Revivals: The '80s--Part Two
A 1980 Brigadoon was fairly well-received and boasted excellent work from Martin Vidnovic and Meg Bussert. It also featured perhaps the most unfortunate supporting performance I've ever seen in a Broadway musical revival, the Meg Brockie of Elaine Hausman. Her rendition of "The Love of My Life" was so poor that one wasn't sorry to see that Meg's other number, "My Mother's Wedding Day," had been dropped.
This Brigadoon was something of a revisal, with Alan Jay Lerner still around to offer some book revisions, including moving the location of the act break. But even with Agnes de Mille's still-splendid choreography, this Brigadoon was removed from the Majestic after four months so that David Merrick could transfer 42nd Street from the Winter Garden.
Likewise praised but short-lived was Houston Grand Opera's Show Boat 1983, an enjoyable production of a piece that would require a major restaging in the '90s for a longer run. Off-Broadway's York Theatre mounting of Sweeney Todd was overpraised, and transferred to Circle in the Square in 1989 for a six-month run. The show had already returned to New York at New York City Opera. Directed by Susan H. Schulman, the York production was hailed as a more intimate, human version than the Broadway original. For the most part, though, it was just less effective.
The 1987 Dreamgirls qualifies more as a return than a revival; the original had closed in 1985, and the '87 run which hit New York just as its director-choreographer, Michael Bennett, was dying featured the scaled-down road version.
Several of the above-mentioned failures were joined in the '80s by a slew of outright musical-revival flops. The most unfortunate of these was the 1983 Mame, which lasted only a month at the Gershwin. With Angela Lansbury still sublime in the role in which she had triumphed in 1966, this Mame was to have played a lengthy pre-Broadway tour. But the tour was abruptly cancelled after a single engagement in Philadelphia, forcing the production to come in to New York in July with little advance publicity. Mixed reviews didn't help, and Lansbury's greatest success turned sour for her this time out. Had the star only waited a bit and chosen to do a limited run of Mame during one of her early hiatuses from "Murder, She Wrote," tickets would have been scarce.
Dick Van Dyke was essentially too nice for con man Harold Hill in The Music Man, but Meg Bussert made a fine Marian, and Michael Kidd's production a commercial booking at City Center that lasted three weeks had more charm than the 2000 Broadway revival of the show. The first Broadway revival of Little Me that lasted a month in 1982 had its moments, but it was a far cry from the glories of the original, and made the mistake of dividing the roles originally played by Sid Caear between two actors. Donny Osmond lasted one performance in a revival of George M. Cohan's Little Johnny Jones, while the French ballerina and cabaret artist Zizi Jeanmaire had little success with Can-Can.
Cameron Mackintosh produced a short-lived Oliver!, with Patti LuPone opposite original stage and film Fagin, Ron Moody. It was too soon for a return of The Wiz, and the flop '84 revival was also saddled with inferior design. Returning to the role she created, leading lady Stephanie Mills got a new, second-act song, "Wonder, Wonder Why," that wasn't a particularly happy addition to the score. In the case of both Oliver! and The Wiz, negative reviews notably in The Times had a great deal to do with the brief runs.
A Goodspeed revival of Take Me Along was mistakenly brought to the Martin Beck, where it played one performance. A bizarre attempt at a revisal of Rudolf Friml's 1928 operetta The Three Musketeers, written by Mark Bramble and with Joe Layton coming in to fix Tom O'Horgan's staging, lasted nine performances. But John Dexter's roundly panned 1989 production of Threepenny Opera wasn't as bad as it was made out to be. If Sting wasn't quite at home as Macheath, the ladies Georgia Brown, Maureen McGovern, Kim Criswell were fine, and the staging, employing Michael Feingold's apt translation, was authentic in style and sound.
Let's end this installment by mentioning the series of musical revivals presented in the '80s by New York City Opera, beginning with Brigadoon and going on to include South Pacific, The Music Man, The Pajama Game, and The Sound of Music. This series of runs was distinct from regular City Opera repertory presentations of such titles as Candide, Sweeney Todd, Kismet, The Desert Song, The Student Prince, Song of Norway, and The New Moon.
If the City Opera revivals weren't especially impressive Brigadoon and Sound of Music weren't bad, they adhered to the original texts, tunestacks, and orchestrations, and therefore rank as the last time New York heard shows like The Music Man and The Sound of Music exactly as they had first been heard. The City Opera shows may have felt like museum pieces, but, in light of revivals to follow, it was good to see them one more time precisely as written.