Obscure Videos: Two By Strouse
But with its trendy scenes at a Greenwich Village gay bar and Joe Allen's restaurant, its brief spoofs of other musicals, and its glimpses of bare-bottomed males, Applause was the right show at the right time. Opening March 30, 1970 at the Palace Theatre, it had a healthy run of 896 performances, with Bacall followed by a strong Anne Baxter title role in the film All About Eve and an underpowered Arlene Dahl. Other musical Margos of the '70s included Eleanor Parker, Patrice Munsel, Alexis Smith, and Eva Gabor.
Tony Awards were won by the show and Bacall, and two went to director-choreographer Ron Field. Even with Baxter's takeover success, the show belonged to Bacall, so she just had to headline the London company, which opened in the fall of '72 for a year's run. During the London run, Applause visited Pinewood Studios, where it was videotaped for telecast in the U.S. and abroad. Not an off-the-stage record of the show, the TV Applause was taped on studio sets and without an audience. With a teleplay by Comden and Green and direction and choreography still by Field, the result was telecast in this country on March 15, 1973.
For the TV taping, Bacall was joined by original Broadway cast members Penny Fuller, who was chillingly good as evil Eve Harrington, and Robert Mandan as the producer. From the London cast came Rod McLennan and Sarah Marshall as the playwright and his wife. Playing opposite Bacall as director Bill Sampson was Larry Hagman.
The songs in the TV version are lip-synched to pre-recorded tracks, as in musical motion pictures. To save time the telecast ran two hours with commercials, the TV production dropped such numbers as "Think How It's Gonna Be," "Inner Thoughts," "Good Friends," and "She's No Longer a Gypsy."
Bacall starred in only two Broadway musicals, and she won Tonys for both of them. In the TV Applause, she gives a big, theatrical performance, broad and barely scaled down from the performance she delivered to the balcony at the Palace. But if she's unsubtle, she's also mesmerizing, and supplies loads of glamour, authority, and star power.
The TV Applause preserves much of Field's stage choreography, particularly in "But Alive" and the title number. The latter is led by Debbie Bowen, who played June in Angela Lansbury's London Gypsy, also in '73. But this Applause is, above all, a great record of a major Broadway musical star turn.
Applause has been tried twice in recent years, first in a quickly aborted national tour starring Stefanie Powers, and just this year in an L.A. Reprise! concert mounting with Sheryl Lee Ralph. But the show is probably best enjoyed in this authentic television taping. It was produced by Alexander H. Cohen, and now that his son, Christopher Cohen, is releasing on home video Cohen productions like clips from the Tony Awards and Beyond the Fringe, I wouldn't be surprised to see the TV Applause become commercially available as well.
Completists may also wish to seek out the television taping of an Italian-language stage production of Applause, with a fine performance as Margo by Rosella Falk of the camp classic film The Legend of Lylah Clare.
With a snappy Strouse-Adams score, engaging performers like Jack Cassidy and Linda Lavin, and Hal Prince providing a sharp staging, It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman 1966 is one of those flop musicals that fans tend to remember fondly.
For all of its strengths, however, it wasn't a great deal worthier than its 129-performance run at the Alvin now the Neil Simon Theatre indicates. It's Superman just happened to arrive during a craze for pop art and campy, comic-book heroes. As a result, a show that had seemed novel when conceived wound up overwhelmed by the success of TV's Batman. The musical's librettists, David Newman and Robert Benton, put their experience with the show to good use when they supplied the screenplay for the hugely successful 1978 Superman film.
In addition to the comic strip, Superman had already been the hero of films and a TV series. It's Superman played it more or less straight, but, if it avoided overt camp, it didn't come up with much in the way of wit or suspense. And unlike such musicals as Li'l Abner and Annie, It's Superman didn't manage to inject much emotion into its comic-strip source.
Of great help, however, were the cast and Robert Randolph's sets, the latter at one point featuring a split-level, six-paneled comic strip come to life. And there were some choice numbers, notably "The Woman for the Man" for Cassidy's theatrical columnist; "You've Got Possibilities" for his sardonic secretary, Sydney, played by Lavin; and the title number, for the show's Lois Lane, Patricia Marand.
New York Times critic Stanley Kauffman gave It's Superman a strong review, and there were other positive assessments. But amusing as It's Superman often was, it was probably too silly to sustain a full evening, and audiences favored that season's Man of La Mancha, Mame, and Sweet Charity. Director Prince followed It's Superman with something less frivolous: Cabaret.
It's Superman has been tried again. The Goodspeed Opera House mounted it in 1992, with a cast including Gary Jackson, Kay McClelland, Jamie Ross, Veanne Cox, and Gabriel Barre. The show was scheduled for Encores!' 2002 season, but after the events of September 11, 2001, it had to be cancelled. The musical's first act concludes with its villain, mad scientist and ten-time Nobel Prize loser Dr. Sedgwick, blowing up Metropolis's City Hall.
In 1975, there was a ninety-minute television adaptation, not deemed fit for prime time and instead aired on ABC's "Wide World Special" at 11:30 p.m. Previously released on a VHS tape in the U.K. and elsewhere, the TV Superman musical is now available in VHS and DVD formats from several easy-to-locate websites. It's unclear whether or not the program is in public domain, or if these are bootleg editions. The DVD I watched was simply a DVD-R, the sort of thing anyone could concoct by transferring a copy of the tape to a blank DVD disc. The transfer was passable; there were a great many flaws, but most of them seem to be inherent in the source tape.
The cast of the TV version of It's Superman is a mixed bag. Best are David Wayne Finian's Rainbow, The Happy Time as Sedgwick and a sweetly ditsy Lesley Warren momentarily dropping the "Ann" as Lois Lane. Kenneth Mars Franz Liebkind in the original film of The Producers plays the columnist, and Loretta Swit is his assistant, Sydney; they're adequate, but they're not Cassidy and Lavin. David Wilson plays the Man of Steel and, of course, Clark Kent, a meek reporter for the Daily Planet.
Romeo Muller's teleplay eliminates Sedgwick's Asian, acrobatic accomplices a sextet called the Flying Lings, substituting a batch of Mafiosi. They get a new number, "It's a Great Country." Dropped in the TV version are the songs "Doing Good," "It's Super Nice," "So Long, Big Guy," and "We Don't Matter at All." The latter was a duet for Lois and the character of lab assistant Jim Morgan; the TV version eliminated Morgan.
As in TV's Batman, the Superman video includes lots of comic-book graphics and an imposing voice-over narrator. Directed by Jack Regas, It's Superman features stylized cut-out sets with hand-drawn backgrounds, and the songs have been unhappily reorchestrated and rearranged.
Unlike the TV Applause, the TV Superman isn't terribly amusing; in fact, it's a bit of a bore. Still, it ranks as a collectible, so you may wish to seek it out.