CDs: Fellini Flop

Early in her career, Bernadette Peters had a Broadway success in the Joel Grey vehicle George M!, then got her break-through part, spoofing Ruby Keeler in the acclaimed off-Broadway musical Dames at Sea. Thereafter, though, she had a harder time of things on Broadway, with her first three musical vehicles all flops. There was the very good but short-lived 1971 revival of On the Town and the promising but disappointing Jerry Herman musical Mack and Mabel 1974.

But the first of her Broadway musical flops was La Strada. Like the earlier Sweet Charity and the later Nine, it was based on a film directed by Italy's Federico Fellini. Like Charity's source, Nights of Cabiria, Fellini's 1954 film La Strada had been created as a vehicle for his wife, actress Giulietta Masina.

By the late '60s, Lionel Bart was the foremost composer-lyricist of the British musical, having had international success with the stage and screen versions of Oliver! along with West End hits in Lock Up Your Daughters, Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be, Blitz!, and Maggie May. With the musical version of La Strada, Bart would be writing his first show directly for Broadway.

Hired to direct was Alan Schneider, who had had considerable success with the plays of Albee, Beckett, and Pinter, but had no experience staging musicals. Alvin Ailey was the choreographer. Handling the book and producing the musical La Strada was Charles K. Peck, Jr., co-author with Pearl S. Buck of the script for the flop musical Christine.

La Strada was saddled with one of the bleakest stories ever put on the musical stage. In the '50s, the thuggish Zampano travels through Southern Italy with his strong-man act. He buys from her family the simple-minded Gelsomina to be his assistant and concubine. Overcoming her shyness, Gelsomina's winsome clowning makes her the star of the act, and she falls in love with Zampano, even though he treats her brutally. When they join a circus, Gelsomina finds someone she can confide in, Mario the Fool. A jealous Zampano kills Mario, and Gelsomina is inconsolable. Zampano abandons Gelsomina on the road, leaving her to die, as he moves on.

Hired to play Zampano was the little-known Vincent Beck, who was replaced during the Detroit tryout by his understudy, Stephen Pearlman. West Side Story's Larry Kert played Mario. Patricia Marand Wish You Were Here, .....It's Superman's role of Mario's assistant was eliminated during the tryout.

Bart's personal demons, which included drugs and alcohol, seem to have prevented him from taking an active role in the developing production. As a result, Elliot Lawrence, a musical director and orchestrator, and lyricist Martin Charnin began composing additional songs for the show, while more and more Bart numbers were dropped. By the time La Strada opened on December 14, 1969 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre, only three Bart songs "Belonging," "The Great Zampano," "A Circus in Town" remained. Lawrence and Charnin had composed a virtually new score, even though the title-page credit still simply stated, "Music and lyrics by Lionel Bart." A note inserted into Playbills cryptically read, "At this performance, additional music and lyrics by Martin Charnin and Elliot Lawrence."

None of this was a sign of a healthy show, and, sure enough, La Strada opened to mostly negative reviews. Clive Barnes in The Times said, "the book is weak, and the music and lyrics are undistinguished to the point of Muzak-like oblivion." Brendan Gill in The New Yorker perceptively noted that those involved in the musical "lifted everything from the celebrated Fellini movie except the one thing that matters and that is obviously incapable of being lifted-the sensibility of the maker." Only Richard Watts in The Post had some good words for the show, calling it "a superior musical drama," noting "a brilliant first act followed by a second that is a serious letdown."

Arriving in such a state of disarray, it was no surprise when La Strada closed on opening night, losing $650,000. It was no fault of Peters, who supplied one of her most enchanting performances. The material was relentlessly depressing, and the show lacked the beauty and tragic quality Fellini was able to impart to the story. Too relentlessly gloomy for Broadway, La Strada would surely have been better suited to operatic treatment.

The score that the Broadway opening-night audience heard was not bad, with several of the Lawrence-Charnin songs adeptly emulating Bart's haunting sound. Judy Kuhn can be heard singing the opening Lawrence-Charnin number on Varese Sarabande's Unsung Musicals Volume One. But given the one-night run and the fact that the real authors of the score weren't officially billed, it was no surprise that La Strada received no Broadway cast recording, even if live tapes exist from Broadway previews. Note that United Artists briefly released an LP of Bart's La Strada score, but it was an untheatrical instrumental treatment, the melodies conducted by "Sir Julian."

Bayview has already reissued on CD the London cast albums of Bart's Fings, Lock Up Your Daughters, and Maggie May. The label's new La Strada release is a forty-six-minute, ten-song 1967 demo, lavishly produced and featuring a twenty-five-piece orchestra. The only soloist identified is pop singer Madeleine Bell, and also credited are the Michael Sammes Singers.

This wholly unexpected release, licensed by the Bart estate, offers the chance to hear many of the songs Bart composed for La Strada, only two of which "Belonging," "Zampano the Great!" made it to the Broadway opening as is. The melody of the song here called "Hullo and Goodbye" was, with a new lyric, recycled as "A Circus in Town." And the melody of another, "If Her Mother Only Knew!," also sounds familiar.

The material here is attractive, although far from Bart's best. The better tracks include a stirring overture; the march "To Be a Performer," which was still included at the La Strada preview I attended; "Belonging," even if the vocal can't compare to Peters' on that song; and a "Something Special" trio. Near the end, Zampano has an ambitious, seven-minute solo aria, "Tan-tan-ta-ra! Farewell!"

One cannot, of course, be sure how some of these songs might have sounded with stage performers and theatre arrangements and orchestrations. Like most show demos, this one features some generic vocals and some renditions that lean toward pop. The Gelsomina presumably Bell fails to convey the character's extreme vulnerability and child-like quality. Still, hardcore Bart fans like myself will find this an intriguing chance to collect a good chunk of Bart's original score.

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