Personal Favorites: The '80s
Instead, I'll begin this installment in my series on shows that touched me or that seemed to me unique with a quartet of memorable '80s flops. There was something inevitably heart-tugging about the failure of Merrily We Roll Along. Not only did it see two of the musical theatre's greatest talents, Stephen Sondheim and Hal Prince, come to grief. But it was performed by a cast of talented young people whose hopes of Broadway success would be dashed when their eagerly-awaited show went through a tortuous preview period and a two-week run. As one who followed Merrily from its first preview to its final performance, I found the show greatly improved by opening night. Yet critics with the notable exception of Clive Barnes in The Post reacted with reviews that couldn't have been much worse had they covered the first preview, before the endless revisions began.
Carrie may qualify as an imported pop opera, but its world premiere at England's Stratford-on-Avon was more along the lines of a Broadway tryout, with the cast half American. Carrie remains the flop of the last twenty-five years; not even Dance of the Vampires could unseat it. Attending the first preview, I couldn't quite believe some of the things I was seeing, yet Carrie's score had moments of considerable beauty. Surmounting the wreckage were valiant performances by leading ladies Linzi Hateley currently playing Mrs. Banks in London's Mary Poppins and Betty Buckley.
Female performances also made The Rink and Rags into distinctive, collectible flops. Even the combination of the extremely high-powered Chita Rivera and Liza Minnelli couldn't make the often grim Rink into a commercial hit. And although Rags was dead on arrival at the Mark Hellinger Theatre, a poorly produced show that was without a director for much of its tryout, it contained a powerhouse performance by opera diva Teresa Stratas. Both The Rink and Rags had high-quality scores by top Broadway songwriters.
The first Broadway smash of the '80s was 42nd Street, but it wasn't until Dreamgirls 1981 that we got a major hit with genuine emotional power. Dreamgirls was dismissed in some quarters as empty glitz, but, beyond its state-of-the-art staging by Michael Bennett and design, Dreamgirls told an affecting tale of a family breaking apart and coming back together. That it also functioned as a great backstage show and deployed the sounds of pop music in genuinely theatrical, near-operatic fashion made Dreamgirls all the more remarkable. But when I think back on the show, I tend to recall above all how moving was its second-act series of reunion scenes.
Some accused Nine 1982 of a lack of emotional content, but Tommy Tune's staging and Maury Yeston's score were sufficiently electrifying to make the show feel like an impassioned evening. What made the high-style Nine particularly exciting to behold was its parade of show-stopping musical ladies, including Karen Akers, Anita Morris, Lilianne Montevechi, Shelly Burch, and Kathi Moss. I am grateful that I was not a Tony voter in 1982, as choosing between Dreamgirls and Nine in several categories would have been close to impossible.
Another bountiful Tune staging was on display in My One and Only 1983. Of the two "new" Broadway Gershwin musicals of recent decades, I much preferred the successful My One and Only to the more successful Crazy for You. But I readily admit that Crazy for You is more useful for post-Broadway production, as the material is somewhat stronger and certainly less dependent on its original Broadway staging. Indeed, My One and Only was an exercise in style, and its text may seem negligible without its original design, star performances, and choreography. This was demonstrated by the recent, non-Tune London production. Without Tune on and off stage, My One and Only would not have worked. With Tune, it was a giddy delight, and ranks, along with Kiss of the Spider Woman, as one of the greatest salvage jobs in recent musical-theatre history.
There was nothing quite like Sunday in the Park with George 1984 in its original production. Fine as the commercially released, original-cast videotape of the show is, it doesn't fully convey the spell the show cast when experienced live at the Booth Theatre. But that tape does capture two of the best Tony-losing performances of recent years, those of Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters. They were irreplaceable, although the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine show was daring and enthralling enough to work without them.
I was very fond of The Mystery of Edwin Drood 1985, which had many fans yet never quite managed to become a commercial hit. The show's built-in gimmick --the audience voting on the outcome of a mystery story that Dickens had left unfinished-- was what most people talked about. But I treasured the show's glittering original cast Judy Kuhn and Donna Murphy were in the chorus and a fine score by Rupert Holmes that makes one regret the lack of subsequent Holmes scores on Broadway.
The Tony victory of Jerome Robbins' Broadway was, of course, an indication of the poor health of the Broadway musical at the end of the '80s. Because the '88-'89 season produced not a single decent new book musical, a compilation of numbers from musicals staged by Jerome Robbins was ruled eligible to compete as a new musical, and, without much competition, won.
But that unfortunate situation should not be allowed to detract from the fact that Jerome Robbins' Broadway was a moving evocation of golden-age musical theatre. If the show included few rarities, the familiar numbers from shows like Fiddler on the Roof, Gypsy, The King and I, and Peter Pan were, when combined in a single evening, an overpowering reminder of the glory days of the Broadway musical.
Tommy Tune may have topped himself with his staging of one of the last musicals of the '80s, Grand Hotel. Like My One and Only, the allure of Grand Hotel depended heavily on Tune's work, although I'm glad to see that the show is holding up well enough to receive non-Tune revivals.
The Broadway production of Grand Hotel was the sort of thing that fans returned to again and again. The brand of stage magic conjured by Tune in Grand Hotel was becoming increasingly rare, and it amply rewarded repeat visits, even if one missed certain key performers when they were replaced.