Looking Back: '83-'84
That musical was half of what turned out to be the summer of Jerry Herman, an unplanned event that, without any indication at the time, would mark the seeming end of the Broadway careers of both Angela Lansbury and composer-lyricist Herman.
In late spring '83, I traveled to Philadelphia's Academy of Music to take in the first preview of Lansbury in her pre-Broadway revival of Mame, a production scheduled to play a lengthy tour prior to New York. I had, of course, seen Lansbury play Mame in the '66 original as well as in a high-profile '70s stock tour. But one couldn't help but be excited by the return of one of the happiest matches of star and role in musical-theatre history.
That night in Philadelphia, the years seemed to fall away, and Lansbury did not disappoint, her professionalism allowing her to easily slip back into her signature role, high kicks and all. But as it turned out, I need not have made that trip to Philadelphia. During its run in that city, it was announced that producer Mitch Leigh's planned tour of this Mame revival had fallen apart, and that the production would proceed immediately to New York's Gershwin Theatre, where it opened in July with little advance notice ---or advance sale.
Thrilling as Lansbury and Mame may now seem to us in memory, the revival received only lukewarm reviews. It's possible that the show hadn't been away from Broadway long enough. And it must also be remembered that Lansbury was at the time of the revival not the TV superstar she was soon to become. The return of Mame lasted only a month, closing a week after the Broadway premiere of Herman's new Broadway musical, La Cage aux Folles.
As previously noted, La Cage arrived in town as a guaranteed smash, just as The Producers and Hairspray did in recent seasons. Audiences ate it up, and everyone involved lucked out with a co-starring pair, George Hearn and Gene Barry, that proved ideal. Note that those men were pretty obviously heterosexual fellows, which was probably what some audiences needed at the time to feel comfortable with the unconventional subject matter. The stars of the forthcoming revival, Gary Beach and Daniel Davis, are perhaps more naturally effete in style.
The Herman double-header wasn't the only Broadway action in the summer of '83. After the decidedly kind critical reception accorded her Broadway debut in The Little Foxes, Elizabeth Taylor decided she was going to become a theatre regular, so producer Zev Bufman formed for her the Elizabeth Theater Company, an organization announced to present a subscription series of starry revivals, with Taylor the headliner of one title per season.
This improbable plan lasted exactly one season and produced just two events, Taylor opposite ex-husband Richard Burton in Private Lives late the previous season, and the summertime '83 entry, an ill-advised revival of The Corn Is Green with an uncomfortable Cicely Tyson in the star part. Better was the young leading man, Peter Gallagher, while collectors were happy to catch the unexpected Broadway return of Irma La Douce Tony winner Elizabeth Seal in a supporting role.
Fall '83's first musical entry was a revival of the Kander-Ebb-Stein 1968 musical Zorba, returning to Broadway a show that had been a commercial failure the first time around. This was an early effort from revival masters Barry and Fran Weissler, and this time, the show was a hit. That was owing, quite obviously, to the presence of Anthony Quinn, who owned the role of Zorba from the movie that had preceded the musical. To make things even closer to the film, its Oscar-winning leading lady, Lila Kedrova, took on the female lead in the musical revival, and won a Tony for it.
Quinn couldn't sing much, but it didn't matter: He was Zorba, and he brought in the crowds. Staged by the film's director, Michael Cacoyannis, who had no experience with Broadway musicals, this was Zorba-lite, far less dark than Hal Prince's original but not remotely as theatrical. Without the conceptual notion of a story being enacted in a bouzouki circle, Debbie Gravitte was forced to play "The Woman" rather than "The Leader." The role no longer made much sense, although Gravitte sang it strongly. Kedrova was entrancing, and both Robert Westenberg and his replacement, Jeff McCarthy, did well opposite Quinn. This Zorba ran a year and turned a profit, but I wouldn't expect to see another Broadway revival of the show, even with its potent Kander and Ebb score.
I skipped Al Pacino in American Buffalo because I'd seen him play it off-Broadway only a couple of years earlier. But I did catch a preview of Carroll O'Connor in his one-nighter, Brothers. Amen Corner, a musical version of a '60s Broadway play by James Baldwin, involved several of the talents from Purlie and Angel. But it proved to be one of the least memorable musicals of the '80s.
With Lincoln Center's theater company temporarily in limbo, the Vivian Beaumont was occupied for most of the season by La Tragedie de Carmen, director Peter Brook's overpraised take on Bizet's opera, performed in French by rotating casts.
The season's first musical, La Cage, would prove to be its biggest hit. But '83-'84 was a particularly fertile semester for new musicals, even if the dire entries equaled the number of memorable ones. The first bomb was of the camp-hoot variety, Marilyn: An American Fable. I would imagine that any book musical that attempted to tell the story of Marilyn Monroe's life on stage in dialogue and song was doomed to failure. Still, Marilyn: An American Fable went out of its way to be ludicrous, playing fast and loose with the truth and redeemed only by the sensitive work of Alyson Reed in the lead. Marilyn was not nearly as forgettable, though, as Doonesbury, an indifferent musicalization of Garry Trudeau's comic strip that, with a tuneless score by Elizabeth Swados, felt more like a play with incidental songs than a full-fledged musical. Among the company was Gary Beach.
December was full of interesting entries. First, there was the disappointing revival of The Glass Menagerie; what with Jessica Tandy, Amanda Plummer, Bruce Davison, and John Heard directed by John Dexter, it had sounded so good on paper. Three nights later, there was Baby, with its highly enjoyable Richard Maltby, Jr./David Shire score. Not much was wrong with Baby, but its subject matter --three couples anticipating parenthood at different stages of life-made it a hard sell. The show was intimate, perhaps too much so for Broadway. The six leads were perfect, especially the ladies, Beth Fowler, Catherine Cox, and Liz Callaway. The relatively small Baby had to struggle to make it through the season, closing in July without having turned a profit.
December's hit comedy was Noises Off, with fine work from Dorothy Loudon, Victor Garber, Brian Murray, Deborah Rush, and Paxton Whitehead. My only problem with it: I had already seen Michael Blakemore's staging even better performed, at London's Savoy Theatre, with an English company headed by Patricia Routledge and Paul Eddington.
The final musical entries of 1983 were Peg and The Tap Dance Kid. The former was a collector's item, great vocalist Peggy Lee, in person, performing not her repertoire of pop standards but instead new songs which she had co-authored in a one-woman autobiography. If numbers like "Daddy Was a Railroad Man" and "One Beating a Day" never became famous, it wasn't for Lee's lack of trying. Lee looked a bit like an extremely glamorous visitor from outer space, and I wouldn't have missed Peg for the world.
The Tap Dance Kid was something of a disappointment, if only because its composer, Henry Krieger, had previously done the fascinating score for Dreamgirls still playing at the Imperial, and was here working on a far more conventional project that didn't seem to inspire him the way the Michael Bennett show had done, or the way the material of Side Show later would. Indeed, The Tap Dance Kid was one of the more old-fashioned book shows of its time, and while it was a fairly pleasant piece for the family trade, it was also undistinguished. It stayed open a year and a half without making money; during the run, Savion Glover inherited the title role from Alfonso Ribeiro.
The new year began with the season's big play, The Real Thing, Tom Stoppard's most warmly human work to date. Peter Gallagher, the saving grace of the summer's The Corn Is Green, was back, along with a dreamy cast including Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close, Christine Baranski, and young Cynthia Nixon. Mike Nichols' Broadway staging was even sharper than the version I had seen in London.
The next collector's-item musical was The Rink. Kander and Ebb's score was full of vivid items. The central mother-daughter relationship of Terrence McNally's book was both dramatic and campy. And you had Chita Rivera and Liza Minnelli together on one stage, reunited from their six weeks together in Chicago nine years earlier.
Everyone was glad to see Rivera in a role juicy enough to at last win her a Tony. Helping out pals Kander and Ebb and Rivera by taking the unglamorous daughter part, Minnelli was excellent. The Rink demonstrated that an ultimately unworkable show could be vastly enjoyable. The cast included Jason Alexander, future director Scott Ellis, and, as an understudy, Rob Marshall, who may have found time to discuss with the stars their previous joint vehicle.
Glengarry Glen Ross had its Broadway premiere in March, 1984, and it remains for me David Mamet's most enjoyable play. Like La Cage, it gets a Broadway revival this season. One of the season's biggest events closed the month, Dustin Hoffman in Death of a Salesman, a production that can still be experienced in its filmed version. Hoffman's little-man Willy Loman took a little getting used to, but it worked, and there was fine work from Kate Reid, Stephen Lang, and John Malkovich. The big Tony surprise of 1984 was the lack of a nomination for Hoffman the revival itself won "Best Reproduction".
I had seen Galt MacDermot's pop-opera version of William Saroyan's The Human Comedy at the Public Theatre in the fall, and while I had loved it, I was surprised at the decision to move it to Broadway. The situation was perhaps akin to this season's Caroline, or Change, another risky transfer, even if The Human Comedy was a more overtly winning work than Caroline. In any case, the Broadway reviews were not particularly helpful, and it became immediately evident that Joseph Papp had made a mistake moving Human Comedy uptown, where it ran less than two weeks.
Having seen her previous Broadway evening, I didn't feel the need to catch Shirley MacLaine on Broadway, this time at the Gershwin Theatre. And I somehow missed Play Memory, a rare non-musical directed by Hal Prince.
But of course I caught the short-lived revival of Oliver!, a show I've always been fond of. I welcomed the chance to see Ron Moody play Fagin on stage, and Patti LuPone's Nancy was a major attraction. Because it dutifully recreated the original staging and design, the revival lacked a certain freshness and energy. Still, I was glad to see a semblance of the original again, as I had been too young to fully appreciate it the first time around.
I passed on A Moon for the Misbegotten with Kate Nelligan, mostly because I'd seen the celebrated Colleen Dewhurst-Jason Robards version of the previous decade. Next came the breathtaking Sunday in the Park With George. I had been lucky enough to see the summer 1983 Playwrights Horizons workshop of the show, and had taken to the piece immediately, even before it had a second act and several of its principal songs. During Broadway previews, it was evident that while Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters were glorious in their roles and the physical production was ideal, the show wasn't fully landing with audiences.
The late addition of two songs "Children and Art," "Lesson #8" greatly helped the show to jell, and by the time it opened, Sunday was remarkable. The show had staunch champions notably Times critic Frank Rich and an equal number of detractors. It was an unusually daring project for Broadway and received mixed reviews, so it was unable to pose a serious Tony threat to La Cage.
More than one person has told me that I missed an unintentional hoot by skipping Barbara Rush in the solo play A Woman of Independent Means. I enjoyed Arthur Kopit's intriguing, controversial, short-lived End of the World, also directed by Hal Prince. The season closed with Stephanie Mills in The Wiz, like Mame and Oliver! a short-lived revival featuring an original star. It was simply too soon to bring the show back, and while the original staging was more or less intact, the physical production was inferior to the original's. In the second act, Mills got an unnecessary new song, "Wonder, Wonder Why."
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