So in my fantasy life, when I hit the lottery big – not just ten or fifteen million, but the huge, $100 million jackpot that appears every so often – one of the things I think about doing is staging a local or dinner theater season - a whole year of musicals, maybe six to run for two months each. I know it wouldn’t make any money, but I could do it cheaply enough that I wouldn’t blow though my “go crazy” portion of winnings.
In short, I could be a Producer for a year.
Lots of my favorites are also quite famous and doing well in their own right, so, much as I’d love to produce them, I wouldn’t waste the time and money… Miss Saigon, Rent, Les Miserables – there’s no value in my even trying.
No, I’d do some that otherwise seldom see the light of day:
[ul]
[li]Good Time Charlie[/li][li]King of Hearts [/li][li]Working[/li][li]Sunday In the Park With George[/li][li]Passion[/li][li]Aspects of Love[/li][li]Into The Woods[/li][li]Song and Dance[/li][li]Whistle Down The Wind[/li][li]Jeykll & Hyde[/li][li]Chess[/li][li]Wildcat[/li][/ul]
Hmmm. Maybe I need two years.
What should I cut from that list? Need answer before the Powerball draw this week.
I had the good luck to see a community production of Chess once, about seven years ago. It wasn’t even professional and I still think it was one of the best shows I ever saw.
I think Pippin is underappreciated, and would make a great movie. Spring Awakening won the Tony for Best Musical a few years ago, but it certainly doesn’t seem to have penetrated the public consciousness. (You’d think that the fact that it’s female lead was Lea Michele, now famous from Glee, would help…)
I toyed with adding Pippin, but ultimate I feel the show has not aged well. I just think there’s a 70s vibe to it, especially the ending, which seems to resonate with that decade’s non-conformist conforming angst.
And while I admire the power and depth of Spring Awakening… not really the uplifting I usually like from musicals. Redo it as an opera and I’ll sign up.
Yessss, my favorite musical! Although it did have a successful Broadway revival a few years ago put on by the Roundabout Theatre Company.
I would add another favorite of mine that had a too short original Broadway run but has since gained something of a cult following, Side Show. I hope the rumors of a revival next year are true!
I’d like to put musicals on film. Some are available as videos of live productions, but it’s not the same thing. Man of La Mancha – a seriously miscast musical. Peter O’Toole? Sophia Loren? Why get them when Richard Kiley and Joan Diener were still around and performing when they made it? And James Coco as Sancho Panza sang too well. You’d needc a new cast today, but surely we can get a better singer than the otherwise great O’Toole.
Phantom of the Opera – actually, the film of Andrew lloyd Webber’s musical was great, with the sole exception of The Phantom. Gerald Butler can no more sing than Peter O’Toole can. And the extent of his ugliness is that he looks like a guy with mild case of Rasacea. All they have to do is digitally replace Butler with a different actor in proper makeup with a good voice. Maybe they can use Michael Crawford. Pippin – They still haven’t filmed this. I have a taped performance, but it ain’t the same.
Candide – They ought to be able to use their imaginations and make something good of this.
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas – The guys responsible for the musical hated the film based on it – they thought using Dolly Parton as the Madame was over-the top, and were hoping for someone like Jill Clayburgh. (At least Dolly can definitely sing, though. And i wouldn’t mind them using the songs she wrote for the film). Jim Nabors was OK, but Burt Reynolds seemed wrong as the sherriff. And Dom de Luise significantly changed the investigative reporter from both the stage show and hios real-life inspiration. Loved Charles Durning as the Governor. Who knew HE could sing?
I know Side Show starred Emily Skinner, whose voice I heard when I thought I was going to be listening to Linda Eder! (Eder was having voice problems during the previews run of J&H and Emily sang her role. I wanted to see the production of Side Show and never did, but do have the cast album.
I dunno about that… I’ve seen two different really fantastic productions of it in the past decade or so, neither of which felt dated to me.
(Digression about Pippin upcoming.)
One was a production in LA put on by a theater for the deaf, with a new song written by Stephen Schwartz himself (“Back in the Bosom of the Family” replacing the totally forgettable “Welcome Home, Son”). The way it was staged was that most characters were played by two actors simultaneously, one deaf or hard-of-hearing actor performing the gestures and physical staging, and another actor doing the singing. At the end, when the Lead Player is taking everything away from Pippin (the sets and costumes and so forth) he actually steals Pippin’s voice.
The other was a more low-rent production with two bits that stand out most clearly: the creative use of anachronistic props, most memorably the map of the battle in “War is a Science” (the men in the ravine/that’s this area in green … and the enemy, in blue, will undoubtedly pursue) which was… a Twister board; and the other being a gimmick as the show was starting, where the theater company was holding was appeared to be a little fundraising raffle, with a few paltry little prizes being given away, and then they draw the grand prize, the winner comes up on stage looking excited, and they inform him that he has won… the right to play Pippin in their production. Brilliant!
Spring Awakening. I can’t believe it’s not still running on Broadway. It’s about teenagers coming of age and the built-in audience of teenagers coming of age is inexhaustible.