Broadway Babylon (5 page)

Q
: What was the oddest musical ever?

A
: Oddity is in the mind of the beholder, but
Lieutenant
is surely a contender. The 1975 rock opera focused on the massacre by American forces at My Lai during the Vietnam War. Its songs included “Kill” and “Massacre.” It lasted nine performances.

Q
: Who “invented” musical comedy?

A
: The consensus is Jacques Offenbach. Before he left his native Cologne for Paris in 1833, musical theater was usually opera or its imitators, or carnival playlets performed with new lyrics on traditional melodies. Thus, a German invented musical comedy in France, and Broadway perfected it, specifically via Jewish, gay, and/or European-emigre composers.

Q
: Is a musical’s title crucial to its success?

A
: Basically, a rose is a rose. A 1925 musical originally titled
My Fair Lady
became
Tell Me More
(who remembers that?), while
Lady Liza
and
The Talk of London
was finally called
My Fair Lady
(1956). Would the originally intended
East Side Story
have been any less successful than
West Side Story
? Or the mega-flop
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
have been any more successful under its first moniker of
Holly Golightly
?

Q
: Who was Broadway’s most prolific and successful librettist?

A
: Harry B. Smith was the most prolific. He had three hundred shows and six thousand songs. But how successful was he? Today his one somewhat-remembered song is “The Sheik of Araby,” typically heard as an instrumental, minus Smith’s lyrics. In most businesses, quantity and quality aren’t synonymous. In his heyday, Smith wasn’t as celebrated as several of his less-prodigious contemporaries.

Q
: What theatrical agent had the longest career?

A
: Nat Day (1886-1982) began his stage career in variety in 1898, then went into the agency business in 1904 and stayed in it for seventy-seven years. Coincidentally, he at one time shared an office floor on London’s Oxford Street with the later-discovered serial killer Dr. Crippen, and actually booked Crippen’s wife for various engagements.

Q
: Why is wearing green in a play considered bad luck?

A
: Before the twentieth century, a green spotlight, or “limelight,” was used to
pick out the star. If said star wore green, the result was semi-invisibility—the true actor’s nightmare.

Q
: Why do actors consider
Macbeth
such an unlucky play?

A
: Many productions of “the Scottish play,” as it’s referred to by those who won’t say its name, have been plagued by injuries, disasters, even deaths. Sir John Gielgud’s 1942 production saw the deaths of four actors. (Its designer later killed himself.)
Macbeth
is associated with black magic, and to quote from it in an actor’s dressing room is deemed very unlucky. The antidote is to go outside, turn around three times, spit, knock thrice on the door, and beg readmittance. (This is also the antidote, minus spitting, for whistling in a dressing room.)

Q
: Did an actor ever kill a critic?

A
: Probably not. But in 1936 Orson Welles staged
Macbeth
for the Negro Division of the Federal Theatre. The setting was switched to the Caribbean, and the witches’ magic to voodoo. After a scathing review by Percy Hammond of the
New York Herald Tribune
, some of the cast held an all-night voodoo ceremony to get back at Hammond. Three days later he died.

Q
: Was a critic ever actually killed?

A
: Yes, but it was in France in 1945 and Robert Brasillach had collaborated with the Germans. While a critic and editor, he’d called for the executions of Resistance actors and vented his anti-Semitic hatred. He was finally executed at the fort of Montrogue, France, aged 35.

Q
: Who is or was the most mean-spirited Broadway critic?

A
: It’s not John Simon—surprise. By consensus, it seems to have been one William Winter, the
New York Tribune
’s drama critic from 1865 to 1909. One reason for his ongoing grouch may have been his weekly salary of $50, the least of any head of a New York paper’s drama department. Besides his dubious taste, Winter had many hates, including foreigners. Such great European actresses as Duse, Bernhardt, and Réjane he labeled and libeled as “foreign strumpets,” and the pioneering Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen he deemed “a reformer who calls you to crawl with him into a sewer, merely to see and breathe its feculence.”

Speaking of bigotry, the often-sour Heywood Broun detested
Abie’s Irish Rose
, a comedy about a Jewish-Catholic marriage. In 1922 he wrote that it was “So cheap and offensive that it might serve to unite all the races of the world in a common hymn of hate.” Broun was certain, or hoped, it would be a flop. The record-breaker ran for 2,327 performances and was revived in 1954.

Q
: Apart from losing money, did a flop play ever set a record?

A
: The longest-running flop in theater history was
The Ladder
(1926), a drama of reincarnation. It ran for seventeen months in New York—at a loss of a then-monumental $750,000—because it was backed by Texas oil tycoon Edgar B. Davis. By late 1927 tickets were free, yet
The Ladder
played to mostly empty houses. Undaunted, Davis later opened it again in Boston. Wags called it the play that wouldn’t die.

Q
: Is there any way of telling that a play will be bad?

A
: George Jean Nathan, critic for the
American Mercury, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Theatre Arts
, etcetera, believed there were various giveaways, such as: “When, as the curtain goes up, you hear newsboys shouting, ‘Extra, extra!’ ” Or “The moment anyone puts anything into a drawer with a furtive look.” And “Any mystery play in which, at the very start, someone remarks that the nearest house is two miles away.” Plus “In four cases out of five, when at the rise of the curtain the wife is writing a letter and the husband, in an easy chair, is reading a newspaper.”

Nathan eschewed one-star shows, particularly the one-woman variety: “A woman talking steadily for two hours is hardly my idea of entertainment whether in the theater or in private.” In the wake of
Oklahoma!
’s success, he noted, “It seems that the moment anyone gets hold of an exclamation point these days, he probably sits down and writes a musical show around it.” About improvisation he felt, “An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut.”

Known to friends as difficult, to others as impossible, Nathan held that “No chronically happy man is a trustworthy critic.”

Q
: Why are classics that get made into musicals often given new titles?

A
: Sometimes it’s obvious, as with Henry Fielding’s
Rape Upon Rape
, which became
Lock Up Your Daughters
(1959). Or T.S. Eliot’s
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
—just
Cats
was more practical. In some cases, an original word was judged noncommercial, like “prejudice” in Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
, which became
First Impressions
in 1959. Or “cry” in Alan Paton’s
Cry the Beloved Country
, which became the lyrical
Lost in the Stars
(1949).

It’s frequently assumed most people have forgotten or never knew the original sources, which some Broadway producers view as free material with time-tested value. On the other hand, whose bright idea was it to rename the still-popular and beloved
Little Women A Girl Called Jo
?

Q
: How could a musical of
Gone with the Wind
fail to be a financial success?

A
: The musical version, which made its American bow in Los Angeles, closed en route to Broadway, a fiasco in its native land. In 1966 a nonmusical play of
Margaret Mitchell’s novel had its world premiere in Tokyo, in a nine-hour production. It was a huge hit. The Japanese who owned the stage rights to the book then decided a musical
GWTW
might be as or even more popular. They commissioned Harold Rome to compose it and Joe Layton to stage it. It opened in Japan in 1970 as
Scarlett
.

It was next unleashed on the West: In 1972
Gone with the Wind
opened in London, not New York, because of lower costs and less-caustic critics. Though the musical version had returned to the better-recognized title, it was still minus the film’s extremely famous theme music. The critics were divided, but Londoners made up their own minds, and
GWTW
ran a year, thanks partly to out-of-towners and tourists. Predictably, the clutch of American critics who went to London to review it slammed it. Even so, an American debut in Atlanta was planned.

Instead it opened in 1973 in LA, then San Francisco, with Lesley Ann Warren as Scarlett and former
Bonanza
star Pernell Roberts as Rhett Butler. A ten-city tour was planned, with a Broadway opening in 1974. However, the British producer was reportedly horrified by the dreadful west coast reviews, and
GWTW
didn’t leave California (although in 1976 it opened in Dallas and toured three cities before sinking).

The US and UK musical ran two and a half hours, versus the 222-minute movie and the four-hour Japanese
Scarlett
. Many people agreed that June Ritchie in London gave a magnificent performance as Scarlett, Broadway historian Ken Mandelbaum even claiming that it rivaled Vivien Leigh’s—repeated eight times weekly. The fact remains that huge numbers of people in Tokyo, London, and elsewhere enjoyed the musical (also, in Japan, the nonmusical), but New Yorkers, excepting a handful of professional hard-boiled eggs, didn’t get a chance to see or enjoy for themselves.

Q
: What was the longest consecutive performance in one role?

A
: One tends to think of Yul Brynner, post-Hollywood, returning to the stage in
The King and I
over and over again. But this record is held by James O’Neill (1848–1920), father of playwright Eugene. He enacted the Count of Monte Cristo over six thousand times between 1883 and ’91, then returned to the role in later life.

Q
: Why was Eugene O’Neill sometimes called the only major playwright on Broadway?

A
: Because he was born in Times Square on October 16, 1888, at 43rd Street and Broadway, at the Barrett House (later the Cadillac Hotel). Much of his childhood was spent in hotels while his father toured.

Q
: Do nonprofessional playwrights ever have big successes with a play or plays?

A
: Everyone from Picasso to Pope John Paul II has tried their hand at writing a play—and getting it produced. Though there are occasional fluke successes—e.g., comic actor Steve Martin—generally the successful playwright is a full-time professional. In his
Desire Caught by the Tail
, Picasso made all of his characters die at the end from inhaling the fumes of fried potatoes. Friends who attended the Spaniards play agreed that Pablo should stick to his day job.

Q
: Who was the first female manager of an important American theatre and what’s her relationship to a current movie star?

A
: Louisa Lane Drew (1820-1897) began as a child actress and married her third husband—fellow thespian John Drew—in 1850. She mothered two actors—another John Drew and Georgiana Drew. “Georgie” married pugilist-turned-actor/playwright Maurice Barrymore, and gave birth to three stars: Lionel, Ethel, and John Barrymore—the latter grandfather to Drew Barrymore, who began as a child actor. For thirty years beginning in 1861, Louisa ran her own theatre, the Arch Street, in Philadelphia, and appeared opposite leading actors like Edwin Booth and Irish comedian Tyrone Power. She was a much-admired actress-manager, capable in all aspects of her business, such as carpentry, in which she sometimes instructed apprentices.

Q
: Who founded the first American acting “dynasty”?

A
: It wasn’t long-lived, and it wasn’t the first, but the Booth family had a significant impact. Junius Brutus Booth (1796–1852) was English, like most of 19th-century America’s celebrated actors. He was father to Junius Brutus Jr. (1821–1883), Edwin (1833–1893), and John Wilkes (1839–1865). Fortunately for Junius Sr., he didn’t live to see his youngest son become a presidential assassin. Booth
père
was an alcoholic and sometime rowdy. His aquiline profile was renowned, but in his 40s his nose was broken during a fight. Post-Profile, a fan told Booth she couldn’t “get over” his nose. He snapped back, “No wonder, madame, for the bridge is gone.”

John Wilkes Booth was killed soon after murdering Abraham Lincoln. His act drove his much-more successful brother from the stage for four years. Edwin Booth was one of the first American actors to earn an international reputation and become a star in England, where Stateside actors were considered second-rate. In 1869 Booth opened the $1 million Booth Theatre in New York City, which showcased him in Shakespearean roles. Its failure bankrupted the actor in 1873 and he had to tour extensively in the United States and United Kingdom, specializing in Shakespeare.

Edwin’s Gramercy Park home became headquarters for The Players, the club he founded that was a combination social haven (gossip was officially
discouraged) and museum of theatrical heirlooms. It later produced theatricals featuring professional actors, and helped separate Edwin’s reputation and Shakespearean legacy from his brother’s murderous rage. (Booth was biographed in the 1954 film
Prince of Players
, starring Richard Burton.) One of Edwin’s closest friends was the scion of an equally long-lived major acting dynasty: comedian Joseph Jefferson III, famous for his portrayal of Rip Van Winkle.