Personal Favorites: The '90s
When the Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical began its sold-out previews at Playwrights Horizons, I waited in a cancellation line on a cold night and got in to see one of the earliest performances. I would see the show two more times during its 1991 off-Broadway run, invariably finding it devastating, and loving Jerry Zaks' staging and cast.
I was fairly perturbed when Assassins opened and received almost entirely negative reviews from the New York critics. When Assassins came back last year, almost everyone admired it, with a number of reviewers doing an about-face from their original assessment. I found this particularly gratifying, especially as the revival was bigger than the original but in no way superior to it. Some felt that the events of September 11 had made the difference. I would say the situation was more akin to that of Chicago, a show whose brilliance many simply failed to appreciate the first time around.
The 1992 Broadway production of Falsettos was, of course, a combination of two one-act William Finn musicals, the first March of the Falsettos from 1981, the second Falsettoland from 1990. And the Broadway production wasn't the first time these works were combined; that happened in Hartford, in a production staged by Graciela Daniele. But it was fitting that when the two pieces were joined in New York, it was in James Lapine's original stagings and with several members of the original casts.
The result was a contemporary opera with delicious tunes and an abundance of humor and compassion. These relatively tiny shows had no trouble filling a small Broadway house with wit and emotion, and there was no more affecting musical on Broadway during the '90s. No doubt a company like Roundabout will attempt to bring Falsettos back to New York one day, and it will be interesting to see how a piece that so beautifully captured its time will hold up.
I was even more passionate about Kiss of the Spider Woman, another show with more than its share of critical detractors. With its combination of politics and show business as metaphor, it was just the sort of piece to inspire top-form work by stager Hal Prince and songwriters John Kander and Fred Ebb, who provided their most complex, operatic score. As the title symbol, Chita Rivera supplied her most imposing performance. The show was also notable for an heroic gay central character whose plight was movingly depicted, especially when Brent Carver was playing the role. Spider Woman was abundantly theatrical, and demonstrated anew its creators' ability to turn serious subject matter into vivid musical theatre.
Then there was the guilty-pleasure show of the '90s, Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard. Strictly speaking, it was not a flawless translation of a great film. But heroine Norma Desmond was nothing if not operatic, so she was a fine subject for the composer's opulent, Gothic style. The extravagance of the physical production was unforgettable, even if it meant that no version of the original production was ever able to return its investment. But it was mainly the opportunity that Sunset Boulevard provided for a star-diva turn that made it such a collector's item. That opportunity was seized by some of the best musical-theatre women of the era, and catching the various takes on the musical Norma was the show's chief attraction for fans. Most critics disparaged Sunset Boulevard, ignoring a good deal of grand music, including some of the composer's best tunes.
The '90s boasted a number of fine scores, none better than Maury Yeston's for Titanic, a show that, like Assassins, was mostly dismissed by critics, but, thanks to its Tony victory, was able to survive for a couple of years. I have only the fondest memories of this show. True, just about any version of the Titanic saga is moving. But Yeston and book writer Peter Stone came pretty close to pulling off a stage musical version that presented any number of challenges. The opening sequence was particularly thrilling, but Titanic was loaded with fine musical pieces, delivered by an exceptionally good original cast.
Was Titanic's score better than Ragtime's? Let's just say that both were wonderful. Musicalizing E.L. Doctorow's kaleidoscopic novel of early-20th-century American life presented formidable problems, not all of which were solved. But I doubt that the novel could have been better musicalized. And the result was an epic show of considerable fascination, one performed by another of the decade's best original companies. I doubt we'll ever again see as serious a musical produced on such a lavish scale. It may have been the undoing of Garth Drabinsky's Livent, but it was certainly impressive while it lasted.
Another product of Livent, Parade was more severely flawed than Titanic and Ragtime. Yet it too lingers in the memory as a powerful work, one that revealed composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown to be a significant new talent. Like Titanic, Parade told a true story, and it did so in an uncompromisingly stark manner. Some found the result stolid, but I thought the score made it haunting. It was but one of a number of demonstrations of Lincoln Center Theater's willingness to tackle darkly intriguing, if commercially unsuccessful, new musicals.
Our last two titles take us into 2000. Talking about serious, daring new musicals brings us to The Wild Party. In almost unprecedented fashion, there were two musical versions of Joseph Moncure March's narrative poem, and for a time the two shows played simultaneously, just a few blocks apart. Neither version was completely successful, and both had their admirable attributes. But the Broadway Wild Party, the one by Michael John LaChiusa and George C. Wolfe, was the more memorably and deliberately creepy and nerve-jangling. The show may not have been able to provide a satisfying ending to its story, and some of the evening was inevitably off-putting; in general, it was a show that, whatever its strengths, wasn't likely to find a wide Broadway audience. But those who responded to it recall it as an evening of hallucinatory atmosphere, with a score that was one of the decade's most original. Toni Collette's musical-theatre debut was simply astonishing.
And 2000 also brought in The Full Monty, by far the most conventional of our '90s favorites, but a solidly entertaining work that ably captured the sensibility of average, working-class folk in Buffalo, New York. Terrence McNally, who also wrote the books for Spider Woman and Ragtime, made a fine stage transcription of a pleasing film, and David Yazbek's score was perfectly in tune with the characters. I'm still slightly surprised that Full Monty didn't have an even longer run.