Broadway's Most Wanted (22 page)

Composer-lyricist-librettist William Finn wrote, between 1979 and 1990, three very original, very angry musical theater pieces that have become known, in trilogy, as “The Marvin Songs.” They deal with Marvin, a married father, who leaves his wife and son for another man.

That’s the first show,
In Trousers.
1981’s
March of the Falsettos
details Marvin’s relationship with his lover, Whizzer, and Marvin’s wife, Trina, and her relationship with the family’s psychiatrist, Mendel. 1990’s
Falsettoland
brings the trilogy full circle as Whizzer faces AIDS and Jason, Marvin’s son, deals with his impending manhood via his bar mitzvah. Selfish, insecure, passionate Marvin and the other characters that form this extended family are not saints or sinners, but rather brilliantly human, thanks to Finn’s skillful, iconoclastic writing.

Broadway’s freshest new hit (2003) looks to be the off-Broadway transfer (from the Vineyard Theater)
Avenue Q.
A post-modern spin on sexual identity and acceptance, the show, about Princeton, a young man who moves into a brownstone on the titular street, is presented in a tongue-in-cheek,
Sesame Street
style. Including the puppets.

Ah, the puppets.
Avenue
Q’s gimmick is that our hero encounters many characters along his not-exactly-G-rated journey, and many of them are life-size puppets. One of them is the straight-arrow (hah!) Rod,
who is proud of his Republicanism and staunchly declares “I am not a closeted homowhatever!” Whatever, Rod. When puppet Lucy T. Slut is jockeying for stage time with a woman playing Gary Coleman, the puppet’s closeted homosexuality seems almost normal.

“When you’re good to Mama,” sings Matron Mama Morton in her big number in
Chicago,
“Mama’s good to you.”
Chicago,
adapted in 1975 from Maurine Dallas Watkins’s 1926 play of the same name, is a completely cynical examination of celebrity and crime. And riding herd over the Merry Murderesses in Cook County Jail is Matron Mama Morton.

Mama is, not to put too fine a point on it, a bull-dyke who knows her position and plays it to the hilt. As played on Broadway originally by great old character gal Mary McCarty, and in revival by Marcia Lewis (and, for the record, too warmly and sexily by Queen Latifah in the movie), her randy attitude towards her girls is perfectly in keeping with the robust cynicism of the musical.

One of Broadway’s greatest musicals,
A Chorus Line
is often accused of being too emotionally cold and aloof in its telling the tale of a dancers’ audition which becomes, by extension, an encounter session. A dancers’ encounter session actually fueled the conception of
A Chorus Line,
with dancers of every stripe telling their stories on tape.

One of those stories came from gay dancer Nicholas Dante, who eventually shared co-authorship of the book, whose moving tale of his adolescence spent
dancing in drag clubs was inserted almost wholesale into
A Chorus Line
and given to the character Paul. Paul’s monologue is one of many non-dancing set pieces that give this superbly constructed musical its heart.

There is, in the canons of musical theater lore, a serious dearth of satisfactory musical versions of Shakespeare. One of the very best is a swingin’ late-sixties adaptation of Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
John Driver, Hal Hester, and Danny Apolinar’s long-running off-Broadway hit
Your Own Thing
cheerfully embraces the freewheeling gender politics of the original Shakespeare and twists them in groovy psychedelic style.

Your Own Thing
follows a confused Viola into Illyria, aka N.Y.C., where she meets her Orson and must disguise herself as a man to gain entrance into his nightclub’s house band. Her disguise fools him into thinking she’s a he, which he digs more than he would if she were a she and not a he. Tuneful (and, considering it’s a Shakespeare adaptation, surprisingly topical) comedy follows until everybody notices the show’s title and realizes what bag they’re into.

Although he’s still alive, Al Carmines is something of a secret in the world of musical theater. A practicing minister as well as a gay man, Carmines, whose congregation is in New York’s West Village, was greatly influenced by the free-for-all nature of the Living Theater movement of the late ’60s, and in 1973, The Truck and Warehouse Theater presented his off-Broadway revue
The Faggot

The Faggot
was a collection of songs presented in semi-oratorio style, neither preachy nor campy. Rather, the songs were basically vignettes of ordinary gay and lesbian life, occasionally explicit (such as in “The Hustler,” which was basically a pickup in song), but never tasteless or whiny. Carmines won Obie Awards for
The Faggot,
but, predictably, it achieved no commercial success.

Adapted from the French farce of the same name (spun off into two hit films as well), Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s
La Cage aux Folles
is a simple tale of unconditional love with a mild twist: Both lead characters are gay, and one has a son who wishes to marry a girl. Of course, her parents are completely out-of-touch with the gay lifestyle, and in true French farce form, must debase themselves, and cross-dress, to escape scandal.

The gay couple are more well-adjusted, although not completely without faults: Albin, the “wife” of the couple, is a perpetual worrywart who is only secure as a performer (his moment of truth comes in the stirring anthem “I Am What I Am,” in which he proudly declares his effeminate homosexuality). His lover, Georges, the “masculine” one, is the soothing, calm presence in the relationship, gently reassuring his lover in “Song on the Sand” and scolding his wayward son in “Look Over There.”

“NO LEGS NO JOKES NO CHANCE” read the telegram Walter Winchell’s secretary cabled back to New York from New Haven, after seeing a preview of
Away We Go!
That show became
Oklahoma!,
an American institution. Here are ten musicals that became successful surprises.

Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s tiny off-Broadway tale of young love and the changes of time, adapted from Rostand’s
Les Romanesques,
opened in 1960 at the Sullivan Street playhouse and then closed—in 2002. Critics liked it from the start, but nobody expected this little show to become the longest run of its kind in American theater history. Of course, it helps if you can write songs like “Try to Remember” and “Soon It’s Gonna Rain.”

A prewar hit in London,
Me and My Girl
was the purely British musical-comedy story of a Cockney busker who inherits a title but still wants to marry his commoner girlfriend. When it was revived and brought to Broad
way in 1986,
Me and My Girl
provided some relief from the Brit-pop spectacles overwhelming both sides of the Atlantic in the mid-’80s.

Composer-lyricist Noel Gay’s son, Richard Armitage, took a risk in producing the show in London in 1985, and, thanks to creative script and score revisions and the mighty hand of director Mike Ockrent, the show hit big in London and unearthed two major stars in Emma Thompson and Robert Lindsay, the latter of whom won a Tony when the show triumphed on Broadway.

A South African export courtesy of New York’s Lincoln Center,
Saraflna!
was the brainchild of Mbongeni Ngema, who wrote the show with the great trumpeter and composer Hugh Masekela and directed it as well. A “township jive” musical about the immediate effects of apartheid on South African schoolchildren,
Saraflna!
was written in an indigenous style known as mbanqa. The youthful cast, delivering the musical’s message of inexorable change with irresistible spirit, traveled all the way from South Africa to Lincoln Center’s off-Broadway Newhouse Theater to Broadway’s Cort Theater in the 1987-88 season.

America’s “tribal love-rock musical” started at the New York Shakespeare Festival’s Public Theater off-Broadway in 1967. It was cited downtown as a powerful portrait of youth flying in the face of an unpopular war, with kudos going to composer Galt MacDermot, author-actors Gerome Ragni and James Rado, and director Gerald Freedman.

Michael Butler produced the show when it moved to
Broadway later that season, firing Freedman and hiring Tom O’Horgan, then a hot name in experimental circles, to direct. Perhaps not trusting the inherent sincerity of the piece, O’Horgan tarted it up, blowing the honest sentiments up and out of context and making it The Revolution, Televised. The resulting version of Hair, on Broadway, became the first counterculture hit on the Main Stem.

Director Richard Maltby, Jr. conceived this evening of songs in tribute to stride piano giant Fats Waller for Manhattan Theater Club’s tiny cabaret space off-off-Broadway in 1977. Within weeks, word was out: This was the “little show that could” for the season. Selling out downtown, the small show (featuring just five performers and a jazz combo) moved uptown and ritzed itself up in time to win the Tony for Best Musical. Generally hailed as the best songwriter revue in Broadway history, its opening night cast (the Protean quintet of Charlaine Woodard, Ken Page, Armelia McQueen, Andre de Shields, and Nell Carter) is also regularly cited as the best ever for a small show.

A show which was, in many ways, ahead of its time in 1936 became a sleeper hit in a 1983 revival which, somehow, opened under Broadway’s radar. Perhaps the previous revival, in 1954, soured some on the show’s reputation.

On Your Toes
was a conventional Rodgers and Hart musical comedy with three, count ’em, three, ballets socked into it. A typically elephantine 1930s plot, concerning Russian ballerinas, a music teacher, vaudevillians, and hitmen jostles with the classic song score,
which includes “Glad to be Unhappy” and the all-timer “There’s a Small Hotel.”

The 1983 revival was praised by critics for its respect of the show’s basic elements, Unlike recent revivals, which often earn the sobriquet “revisals,” this revival had no overweening concepts applied to it. Perhaps that’s because the master, Mr. George Abbott, and original orchestrator, Hans Spialek, were around to make sure that the musical comedy was just that. The ballets, notably the jazzy-classical “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue,” were treated like gold (and danced that way, too).

Chicago’s legendary Kingston Mines blues club was, inexplicably, the incubator for this cheerful doo-wop Valentine. Without winning a single Tony Award, the show managed to stay afloat on powerful word-of-mouth and survived to become the longest running Broadway musical of its time.

Basically, the plot of
Grease
comes across as the anti-Pygmalion—be a skank and you’ll get the guy of your dreams—but following a hit run in 1971 off-Broadway at Entermedia,
Grease
went on to Broadway’s Royale Theater, where it stayed for 3,388 cheerfully skanky performances.

Dan Goggin wrote and directed this small show about a group of nuns trying to raise money to bury one of their own. It’s a talent show (taking place on their school’s set of
Grease,
no less) which soon becomes a mystery. Where did the missing nun go? Why does one of them have a nun puppet?

So, okay, singing, dancing nuns
are
pretty funny. This 1985 show rode that mild taboo to become an
overwhelming success, running at New York’s Cherry Lane Theater for almost nine years, spawning countless productions worldwide and several sequels. Dan Goggins probably owns the building in which you’re reading this book.

April 2001 saw the premiere of this small satire of big business off-Broadway at the teeny Chernuchin Theater, where it became a hit among the
Entertainment Weekly
set for its cheeky satire, its gentle mocking of showbiz conventions, and the fact that it was called
Urinetown.
(You’re in town? Yes, I am, what’s your point? Wait. You mean … oh.)

Prior to September 11, a Broadway transfer was announced, then delayed, but
Urinetown
finally made it to the big time (and three Tony Awards) in fall 2001. As the nation reeled, smart comedies were what Broadway audiences seemed to want, and
Urinetown
filled the bill.

In the wilderness of the off-Broadway of the 1950s, occasionally a big hit popped up, most notably the Theater de Lys production of
The Threepenny Opera
and Rick Besoyan’s
Little Mary Sunshine.
Besoyan’s 1959 spoof was entirely his creation—book, music, and lyrics—and came out of absolutely nowhere.

A very, very campy spoof of operettas, most notably Rudolf Friml’s Mountie epic
Rose Marie,
the tongue-in-cheek
Little Mary Sunshine
cost virtually nothing to put on and starred no one famous at the time (Oscar-nominee-to-be Eileen Brennan played Little Mary) and rode a wave of critical raves to a then rare 1,143 performances off-Broadway.

As any stage actor will tell you, there’s no money in acting on the stage. Actors will also tell you they’re biding their time until that perfect part written just for them comes along. Here are ten performers who got tired of waiting and wrote—some parts for themselves, some for their colleagues.

England’s legendary wit was represented on Broadway many times over as an author of both straight plays and musicals. His skills as a composer-lyricist occasionally ran toward the twee, but he was also capable of writing music of devastating beauty, as in his 1934 Broadway operetta
Bitter Sweet,
which contains the haunting “If You Could Only Come With Me.”