Telegram from producers Hal Prince and Bobby Griffiths to Leonard Bernstein, on the opening night of West Side Story, 1957.
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June 17, 2010
June 17, 2010
I wanna be a producer…
Producers. We all know about them, but how often do we stop to consider what they actually do? While not a part of the creative arts, (and therefore not who I intended to pay tribute to in this blog) producers are a vital part of Broadway. Producers help to finance productions, and without money, there’s no musical. They also often oversee marketing and advertising for shows, which, in its own way, requires as much creativity and ingenuity as being a theater composer or director.
Case in point: David Merrick, the “abominable showman,” elevated the advertisement of Broadway shows to an art form-a sneaky, ruthless, my-god-will-he-stop-at-nothing art form. One of my favorite anecdotes about Merrick involves his very public ire about the lack of Tony Award nominations for his production of State Fair. Merrick, incensed that the Tony Awards would dare ignore his production, stated he would not be attending the awards ceremony. At the same time, Julie Andrews refused her best actress nomination for Victor/Victoria and also publicly announced she would not be attending the ceremony. This is where Merrick’s keen eye for publicity took hold. On the day of the Tony Awards, Merrick took out an ad in the New York Times that said simply,
Julie,
Dinner at 10?
David
Merrick’s show may not have gotten Tony nominations, but it got publicity. This was Merrick’s genius- he was a master at garnering publicity through unconventional means. Merrick was also not afraid to stoop to more unscrupulous methods of gaining attention. In one infamous stunt, Merrick found people with the same names as each of the major New York theater critics. He then took them to see his floundering show Subways are For Sleeping and put blurbs from each of the faux critics on posters. What makes this even more extraordinary is that Merrick had planned this stunt for years. He could never find anyone with the name of the Times critic Brooks Atkinson, so he patiently waited for Atkinson to retire before pulling the prank.
Today, with show costs as high as they are, there are few svengali producers like Merrick left. Instead, costs and publicity are managed by huge corporations like Disney. While Disney is probably as equally nefarious as Merrick, they just don’t have his personal evil-genius charisma. Merrick was part of a bygone era of Broadway stars, and Merrick, in his own inimitable way, was a star himself.
June 17, 2010
This is a rare find. A scene from a 1956 tv production of Bloomer Girl, which featured music by Harold Arlen (I’m a big Harold Arlen fan, in case you haven’t noticed) and lyrics by Yip Harburg. This is the “Civil War Ballet”, which features choreography by Agnes de Mille.The way she managed to portray character and emotion through dance is really extraordinary.
June 15, 2010
June 13, 2010
Finian’s Rainbow, nominated for Best Revival of a Musical. Kate Baldwin is also nominated for Best Actress in a Musical
June 13, 2010
Montage of songs from A Little Night Music, nominated for Best Revival of a Musical. Catherine Zeta Jones is also nominated for her role as Desiree Armfeldt.
June 13, 2010
Can American Idiot upset Fela! and Memphis to win Best Musical?
June 13, 2010
Montego Glover sings “Colored Woman” from Memphis, the only show nominated for Best Musical this year with an original score and lyrics.
June 13, 2010
The Tony Awards are tomorrow! The next few posts will be about shows nominated for Tony Awards. Here’s a montage of footage from Fela!
June 10, 2010
"A fiddler on the roof. Sounds crazy, no? But in our little village of Anatevka, you might say every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to scratch out a pleasant simple tune without breaking his neck. It isn’t easy. You may ask, why do we stay up here if it’s so dangerous? We stay because Anatevka is our home. And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in a word- tradition!"
— From the book of Fiddler on the Roof, by Joseph Stein.
June 10, 2010
"
Col. Pickering: Have you no morals, man?
Alfred P. Doolittle: No! I can’t afford ‘em, governor. Neither could you, if you was as poor as me.
"— From the book of My Fair Lady. This particular quote is from the source material for the musical, George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion.
June 10, 2010
"Anybody that stays home is dead! If I die, it won’t be from sittin’! It’ll be from fightin’ to get up and get out!"
— Mama Rose in Gypsy, written by playwright Arthur Laurents
June 10, 2010
On Librettists
Today I want to show a little love to the people who write the books of musicals. Quite simply, they don’t get enough credit. When we go to a Broadway show, what we remember most are the songs- they are musicals, of course. But part of what makes those musicals so memorable is the book. The book acts as the unifying force of the show. Without it, the musical would just be a collection of vaguely-related songs. The book is what compels us to listen to the songs, to care about the characters, to get involved with the story of the show. Without the book, a Broadway show is just a lounge act with better costumes.
Stephen Sondheim, the greatest living composer/lyricist, arguably the greatest composer/lyricist of all time, wrote this about his collaborators in an acceptance speech for his Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in Theater:
This award has to be shared with Julius Epstein, Arthur Laurents, Burt Shevelove, Larry Gelbart, George Furth, Jim Goldman, John Weidman, Hugh Wheeler and James Lapine. These are the men who created the characters that sang the songs, the situations that gave rise to the songs and the criticism that improved the songs. They were my collaborators. They are called playwrights. They invent. They make whole cloth out of nothing. They make a hat where there never was a hat.
As usual, Mr. Sondheim says it better than I ever could.
Unfortunately, book writers also are generally the first to be blamed for the failure of a show. One of the most common complaints of theater critics is, in essence, “Great music and lyrics, terrible book.” I have never understood this criticism. In most modern musicals, the book and the songs are inextricably linked. The book is the driving force for the content of the music and lyrics. You can’t have one without the other.
So let’s hear it for librettists, the unsung heroes of the American musical!
June 10, 2010
An Excerpt from Company, by George Furth
“Right after I became an airline stewardess, a friend of mine who had a garden apartment gave me a cocoon for my bedroom. He collects things like that, insects and caterpillars and all that…It was attached to a twig and he said one morning I’d wake up to a beautiful butterfly in my bedroom- when it hatched. He told me that when they come out they’re soaking wet and there is a drop of blood there, too- isn’t that fascinating- but within an hour they dry off and then begin to fly. Well, I told him I had a cat. I had a cat then, but he said just put the cocoon somewhere the cat couldn’t get at it… which is impossible, but what can you do? So I put it up high on a ledge where the cat never went, and the next morning it was still there, at least so it seemed safe to leave it. Well, anyway, almost a week later very, very early this one morning the guy calls me, and he said, “April do you have a butterfly this morning?” I told him to hold on and managed to get up and look and there on the ledge I saw this wet spot and a little speck of blood but no butterfly, and I thought “Oh dear God in heaven the cat got it.” I picked up the phone to tell this guy and just suddenly I spotted it under the dressing table, it was moving one wing. The cat had got at it, but it was still alive. So I told the guy and he got so upset and he said “Oh no- oh, God no, no- don’t you see that’s a life- a living thing?” Well, I got dressed and took it to the park and put it on a rose, it was summer then, and it looked like it was going to be all right- I think, anyway. But that man- I really felt damaged by him- awful- that was just cruel. I got home and I called him back and said, “Listen, I’m a living thing too, you shithead!” I never saw him again.”
