THE PRODUCER'S PERSPECTIVE SUMMER READING LIST from Ken Davenport (the producer blogger on GReader)
1. Letters from An Actor by William Redfield
William Redfield's recollections of appearing in the 1964 production of Hamlet starring Richard Burton and directed by Sir John Gielgud.
2. Underfoot in Show Business by Helene Hanff
"Each year, hundreds of stagestruck kids arrive in New York determined to crash the theatre, firmly convinced they're destined to be famous Broadway stars or playwrights. One in a thousand turns out to be Noel Coward. This book is about life among the other 999. By one of them." -Helene Hanff
3. The Whorehouse Papers by Larry L. King
An account by a journeyman dramatist of the production--from phone call to first night--of his first play The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and the attendant wranglings, clashes, and confusions.
4. The Seesaw Log by William Gibson
A day-by-day candid account of the creativity, conflict, and compromise involved in the making of a smash-hit Broadway show (Seesaw), by the playwright himself.
5. We Bombed in New London by Brian Gari
A day-by-day candid account of the creativity, conflict, and compromise involved in the making of a legendary flop Broadway show (Late Nite Comic) written by the composer-lyricist.
6. Everything Was Possible: The Birth of The Musical Follies by Ted Chapin
Ted Chapin is now Chairman of the American Theatre Wing. But when he was 22 years old, he was just a lowly Production Assistant, running around after Hal Prince, Stephen Sondheim, and Michael Bennett as they created one of the most legendary musicals of all time. This was his journal.
7. A Year With The Producers: One Actor's Exhausting (But Worth It) Journey From Cats to Mel Brooks' Mega-Hit by Jeffry Denman
Jeffry Denman's journey with The Producers from audition to opening night.
8. The Show Business Nobody Knows by Earl Wilson
Earl Wilson chronicled Broadway's Golden Age in The New York Post from 1942 to 1983. This book tells some of his sordid tales.
9. Showstopper by Abigail Pogrebin
A recent release, this mini-book is now-author Abigail Pogrebin's story of getting cast in Merrily We Roll Along at the age of 16.
10. Making It Big: The Diary of a Broadway Musical by Barbara Isenberg
Barbara Isenberg was a fly on the wall during the out-of-town tryout and Broadway birth of the musical Big. From a review by Library Journal: "This book is not for the weak-hearted or those with illusions about Broadway as the home of art; making this musical was more like making war."
Showing posts with label Broadway. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Broadway. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Sunday, August 10, 2008
Singing! Dancing! Adapting! Stumbling! By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Singing! Dancing! Adapting! Stumbling!
HOLLYWOOD has a long history of bungling the movie versions of hit Broadway musicals, but believe it or not I held out hope for “Mamma Mia!” In retrospect this seems a little deranged, but let me explain.
The story of my responses to the Abba musical onstage is a strange one, moving through several phases, sort of like those stages of grief famously diagnosed by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. I first saw the show shortly after it opened in London in 1999 to giddy reviews from the local critics. My reaction was a mixture of bafflement and dismay as I watched rows and rows of middle-aged Englishwomen — and quite a few mildly embarrassed-looking Englishmen — bouncing to their feet with glee to join in the megamix finale. There was sorrow too at what I immediately perceived as a dubious but obviously popular new genre of musical theater.
A few years later the musical splashed down on Broadway. Perhaps that initial vaccination had inoculated me against continued irritation. I still found it deeply silly, but also tolerable fun. And really, in contrast to the run of karaoke musicals that had by then begun to inundate the stage, “Mamma Mia!” does have a sweet little mother-daughter story nestled inside its iPod shuffle score of Abba tunes.
Still later I saw another production, this time in what I have come to consider the musical’s natural spiritual home, Las Vegas. The third time was the charm. Maybe it was the novelty of the cup holder at my seat, into which I nestled one of those luridly colored frozen drinks they serve you in big, cutely shaped plastic vessels. But at last I succumbed entirely to its ditzy glory, achieving serene acceptance. I saw the light, though I still refused to sing along. So I can honestly say I looked forward to the movie version with at least a happy sense of anticipation, intrigued by the curious casting of Meryl Streep in the leading role.
I really should have known better. Every few years, with depressing regularity, a hit Broadway musical makes the leap to the big screen and goes splat! Or thud. Or zzzzz. “Mamma Mia!” does a little of all three, to a frantic disco beat, becoming yet another milestone in Hollywood’s repertory of enjoyable stage musicals transformed into lumbering messes on screen.
The movie is actually doing strong if not superhero-size business, despite receiving some of the most amusingly awful reviews meted out to any movie this year. Even Ms. Streep, the country’s Greatest Living Actress by the reckoning of many, got knocked around. Many critics seemed to want to avert their eyes from the sorry spectacle of the great Streep cavorting in the Aegean with such frenetic zeal. I share the general mortification. The movie has brought me full circle in my “Mamma Mia!” journey, back to Stage 1: bafflement, dismay and sorrow.
For the uninitiated “Mamma Mia!” is set on an idyllic Greek island that doubles as both a funky resort and a lunatic asylum for people suffering from a distinctive disorder, the compulsive need to sing Abba songs at all hours of the day and night. The movie follows closely the plot and pacing of the original show, but the hard gaze of the camera puts into queasy relief the inanity of people lurching suddenly from natural conversation to leaping around singing lyrics with a mighty tenuous relationship to the situation at hand, as synthesizer chords churn away in the background. (For instance, when Ms. Streep’s character, Donna, evinces clear signs of emotional distress, a girlfriend opens her mouth and sings, “Chiquitita, tell me what’s wrong.” Chiquitita? Who she?)
Leaping isn’t the half of it either. I wouldn’t want to say Ms. Streep gives the worst performance of her career, as some aver, but it has got to be the scariest. When she is called upon to sing the title song — just after stumbling upon three ex-boyfriends she hasn’t seen for years — she flies into a spasmodic frenzy that concludes with her writhing on the roof of a goat house. Later she sings a syrupy ballad, “The Winner Takes It All,” with an operatic intensity that’s unsettling. It’s not exactly “Rose’s Turn,” after all, or even “My Man” from “Funny Girl.”
Staunch fans of the stage musical as an art form regularly have to weather scorn from nonbelievers when the movie versions of Broadway shows go galumphing across the screen. The subtext of many reviews is a smirky disdain for anything with its roots in old-fashioned theater, an unspoken belief that musicals and even plays are quant relics of another era beloved only of octogenarians, nostalgists and the irredeemably unhip.
The problem is, on the evidence of the movie versions of most musicals — and you have to keep in mind that only the most popular musicals warrant attention from Hollywood — their disaffection is hard to refute. If you saw the movie version of Mel Brooks’s musical “The Producers,” you’d have little notion of what a gut-busting joy the Broadway show was. The filmed “Rent” was a blunt, literal-minded translation of material that really had a sizzle onstage. “The Phantom of the Opera” was numbingly dull. Even “Mamma Mia!” — which I can now soberly see was never exactly “South Pacific” on the stage — might have made for a spryer, funnier, more zesty movie.
Theater is a stylized medium. We know that the guys up there fighting with swords are not going to draw real blood, and we don’t flinch when purportedly real people burst spontaneously into song. The great musicals from the glory days of Hollywood — the Fred and Ginger movies, the Arthur Freed classics from MGM — likewise offered up frothier visions of contemporary life. They emerged during an era when movies gussied up reality for purposes of enhancing their escapist appeal.
But since the 1960s film’s ability to capture the sights and sounds of the world more or less as they meet the eye and ear has been its signature aesthetic, at least for mainstream fare. The conventions of musical theater tend to assume a ludicrous aspect in this context; in life as we know it people do not communicate in song, trailed by a personal orchestra. (Those superhero movies are obviously pure fantasy, but they achieve their intense appeal by seeming to take place in a version of the real world.)
Theater is at the same time an intimate art form, allowing actors to make a direct connection to the audience and send complex messages. Watching the stage version of “Mamma Mia!” you often got a sense that the actors were in on the gag, fully aware of how patently ludicrous it was for their characters suddenly to bust out a flimsy but catchy 25-year-old pop song.
That sense of complicity in a collective joke can’t make it easily past the impersonal barrier of the movie screen. Winking at the camera is not really allowed. (Although I’m told there is collective audience participation at some screenings of the movie: When Pierce Brosnan first breaks into “S.O.S.,” his big number with Ms. Streep, viewers explode in mirth.)
A similar give-and-take between performers and audience basted the hoary jokes in “The Producers” in a shared warmth. The performances of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, which fed happily on a live audience’s affection onstage, seemed canned and forced on film. “Rent” would have made a far more effective movie if it were filmed concert style, I expect. (And my hopes are high for Spike Lee’s planned movie of the sadly underappreciated “Passing Strange.”)
In the long history of stage-to-film transcriptions, Hollywood has found all sorts of ways to make mincemeat out of solid successes. On many occasions the decision to shunt aside the magnetic stage performer at the center of a show and cast an established movie star has proved fatal, as when Rosalind Russell replaced Ethel Merman in “Gypsy,” or Lucille Ball took over from Angela Lansbury in “Mame.” Even the great Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra didn’t do much for the movie version of “Guys and Dolls.”
Entrusting musicals to esteemed film directors with no affinity for the material has often been a sure path to disaster. John Huston was all wrong for “Annie.” Ditto Richard Attenborough for “A Chorus Line” and Sidney Lumet on “The Wiz.” On the other hand, stage directors handed a camera to replicate their success on screen have also come a cropper with some regularity, as Harold Prince did on the notoriously awful film version of “A Little Night Music,” and later by Susan Stroman on “The Producers” and now Phyllida Lloyd, the director of “Mamma Mia!” on both stage and screen. Theater and film speak different languages; very few directors are fluent in both. Bob Fosse is one, and his film adaptation of “Cabaret” might top my list of the best stage-to-film translations. (Notably Fosse eliminated the “book” songs in which characters spontaneously sing, retaining only the numbers at the nightclub.)
I also particularly admire Norman Jewison’s “Fiddler on the Roof,” William Wyler’s “Funny Girl” and Carol Reed’s “Oliver!” Stanley Donen, a stage hoofer who became a skilled filmmaker, profitably teamed with the stage vet George Abbott to direct the likable films of “The Pajama Game” and “Damn Yankees.”
In recent years there has been a marked upward trend in the general quality of stage-to-film transcriptions. The more successful recent movie adaptations of popular musicals — “Chicago,” “Dreamgirls,” “Hairspray” and “Sweeney Todd” — only fitfully captured the energy and excitement of the stage versions, but they were respectable as movies, and entertaining.
“Chicago” is probably the best, although the movie was mostly Fosse-derivative and drained away a fair amount of the stage version’s snazzy wit. “Dreamgirls” felt to me like a two-hour montage, a frenzy of scenes and images that never really found a natural rhythm. The stage-size humor of “Hairspray” often clunked on screen, and the charm of Harvey Fierstein’s drag performance as Edna Turnblad lost much of its camp appeal when John Travolta was squeezed into a weirdly porcine fat suit. “Sweeney Todd” turned Mrs. Lovett into the title character’s goth twin, stripping away the contrast that gave their relationship such fizz and the show its variety. But each had its merits, and none was a disaster, suggesting — at least until the advent of “Mamma Mia!” — that an ongoing aesthetic rapprochement was being achieved.
Still, in my view the best movie musicals of the past few decades were not based on stage shows at all, in keeping with history. (“Singin’ in the Rain” is possibly the best movie musical of all time.) Herbert Ross’s “Pennies From Heaven” and Baz Luhrmann’s “Moulin Rouge!” both used film’s endless flexibility to enhance the stylized nature of the material, to thrilling results.
And, most promisingly, a small movie coming out of nowhere managed to make the old-school conventions of musical theater bloom naturally in a strictly realistic, indeed even grungy environment. The indie movie “Once,” which ultimately won an Oscar for best original song this year, depicts a romance between two street musicians in Dublin. The scruffy Irish protagonist and his Czech girlfriend glide into their music with the ease of Fred and Ginger wafting onto the dance floor, reminding us that at its best, onstage or at the movies, the marriage of music and drama feels not just natural but inevitable.
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Recommended Original Cast Albums
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Not Your Mother’s Original-Cast Albums
Correction Appended
A surge of oxygen pours through the original cast albums of “In the Heights” and “Passing Strange,” two musicals that have shown Broadway how to revitalize a somnolent form this season.
You can also feel that breeze in the cast album of the Off Broadway show “Adding Machine” and a faint puff of fresh air in the quiet cast album of “A Catered Affair.” There are no plans for a “Cry-Baby” recording, but its witty rock ’n’ roll parody lyrics give the last twist of the knife to “Grease”-era nostalgia; it is now irredeemably camp.
An album of the revival of “Gypsy,” with a performance by Patti LuPone for which there is only one word — volcanic — is due in August. It will include several never-before-recorded songs that were cut from the original production, with new orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick.
Until recently I imagined the Broadway musical locked inside a museum, at which a superannuated curator in a seersucker suit, bow tie and horn-rimmed glasses politely welcomed guests to the tea party. But not anymore. Once that curator extended a trembling hand to eager new faces, fresh air wafted in; the tea and cucumber sandwiches were supplanted by beer and pizza, and the music blasted all night.
That doesn’t mean that patriarchs like Rodgers and Hammerstein, haughtily gazing down from the museum walls, no longer speak to us. You can’t listen to the cast album of the Lincoln Center revival of “South Pacific” without becoming misty-eyed for an era of cockeyed postwar optimism when all America sang Rodgers and Hammerstein hits and absorbed the moral instruction in their songs.
Cockeyed optimism may not describe today’s climate. But the giddy euphoria that has always been a hallmark of Broadway musicals explodes on the two-disc cast album of “In the Heights.” Although expressed in a different musical vocabulary, this bilingual show (more English than Spanish) is as secure as “South Pacific” in its faith that a better future lies ahead.
This show’s true believers are not white, middle-class sailors and nurses fighting a just war in the Pacific. They are economically struggling Dominican, Puerto Rican, Cuban and African-American residents of Washington Heights, the melting pot idealized in the show. For “In the Heights,” which just won a Tony Award for best musical, embodies a compelling argument that immigration is the lifeblood of America.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, the blazingly talented 28-year-old who wrote the music and lyrics and stars as the Dominican storekeeper Usnavi, respects popular music traditions. Early in the show he interpolates quotations from Duke Ellington (“Take the ‘A’ Train”) and Cole Porter (“Too Darn Hot”) into the partly rapped title song, an ensemble number that introduces most of the characters. Throughout, the score echoes (but doesn’t quote outright) “West Side Story,” especially “America” and the great mambo dance sequence.
But for all its nods to old-school Broadway “In the Heights” is truly an uptown musical. The score is a fluid, authentic mix of salsa, rap and reggaetón. For a show set in a heavily Dominican neighborhood with a Dominican character as its official greeter, the absence of merengue is puzzling. But as a broadly sketched overview of Latin musical cultures that collide and merge in the melting pot, the score is still wildly exhilarating.
The rap lyrics, however sanitized for Broadway, carry pungent streetwise inflections, and Mr. Miranda delivers them with an aggressive swagger that illustrates the power of rap as a storytelling medium.
The influence of rap is the underlying story of the past Broadway musical season. Words, either rapped or sung in variations of the traditional patter song, are loosening the grip of traditional melody on Broadway. Lament it if you will, but stand-alone songs have a way of interrupting the narrative. Even in musicals without hip-hop, recitative and songs flow into each other more smoothly nowadays; the story is the thing, and language the vehicle.
Mr. Manuel and his orchestrators Alex Lacamoire and Bill Sherman twirl various styles of Latin music into a fabric that is continually changing color and pace. The sprawling ensemble numbers, “96,000,” “Blackout” and “Carnaval del Barrio,” in particular, portray a whole community of disparate voices, speaking as one and at the same time as individuals. Words that go by too quickly to be picked up in the theater can be studied while listening to the cast album with the booklet at hand. These virtuosic numbers suggest denser elaborations of the pre-rumble “Tonight” sequence from “West Side Story.”
A binding ingredient of Mr. Miranda’s score is tuneful Broadway pop that coalesces into a plaintive 11 o’clock number, “Everything I Know,” in the second act. Though not a great song, it serves effectively as the show’s emotional grounding wire.
Because “Passing Strange” has no sugar coating, in some ways it is almost anti-Broadway. The songs, with music by Stew and Heidi Rodewald (he plays guitar, and she plays bass onstage) and lyrics by Stew, describe the personal odyssey of a rebellious middle-class African-American musician who goes from Los Angeles to Europe in a search for his identity.
The galumphing rock score in which a song can suddenly change character without warning reflects the character’s uncertainty about who he is. The Narrator (the grown-up Stew) observes the life of his younger self, Youth (Daniel Breaker), with an affectionately critical eye. When Stew riffs on electric guitar and declaims his lyrics in a gruff holler, you hear echoes of Jimi Hendrix. Later on he morphs into a punk rocker. There is a broad, sarcastic parody of “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” when the young Stew ingests psychedelics.
The young man’s naïve infatuation with Europe, where he dives into a bohemian paradise of sex and drugs, inspires an amusing rock parody of “A Man and a Woman” and a sarcastic Kander and Ebb spoof, “The Black One,” which is a scathing response to his being fetishized as an angry black militant by a group of German cultural revolutionaries:
“Who lends the club that speak-easy air?/The black one, the black one!/Who dances like a god and has ‘wunderbar’ hair?/Der Schwarze.” In conclusion he wonders if he is “the postmodern lawn jockey sculpture.”
The term postmodern indicates the intellectual seriousness of the show. As the character matures and becomes bored with easy pleasure, his search carries him into a philosophic realm rarely visited by the Broadway musical. “What’s Inside Is Just a Lie/And Now I’m Ready to Explode” describes a psychic earthquake in which Youth decides “our feelings and our dreams have actually been put there by a system.” In desperation he determines to turn his life into a work of art, that work being “Passing Strange.”
The show’s final song, “Love Like That,” offers the closest thing to a comfortable answer to his questions: “Cuz the Real is a construct.../It’s the raw nerve’s private zone/It’s a personal sunset .../You drive off into alone.” “Passing Strange” is too true to its own vision to culminate in an explosion of joyful affirmation. It ends with a sigh.
Joshua Schmidt’s score for “Adding Machine” is just as harsh and darkly funny. The protagonist of this musical adaptation of Elmer Rice’s 1923 expressionistic play is a repressed number-crunching boor, Mr. Zero (Joel Hatch), who hates his job and his shrewish wife.
Mr. Schmidt’s music is percussive, mechanistic and frequently discordant as characters robotically chant lists of numbers, the monotony broken by bursts of rage and frustration. The score, at once hypnotic and corrosive, goes beyond Brecht-Weill in evoking a dystopic world. The one catchy tune, “I’d Rather Watch You,” sung by Daisy (Amy Warren), Zero’s office mate who has a secret crush on him, is a slowed-up 1920s-style barroom waltz.
The fiendish cosmic joke occurs when Zero, executed for the murder of his boss, lands in Elysian fields, where he discovers that freedom in the afterlife is unbearable because there is no morality. A mocking chorus sings, “And we must each/Believe, believe/Our lives will all/Add up to something in the end.”
Although wistfulness and anger crop up in John Bucchino’s music and lyrics for “A Catered Affair,” the kind of nihilism trumpeted by “Adding Machine” is nowhere to be found. The main characters, Aggie (Faith Prince) and her husband, Tom (Tom Wopat), are softened, realistic descendants of the careworn working people in “Adding Machine” and they’re observed tenderly instead of harshly.
“A Catered Affair” is a delicate, 1950s kitchen-sink chamber piece. Mr. Bucchino’s score, his first for Broadway, is true to the mood of the show, which has finely shaded performances by Ms. Prince and Mr. Wopat and an irritatingly outsize one by Harvey Fierstein, who can barely sing. Ms. Prince’s touching big number, “Married,” is delivered with appropriate Shirley Booth-meets-Edith Bunker plainness. The score’s one moment of high drama, Mr. Wopat’s “I Stayed,” is an eloquent swatch of narrative songwriting that breaks the mood of weary resignation at exactly the right moment. It is a modest, touching male answer to “Rose’s Turn” in “Gypsy,” a perfect moment.
The biggest impediment to falling in love with the new cast album of “South Pacific” is the memory of the 1949 original with Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin. The orchestra for this Lincoln Center Theater production, even beefed up, sounds smaller. That 1949 recording begins with a thunderous overture that sweeps into “Bali Hai” like a tidal wave. The supercharged sense of inevitability that permeates the original is only fleetingly captured in the Lincoln Center production.
Paulo Szot, who looks like a younger Pinza, sings wonderfully but without the same rock-bottom authority. Kelli O’Hara’s Nellie Forbush is irresistible to watch, but less so to hear on the album, because her voice lacks the personality of either a Mary Martin or a Reba McEntire, who sang the role in concert with Brian Stokes Mitchell. Ms. O’Hara is perfectly fine but not definitive.
The wonder is how fresh the score still sounds. “South Pacific” caught a wave of American history at Broadway’s high tide, like no other show has since. The museum that opened it doors to Stew and Mr. Miranda was built around musicals like it.
Correction: June 28, 2008
Because of an editing error, an article on Friday about cast albums of current Broadway musicals misidentified an award won by
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