Looking BacK: '78-'79
Two summer '78 musical attractions are noteworthy. Lucie Arnaz demonstrated musical-comedy know-how opposite big-voiced Harve Presnell in a Jones Beach outdoor revival of Annie Get Your Gun. Arnaz would make her Broadway musical debut before the season was over. In Manhattan and indoors was an ill-advised revival of Stop the World-I Want to Get Off as a vehicle for Sammy Davis, Jr. The early-'60s show had already dated, and only Davis's vocals of the big songs came off well. Ironically, this production is one of the few from the season that got preserved, in the form of a theatrically if very briefly released film called Sammy Stops the World.
That summer also brought to Broadway Jack Lemmon, working hard in a mediocre Bernard Slade Same Time, Next Year vehicle called Tribute, and a Circle in the Square revival of the still-funny Kaufman and Hart Hollywood spoof Once in a Lifetime. It was amusing to note that, because the leads were billed in alphabetical order, Steve Allen's wife, actress and TV personality Jayne Meadows, chose to call herself Jayne Meadows Allen for this engagement. Somewhere in the large cast was Jerry Zaks.
The Broadway season's second musical was a songbook revue with a lot of dance, Eubie, a moderately entertaining evening built around the music of Eubie Blake and featuring tap-happy brothers Gregory and Maurice Hines. For those interested in the fertile history of songbook shows during this period, Eubie! was one that wound up on home video.
Glenn Close was already showing signs of her considerable abilities in the new Sherlock Holmes play The Crucifer of Blood, and Henry Fonda and Jane Alexander had considerable charm in Lawrence and Lee's Supreme Court backstager, First Monday in October. Fonda's drawing power in a limited engagement allowed the play to take the Majestic Theatre.
A three-month newspaper strike was still on for the openings of both Eubie and the next big musical, King of Hearts. Based on the cult French film, the Joseph Stein/Peter Link musical had its admirers. But its score was only so-so; its theme the insane are somehow "saner" than the sane had a '60s feel; and its cast was not particularly distinctive. The outstanding element was Santo Loquasto's set design. King of Hearts expired after six weeks.
One of the campiest shows of its time, Platinum gave Alexis Smith of Follies a second Broadway musical vehicle. As a faded film star attempting a comeback, Smith looked sensational and performed with gusto. But while Platinum had several attractive songs, the show was too overtly aimed at the "After Dark" magazine crowd, and was too insubstantial for general audiences. Broadway's current Edna Turnblad, Bruce Vilanch, did his best to inject some workable comedy into the slender libretto.
The night Platinum opened, I was at a sensational, one-night-only Kander and Ebb tribute called Sing Happy! Lotte Lenya and Jack Gilford scored heavily recreating numbers from Cabaret. But the evening's electrifying highpoint was the finale from Chicago, restaged as a trio for originals Gwen Verdon and Chita Rivera along with Verdon's interim replacement, Liza Minnelli. Minnelli could do no wrong that night, bringing down the house repeatedly. After Minnelli's all-out rendition of "New York, New York," Rivera came up to the mike and said, "Liza, that was....fair."
It was hard to avoid shows like The Kingfisher, for if the play was inconsequential I admit to remembering little about it, the cast --Rex Harrison, Claudette Colbert, George Rose-- made it an event.
December also brought in that heartbreaker of a musical, Ballroom, Michael Bennett's first show since A Chorus Line and thus probably bound to fail. Those who saw the show tend to treasure the dance sequences at the Stardust Ballroom, as well as Dorothy Loudon's heartfelt performance as widow Bea Asher. Critics complained that the material wasn't on the same level as the staging, and they were probably right, with matters not helped by an oddly unbalanced if often attractive score that had all the songs performed by Loudon and two bandstand singers. Still, Ballroom was the season's most collectible flop, and one only wishes that the show had been preserved on video.
The next musical was a genuine turkey, the hopeless A Broadway Musical. Gower Champion came in and tried to save it, but there wasn't much he could do with this well-meaning but fatally underpowered evening. The Charles Strouse-Lee Adams score had its moments, so one would have liked a cast recording. The co-producer was future Livent mogul Garth Drabinsky.
Considerably better was Jerry Herman's third consecutive flop, The Grand Tour, at the Palace, where his next show, the smash La Cage aux Folles, would change his fortunes four years later. The Grand Tour was entirely respectable, its score attractive. It just wasn't exciting enough for audiences at the time, however, and Joel Grey and company were gone after only two months. Also in January: the magnificent English actress Constance Cummings in Wings, Arthur Kopit's play about a stroke victim that had begun off-Broadway at the Public Theatre and would eventually find its way back there as a musical of the same name.
February saw the arrival of a sizable hit, They're Playing Our Song, essentially a two-character musical with help from those characters' singing alter egos. Neil Simon was still in very good form with his consistently funny script, and the Marvin Hamlisch/Carole Bayer Sager songs were enjoyable. A slick package that worked well, Song boasted fine performances by Lucie Arnaz who should have been nominated for a Tony but wasn't and Robert Klein. They were successfully replaced by Stockard Channing and Tony Roberts, who were only the first in a line of Song successors. Is They're Playing Our Song, which lasted almost three years and was produced around the world, revivable? I doubt it, although a pair of performers with great personal appeal might be able to sell it to new audiences.
A few days after that hit came an enjoyable revival of the venerable Eddie Cantor vehicle Whoopee!, imported from the Goodspeed Opera House. It lasted six months. Hoofing in the ensemble behind such non-names as Charles Repole, Beth Austin, and Carol Swarbrick was one Susan Stroman, who would later stage a ballet featuring the music of Whoopee composer Walter Donaldson and called Makin' Whoopee. Fans trekked out to Brooklyn's Academy of Music to catch a brief run of another Goodspeed production, the Gershwin's Tip-Toes with a cute Georgia Engel in the lead.
Still in February, there was Sarava, a weak Mitch Leigh musical which limped along and even moved, from the Hellinger to the Broadway for about five months. Sarava employed the questionable tactic of playing extended previews, advertising heavily on television while avoiding setting a date for the critics to attend. This caused several reviewers, including the man from The Times, to cover the show before it finally had its official opening.
Before February was over, Broadway had the transfer from off-Broadway's Hudson Guild Theatre of On Golden Pond, an unsurprising but reasonably effective audience pleaser. The original Broadway production boasted gifted non-stars in Tom Aldredge and Frances Sternhagen. It wasn't until the film version that the show became a star vehicle.
With March came the opening of the one musical of the '78-'79 season that was indisputably important, Sweeney Todd. Unlike certain other ambitious classics of the repertoire, Sweeney Todd was, for the most part, immediately recognized as a work of stature, even if its reputation would grow throughout its run of only 557 performances. The cast recording helped make it clear that here was a work of often staggering brilliance. The show is scheduled to have its third Broadway production this fall.
Zoot Suit was an ambitious, elaborate, unworkable play with songs, based on real-life events in Los Angeles in the 1940s. Alan Ayckbourn's Bedroom Farce was a delight, first with its peerless National Theatre cast, and again with its American replacement cast, including Mildred Natwick and John Lithgow. Tom Conti gave a memorable performance in the acclaimed Whose Life Is It Anyway? Conti's next job: Robert Klein's role in the London version of They're Playing Our Song.
April brought the transfer from off-Broadway of The Elephant Man, which wound up taking the major prizes for the season's best play. It was superbly staged by Jack Hofsiss, and the performances of Carole Shelley, Philip Anglim, and Kevin Conway were flawless. As a recent Broadway revival demonstrated, it was not so much a great play as a great topic given a superb production.
The musical season might just as well have ended with Sweeney Todd, but this was one that just wouldn't quit. Distinguished names like Alan Jay Lerner, Burton Lane, and Joseph Stein were involved in the short-lived Carmelina, which contained a classy score but was, like several of the season's earlier musicals, not exciting enough to draw crowds.
The season concluded with three more musical productions, one a mostly one-man show, Peter Allen in Up in One at the Biltmore Theatre. He was assisted by recent Chicago Velma replacement, Lenora Nemetz. Starring old pro Celeste Holm, The Utter Glory of Morrissey Hall, about an English school for girls, was the one Broadway musical of the season entirely without merit. It deserved its one-night run.
Although, in terms of the Tonys, it was part of the next season, Richard Rodgers' final Broadway musical, I Remember Mama, had its delayed opening at the end of May. Its attractive physical production and the occasional trace of Rodgers' melodic gifts notwithstanding, it was a sizable disappointment, with star Liv Ullmann less than comfortable in the lead. It struggled through a three-month run.
One more golden-age musical name had been scheduled for Broadway that season. But Cy Coleman's latest show, Home Again, Home Again, never made it beyond Stratford, Connecticut and Toronto.