New York City: February 2005 Archives

Continuing with my series of flops I wished I'd seen...here's one of the greatest, known for its record number of previews (71 performances) and brevity of run (9 performances). Ouch! I'm talking aboutNick & Nora, of course.

Not the stylish pajamas, but the Broadway musical based on The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett (author of The Maltese Falcon, famous for his hardboiled detectives, blacklisted in the '50s)

On the face of it, this should have been an out-of-the-park hit.

It appeared at the Marquis, and Arthur Laurents was the librettist and director, score by Charles Strouse and Richard Maltby, Jr. It starred two of my favorite musical theater stars: Joanna Gleason (Into The Woods) and Barry Bostwick (The Rocky Horror Picture Show) in the title roles of Nora and Nick Charles. Of course,Mandy Patinkin couldn't save Wild Party, so maybe that's not saying much.

And before we go too much further, let me state that I am a HUGE a fan of Nick and Nora Charles. I was introduced to Nick & Nora in The Thin Man movie series of the 1930s and 1940s, starring Myrna Loy and William Powell.

I just loved the relationship between Nick & Nora in those movies. They lived a lavish lifestyle, wandering the country solving crimes, drinking like fish, and generally sarcastically bantering with each other. However, their sarcasm contained very real affection. And although it was only hinted at, they gave the impression that they had a really fantastic sex life.

So what happened with the musical?

Laurents himself describes it as "...the biggest flop of my career..." and most critics agreed...it just didn't work. The greatest failure? No chemistry between Nick & Nora, which in a show about a couple called Nick & Nora, is a really, really big problem.

However, the original cast recording is available on Amazon, and it's worth a listen. Perhaps it will get a loving rewrite and restaging in about 10 years and return triumphant...

It's been a couple of crazy weeks here at Blogway Baby, but with good reason. My husband and I have been going through the U.S. Green Card immigration process, which we originally started 17 years ago. Yep, that's 17years...

We officially "immigrated" on Friday, so now we're American permanent residents. We'll be going back and forth for a while, but now I've got the ability to work and live without restriction in the U.S. of A.

For a musical theater writer, this is very important, since, sadly, most of the action in musical theater is here in the U.S. Happily, the center of the Broadway universe is New York, so I'll still be close to home, and living in the GREATEST CITY IN THE WORLD. Except for the rats and cockroaches of course...

Yesterday in Playbill it was announced that Ben Vereen was taking over the role of the Wizard in Wicked. CurrentlyGeorge Hearn plays the role, and he took it over from Joel Grey (who replaced Robert Morse in the west coast run. I'm still trying to dig up the truth about why he was turfed. Did he keep insisting on singing "I Believe In You" to Elphaba?).

Now I have a compelling reason to seeWicked in New York again. With Kirsten and Idina leaving and all, and the choppy book, and loving the CD on its own so much, I was finding it hard to work up the enthusiasm to go to see the show again.

But Ben Vereen! Ever since I saw All That Jazz I was a complete Ben fan. Oh, and isn't that him dancing in theSweet Charity movie too? He is on my list of people I want to see perform live before I die. I've made good progress (Bette Midler, check, Liza Minelli, check, Julie Andrews, check, Patti Lupone, check, Mandy Patinkin, check, Ann Reinking, check, Bernadette Peters, check., Tim Curry, check, Carol Burnett, check, Chita Rivera, check, Joel Grey, check, Barbra Streisand...rats!) but still haven't checked off Mr. Vereen.

I almost gave up hope when Canada's own David Foster ran Ben down with his car in Malibu...

And finally a reason to watch the Grammy's, as Wicked picked up the award for best musical show album...take that Avenue Q!

More Magic to Do: Pippin Tony Winner Ben Vereen to Be Wicked's Next Wizard, May 31

By Ernio Hernandez and Andrew Gans
14 Feb 2005

Pippin Tony Award winner Ben Vereen is returning to Broadway in another Stephen Schwartz musical. He'll play the Wizard in Wicked, starting May 31, a production spokesperson confirmed.

The actor will take over the role originated on Broadway by Cabaret's Joel Grey and currently played by George Hearn, a two-time Tony Award winner for his work in Sunset Boulevard and La Cage aux Folles.

A star of stage and screen, Ben Vereen made his Broadway debut as Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar, earning a Tony Award nomination for his performance. He nabbed the Tony for his work in Bob Fosse's production of Stephen Schwartz'sPippin (singing "Magic to Do") and has also starred on Broadway in Grind, Jelly's Last Jam, and Fosse. The recent revival of I'm Not Rappaport marked Vereen's non-musical Broadway debut. Vereen was nominated for Emmy Awards for his performances in Roots, Intruders, and 1976's The Bell Telephone Jubilee. He also received Golden Globe nominations for his work in Funny Lady and Ellis Island.

With a score by Stephen Schwartz and a book by Winnie Holzman, Wicked began
previews on Broadway Oct. 8, 2003, with an official opening Oct. 30, 2003. The musical just earned the Grammy Award for Best Musical Show Album for the popular Decca Broadway original cast recording.

OK, here starts a regular feature, which is a rundown of maligned, dead musicals that I wish I'd seen.

Today, we'll talk about Carrie, which as far as I can tell, everyone on Broadway was in...

Seriously, I wish I had a nickel for every bio inPlaybill that included a credit for Carrie...

There is a great "unofficial" Carrie Web site which carries [sic] this review from 1988:

"This was one big expensive turkey musical with Betty Buckley based on the Stephen King horror story. Here are some of the blurbs from News critic Howard Kissel's review:

"Halfway through Carrie, I suddenly wished I could take back some of the nasty things I said a few weeks ago about Chess, because Carrie is so disgusting it makes Chess look adorable."

(About the female chorus he zings...) "The girls don't look like teenagers at all. Their bodies don't have the bloom of youth. They're either too angular or too fleshy. Their faces are hard and haggard, like they've just come off a bus-and-truck tour playing the hookers in Sweet Charity."

(Of the score...) "You already know the title song. Just sing "Call Me" with the word Carrie, and make the A flat as flat as possible, and you've got it.....for me the high point of the lyrics was rhyming "attitude" with "I've been screwed."

(Of the cast...) "For most of the cast, the goal seems to have been to make the characters obnoxious and everyone has succeeded mightily. The exception is the engaging Darlene Love as the gym teacher."

I couldn't possibly add anything to Howard's dead-on review. It's one of my favorites ever written. Now, the funny part is that I saw Carrie and I sort of liked it in an offbeat sort of way. Have you ever heard the expression, It was so bad it was good!

For excellent reading, I recommend the book Not since Carrie by Ken Mandelbaum, however it is hard to get because it is out of print, which is truly dumb, because this book belongs in every Broadway lover library. Go to Borders, or Barnes and Noble and they can do a database search and locate a copy in one of their stores throughout the land. Incidentally, Carrie was done in 1988 and Howard Kissel still gives the world his witty reviews in the New York Daily News."

From the "I told you so" department. How about that...Good Vibrations is having problems... well, gosh, it's not like I might have posted something along those lines already. Isn't Blogway Baby great? It shows the wisdom of Suzy Conn, over and over again ;-) All bow to the power of Blogway Baby...

"Good Vibrations, the new Beach Boys musical at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre, ends a fraught and lengthy preview period on Feb. 2, when the John Carrafa-directed production officially opens.

The new show, which arrives on Broadway without the luxury of an out-of-town tryout, offered its first performance back on Dec. 20. It was to have premiered on Jan. 27 (and indeed, the opening night party remained on that date), but the unveiling was pushed back to Feb. 2 while the creative team honed their work.

In early January, experienced New York director David Warren was brought in to assist in the staging. Warren reportedly began work at the O'Neill on Jan. 6. John Carrafa, however, remains the official director and choreographer on the project.

Good Vibrations uses more than 30 songs written by Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys -- some heard in their entirety, some in snippets. The plot is not a biographical tale of the blond-mopped California band that celebrated cars, girls and surfing in the 1960s. Instead, it follows a group of high school pals desperate to escape their one-factory, New England town and drive to California."

I don't want to say I told you so, but omigosh, I TOLD YOU SO...

"NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) -- The burgeoning genre of Broadway shows trafficking in vintage pop musical catalogs has probably already reached its nadir with this misbegotten show featuring the classic songs of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys.

The far too inaccurately titled "Good Vibrations," featuring about three dozen of those great songs, is clearly trying to tap into the baby boomer nostalgia that has made hits out of such disparate shows as "Movin' Out" and "Mamma Mia." But this effort, about which bad rumors began brewing almost immediately, is likely to last as long as a single wave.

The book by Richard Dresser, a not untalented playwright with some decent off-Broadway plays to his credit ("Below the Belt," "Rounding Third"), is not a history of the legendarily troubled band. Rather, it tells an insipid story about a group of restless teens who travel from their drab East Coast town in search of the fun, sun and beautiful blondes of Southern California. Normally, more plot information would be provided here, but the coma that set in almost immediately after the opening number prevents memory of further details.

The show attempts to shoehorn in as many musical numbers as possible into its two-hour running time, and indeed hearing such wonderful songs as "The Warmth of the Sun," "California Girls," "Surfer Girl," "Sloop John B" and "God Only Knows" does have its nostalgic pleasures. But the insipid dialogue and cartoonish characterizations, which makes even "Mamma Mia" and "We Will Rock You" look like Shakespeare, gives the production the feel of a subpar sitcom. Choreographer John Carrafa, making his directorial debut, is clearly in over his hand, failing to infuse any of the musical numbers with any remote degree of originality or creativity."