When the swirling color lights of the Chicago Theatre marquee come to life Wednesday for another opening of another show, the show will be another musical revival.
Across the Loop at the Shubert, the “Best of Broadway” season will roll on with another blast from the past. Then another.
And–maybe you’ve heard–“Show Boat” is a-comin’! to the Auditorium Theatre.
Ringing the suburbs, from Summit to Oakbrook Terrace to Rosemont to Lincolnshire, are more old shows. And their rings do sound very familiar.
The phenomenon of the revived/revised musical may not be new. The suburban dinner theater scene would starve without it.
What is new is the changing perception of revivals. Or, as Broadway producer Michael David describes them, “excuse-the-expression” revivals.
“We think `revival’ carries a bad connotation in the theatrical world,” says David, whose Dodger Productions company brought “Guys and Dolls” to the Shubert Theatre last season. “And I think that’s something we (some theater producers) created ourselves.”
The old way to restage an old show, he explained, went like this: “Producers would say, `Don’t worry about the production. Just put Robert Goulet in it, stick him up there in the middle of whatever you can rent and in whatever costumes you can find, and they’ll come.’ “
Then, like Professor Harold Hill, the buses and trucks would move along to another town.
“It’s a compelling formula,” David concedes. And it’s still a temptation for some producers of revivals.
At Dodger, the “r” word is seldom uttered. As is the practice in the worlds of opera, music and dance, David and company produce what he calls “classics.” They spend many millions in the process, first in New York and later on the road.
“The Broadway venue for us is the one that goes from the Atlantic to the Pacific,” he says. Dodger productions of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and “Damn Yankees” will hit the Shubert this summer.
Dodger will happily drop names such as Ralph Macchio, starring in “How to Succeed in Business,” to grab the attention of Chicago theatergoers. But, David says, “We want to give the material a first-class, new production.”
The “new production” formula for musical revivals is embraced by various producers in various ways.
To Toronto-based Livent, which is bringing “Show Boat” to the Auditorium in March, the idea is to “reconstitute” an old show, says spokesman Norman Zagier.
“There was no definitive script,” he says. “This production is an amalgamation of various materials–from the original production, the restagings, the motion pictures–the director, Harold Prince, spent two years distilling it all.”
Besides Prince’s own sensibilities, the “Show Boat” producers’ $9 million investment also comes into play. And not just with a promotional campaign that began 15 months before the opening: “Modern technology that wasn’t available to the original creative team allows for significant restaging and rethinking,” Zagier says.
New blood
“Carousel,” arriving at the Rosemont Theatre next month, takes a slightly different approach in its reincarnation.
“It’s still Rodgers and Hammerstein,” says Aldo Scrofani, executive vice president of Columbia Artists Management Inc. CAMI is handling the tour for the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain’s revival.
“It just feels new,” he adds. The turntable stage has something to do with that, yet a lot of the newness has to do with the young actors who play Billy Bigelow, Julie Jordan and the rest.
New blood also is a major part of the mix in the “West Side Story” that hits the Chicago Theatre this week. That comes through clearly in the newspaper ad, which looks like the passion-splashed cover of a romance novel. Lots of skin.
Is this a sexy, ’90s kind of spin for Tony and Maria?
“Don’t be misled by the ads,” sighs director Alan Johnson. “My responsibility is to re-create Jerome Robbins’ original direction and choreography. So this is as close a reproduction of the original as possible.”
With one change: Robbins and book writer Arthur Laurents insisted on actors near the ages of the story’s star-crossed teen lovers. “Past productions have always gone with older people because of their experience, who try to play younger. Here the mean age is about 23,” says Johnson, who was 28 when he played Arab in the show’s original Broadway run.
The youth movement in casting should help producers sell older shows to younger theatergoers, which is a continuing challenge. “We have a great deal of trouble getting a great number of people under 45 into the musical theater,” says Kary Walker, producer at Marriott’s Lincolnshire Theatre.
That job won’t get any easier for suburban dinner theaters–especially if Broadway parcels out just one or two new productions a year, and most especially if one of those productions is a creaker such as “Hello, Dolly!” starring Carol Channing. That show plus the Julie Andrews vehicle “Victor/Victoria” and “How to Succeed in Business” sum up the season so far.
“Broadway isn’t providing enough product for (us) regional theaters,” Walker complains. “We gotta do five shows a year.”
Adds William Pullinsi, producer-director at Candlelight Dinner Playhouse: “Most of the few musicals that have run on Broadway tend not to be available to the rest of the country.” That’s because the master showmen of the Broadway universe, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh, control tours of their own blockbusters–although Pullinsi did manage to snap up each of their recent discards: Webber’s “Song and Dance” and Mackintosh’s “5 Guys Named Moe.”
The past has its risks
This situation forces area theater producers to poke ever further back into their attics to dust off forgotten favorites such as Irving Berlin’s “Annie Get Your Gun” (spurred back to a gallop now at Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace with a lively young company), Lerner and Loewe’s “Brigadoon” this spring at Candlelight, and Cole Porter’s Depression era musical comedy “The New Yorkers” (Marriott’s Lincolnshire production this spring will be the show’s first anywhere since 1931).
Shows so old they’re new? “People under 45 aren’t necessarily overexposed to them,” Walker notes dryly.
Familiarity can breed boredom, if not contempt. So none of this rededication to quality revivals comes without risk.
Pre-opening ticket sales for a recent production of “Hello, Dolly!” at Marriott’s Lincolnshire, sans Channing, were “terrible,” Walker recalls with a wince. (Good reviews and word-of-mouth eventually helped boost the box office.) In New York, Dodger’s “Guys and Dolls” suffered a similar tough start at the gate before finally paying off like a trifecta.
Fact is, paying $50 or more for a ticket is a lot to ask for a show most people have already seen. So what if it’s a good production? The Summertime Players (or whoever) did a nice job with it, too.
“On Broadway, only 10 shows that have been revived have run longer than a year,” Dodger’s David notes. “We’ll spend $5 million on a new production. We need to create a life longer than these (revivals) traditionally have had.” That’s why tours of his “fresh” productions are so important to him; they’re treated like continuations of the New York run.
Walker’s theater succeeds in business by trying to generate new interest in familiar musical motifs. He ventures into territory somewhere beyond revival, between parody and tribute.
One of 1994’s surprises was Marriott’s “Phantom of the Country Palace,” subbing Nashville for Paris. And this season, “Ms. Cinderella” placed a woman of the ’90s in an old-fashioned fairy tale.
At Candlelight, Pullinsi surveys his audiences to determine their interests. “Not too heavily, though. We know they’ll say the shows they’ve heard of,” he says. Doing just what they say is “no way to lead audiences,” he warns. That’s why he makes a point of doing unheard-of revivals, finding redemption for good Broadway shows gone bad.
Under Pullinsi’s direction, the downbeat “Follies,” the Felliniesque “Nine” and “Rags” (the 1986 sequel to “Fiddler on the Roof” that bombed in New York) all found new lives in Chicago’s blue-collar suburbia.
Still, Pullinsi sees nothing inherently evil about the current popularity of standard revivals. “Nobody thinks anything of it in the opera,” he says. “There are classics of the repertoire, and people want to see them on a regular basis.”
Does the world need something else like opera? CAMI’s Scrofani isn’t so sure.
“After we’re gone,” he wonders, “is the contribution of those of us who have been in the business for the past 20 years going to be that we could find a revival and give it a new twist?”
