other subtle changes: In the original cast, the worldly “How Can Love Survive” was rendered by Max and Elsa in the captain’s passive presence; now, the captain is not even present. In the original, “No Way to Stop It” began with the captain, his frustration with the looming Nazi threat boiling over, strumming angrily against his guitar. In Schulman’s version, he just sings it, sans guitar. Lastly, the original featured “An Ordinary Couple,” a love duet between Maria and the captain, built on the imagery of a shared belief in companionship, on the simple contentment derived from an embrace each day as the sun fades away. Forty years later, that fading sun was nowhere to be found. “An Ordinary Couple” was completely 86d, callously replaced by another Richard Rodgers solo effort written for the movie, the stupefyingly simple minded “Something Good,” in which Maria oddly alludes to a “wicked” and “miserable” childhood, leading us to ponder whether our nun-on-the-run has a police record. We are forced here to endure the composer stumbling over himself in a feeble reach for insight.
Arguably minor changes? Altogether, they kept the show clearly in the world of Julie Andrews. Schulman’s production moved with precision and polish from one big musical highlight to the next, drawing its vitality from the gut-grabbing showmanship of those final Rodgers and Hammerstein creations. Especially terrific were the dramatic escape scenes at the end. If The Sound of Music lends itself to inspired direction, Schulman’s handiwork fell respectably short.
Dr. Kildare (aka: Richard Chamberlain), who joined the New York cast during the run, did not set the box office on fire with his regally austere reading of Captain Trapp. Nor did the revival need another lovely Julie Andrews sound-alike in the form of hard-working Meg Tolin. Following 540 performances, the company quietly departed the Great White Way for an extended road tour, having failed to recoup all of its $6 million investment.
The Rodgers and Hammerstein organization evidently does not take very seriously what their own Richard Rodgers had to say on the subject: “When we can possibly get them performed the way they were written, we do because we’ve found from experience, some of it painful, that the best way to project these things and to get a response from a live audience is to do them the way there were done originally, after we got finished correcting them ourselves.”13 Well, ironically, Rodgers didn’t take his own advice either. This is the same Rodgers who, following Hammerstein’s death, dropped and added songs to The Sound of Music (at one time making the stage version conform to the film version). The same Rodgers who betrayed his better instincts at least on one mind-boggling occasion when he, or someone in his office, authorized the tacky disco-driven Pal Joey ’78, which featured Lena Horne in a national touring aberration that did not dare cast its cheap strobe lights on a New York stage. Mr. Rodgers may have been smarting over the poorly received revival of Joey in a more conventional version, only two years earlier, when Theodore Mann staged it at the Circle in the Square Theatre. The urge to stay modern can wreck havoc with proven classics.
Out of all this deconstruction, of course, looms the tantalizing promise that Allegro or even Pipe Dream might one day rise triumphantly, thanks to effectively rewritten scripts. Both shows have first rate scores, interesting characters and salvageable books. Pipe Dream with its quirkier on-the-edge cast would probably find a more hospitable reception in the age of ambivalence. State Fair, the movie, was turned into an enchanting stage musical full of many things to love, though romantically it lagged way behind the times. It struggled through an erratically patronized national tour before suffering a fast fold on Broadway. Familiar songs from Pipe Dream and Me and Juliet were interpolated, some convincingly, others not. The Rodgers and Hammerstein office has, it would appear, given up on Pipe Dream and Juliet ever finding an audience beyond the concert staged-reading format, largely patronized by die-hard fans of all things pre-guitar. And so these songs are up for grabs. So, too, increasingly, are even the more successful shows themselves.
Cinderella, regarded with little argument as the finest original musical ever scripted for television, was bartered away, song by song, to Disney, completely rewritten for sit-com audiences in 1997, and pitched deceitfully as “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s.” Hammerstein’s lyrics were not good enough for TV’s cultured crowd; in clear violation of a stipulation in Richard Rodgers’ will prohibiting such posthumous alterations, Fred Ebb added new lines to “The Prince is Giving a Ball.”14 Tunes from other shows (one by Rodgers and Hart) were added. The strongest musical number offered did not even come from the original TV score, and the epic soulful rendition of it by Whitney Houston suggested a style that, had it been thoroughly infused throughout the show, might have given Cinderella’s date with Disney a more memorable edge. The number was a deftly wrought hybrid merging two obscure R & H songs, “There’s Music in You,” from a 1953 movie Main Street to Broadway in which Dick and Oscar appeared, along with Mary Martin who sang the song, and “One Foot, Other Foot” out of Allegro. Whitney Houston’s rendition, during the wedding scene, of the surprisingly effective result made it sound like a big potential pop hit. Not to be.
Flower Drum Song is another property arguably not in need of a major overhaul, an underrated musical comedy hit easily derided by its detractors as politically out of date—notwithstanding that the same could be said for a great many novels, films, and plays. Flower Drum Song was a clear winner when it opened, full of bright humor and hummable songs. Nonetheless, Playwright David Henry Hwang, one of the writers who worked on Disney’s Aida, was commissioned to supply a new book. And that he did, returning (he misleadingly claimed) to the novel by C. Y. Lee upon which the show was based, consulting with the author, and yet delivering a harder-edged, more contemporary vision, far removed from Lee’s. A pre–Broadway tryout was slated to commence in the spring of 2001 at the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles. Lack of sufficient funds, however, caused the venture to be moved back to the fall and onto the boards of the smaller Mark Taper Forum.
Music theatre watchers wondered what the director would do with “I Enjoy Being a Girl,” the song about a woman applying makeup and talking for hours on the telephone, which sends more people up the wall than the most misogynistic rap lyrics or violent television programs. With all the striking changes Hwang made to Flower Drum Song (“I Enjoy Being a Girl” was retained), unless his redesigned libretto—assuming the commercially promising production reaches Broadway—can turn a very good show into a great one, no doubt some director years from now will make a case for merely producing the musical as originally conceived and written, just with fresh direction and faces. How revolutionary!
Perhaps no single event in revival history has so agonizingly underscored the precarious life span of the libretto as did the grim fate, in 1995, of the anxiously anticipated new Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim’s Company. The classic work was met with full houses at the not-for-profit Roundabout Theatre during its scheduled three-month run, and by a gushing endorsement from the bible of showbiz. “After a shaky start,” reported Variety, “the show builds, expanding, finally, to greatness.”15 Not in the opinion of lesser bibles. The majority of reviewers issued pessimistic assessments, and the initial surging crowds consisted mainly of hard core Sondheimaniacs. A terse edict from Margo Jefferson of the New York Times called for a divorce of score from libretto: “I suppose there’s no point in a musical being a musical unless the songs are worth more than the script. The better scripts aim to be timely, the better scores aim to be timeless, and it’s usually a nice arrangement. But when the story begins to work against the best interests of the score, an audience has every right to wish the two would split and to their separate ways…. I would rather have seen it in concert version. Concert versions of musicals treat the script like a road we tread lightly between songs. Mr. Sondheim the composer and Mr. Sondheim the lyricist are a brilliant match. Two is all the company we need here.”16
And that’s all the world may get, if the passing years make Company’s libretto less viable. Ms. Jefferson had it backwards: It is the score that must serve the best interests of the story, not vice versa, if there is going to be show at all. Producer John Hart had planned to move Company into a house uptown, until a piddling advance sale of $100,000 in response to early adds touting a move did not, in Hart’s credible judgment—soundly supported by box-office traditions—justify the formidable transfer. Stephen Sondheim, no doubt smarting over a recent string of flops, lashed out at Hart by issuing a public statement “denouncing,” in the words of New York Times writer Peter Marks, the producer’s inability to do the job. “We couldn’t find a producer,” stated the fuming Sondheim. “We found an enthusiast in Mr. Hart, but unfortunately he has no experience as a producer, only as a money man.”17
Sondheim revealed that, as a contingency for going forward, Hart had made repeated demands for numerous changes from content to casting. They were just the ploys of a producer seeking to stir up dissension and carve an easier exit path for himself, as the angry composer saw it. Indeed, that moment came when the show’s director, Scott Ellis, fiercely refused to replace lead man Boyd Gaines with Michael Rupert, an idea of Hart’s to bolster public interest. Hart was getting little cooperation from anybody. The Nederlanders, who had tentatively agreed to help finance the move, backed out, leaving Hart on his own. Sondheim saw only cowardice. Hart “didn’t really want to move the show,”18 he claimed, whining about the good old days when producers were really producers, though he omitted one key factor in his looking back comparisons—when shows were really shows. In his defense, Mr. Hart could point to a thundering absence of public interest. It just wasn’t there, sorry or grateful.
What happened? The world of reality is what happened. Long term success proved as elusive for Company as it did, not quite to the same degree, for its spiritual antithesis, The Sound of Music. Neither show took the town by storm. Cynical self-analysis among the dysfunctionally wed may not hold up any better than confident sentiment on the Austrian alps.