Forward to The Past

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

What year is it on Broadway? Is it 1963, when this season's first musical, She Loves Me, made its original debut? Or 1960, when this season's Camelot first put castles in the air? Or perhaps 1956, when this season's My Fair Lady gave elocution a song and dance? Maybe it's 1955, when this season's Damn Yankees first proved that whatever Lola wants, Lola gets. Perhaps it's as modern as 1968, when this season's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat first displayed the talents of Andrew Lloyd Webber. Or perhaps it's as far back as 1945, when this season's most eagerly awaited musical, Carousel, first revealed heaven on earth. By season's end the year may seem as contemporary as 1972, when the tentatively scheduled Grease first revved its engines, or as antiquarian as 1927, when the impending Show Boat first tooted its horn.

The one year it certainly isn't is 1993. In this season of multitudinous musical revivals, even the upcoming "new" musicals derive from the dear dead past. A Grand Night for Singing is a cabaret collage of the 1943-to-1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein songbook. The Red Shoes is so closely based on the 1948 ballet film that it uses footage from it as the basis of TV ads. Cyrano the Musical, an import from Amsterdam, retells a much told romance, written in the 19th century and set in the 17th. Disney's Beauty and the Beast will transpose to the stage the hit songs and scenic devices of the 1991 animated film, itself based on a venerable fairy tale. If art is supposed to be relevant, Broadway is missing the message. And if art is an escapist time machine, Broadway's has one setting -- backward.

There's nothing regrettable about a revival per se. Indeed, it's usually regarded as a positive sign when the commercial theater finds room for Hamlet or The Master Builder -- although even Rodgers and Hammerstein did not confuse themselves with Shakespeare and Ibsen. The pleasure can be the same whether the effort is a shrine built to the original, as in 1990's unimaginative but impeccable reproduction of Fiddler on the Roof, or a piece of fey revisionism such as 1992's cartoon reconception of Guys and Dolls, which turned into the hottest ticket in town and helped spark this season's spate. Sometimes a revival is so extensive it's treated as new, like 1992's Crazy for You, a loose remake of the Gershwins' Girl Crazy, which won the Tony Award for best new musical, or 1993's Tommy, which shared the Tony Award for best score -- for music dating to 1969.

However enjoyable the revivals are, it's a little depressing that there hasn't been a really successful new musical by an American set in the present- day U.S. since the not exactly ground-breaking The Tap Dance Kid in 1983. William Finn's dazzling (and relevant) Falsettos came close, but it reached Broadway a dozen years after its dawn-of-AIDS era. Says Harvey Sabinson, executive director of Broadway's administrative umbrella, the League of American Theaters and Producers: "Producers need to be attentive to economics and minimize their risks. That's why we are seeing so many revivals and returns to proven stories." Michael David, who co-produced several new musicals before mounting Guys and Dolls and Tommy, is even blunter: "Broadway and the developing of art have nothing to do with each other. There's no artistic mandate. Broadway is just Vegas for plays. And as it becomes more speculative, it's easier to raise money and easier to feel good about doing so when you know a lot more about the material."

In fairness, the season's surprise delight, She Loves Me, was far from a guaranteed hit. During its initial run, in a season dominated by Hello, Dolly! and Funny Girl, it failed to recoup its investment. "And then it sat on the shelf for 30 years," says Todd Haimes, artistic director of the nonprofit Roundabout Theater, which mounted the show for a summer run of a couple of months, during which it turned into a runaway hit and a commercial transfer. A key factor: ecstatic reviews from this generation of critics, who are unaccustomed to the musical bounty that greeted their predecessors three decades ago. They adored the once standard and now quaint format of a - straightforward love story, the shamelessly hummable melodies, the elegant wit of the dialogue and lyrics.

The formerly nonmusical Roundabout is also the aegis for A Grand Night for Singing, which opens this week. In its original incarnation as a black-tie cabaret act at New York City's Rainbow & Stars, it was pleasant, often witty and inventive, but slight. Adding a modicum of costumes and choreography can go only so far in making it fill a bigger stage. "Maybe the number of revivals this season is just a coincidence," says Haimes, "but I hope it's a harking back to the virtues of musicals in their heyday." Worryingly for that hope, She Loves Me is showing some softness at the box office.

Without doubt, there is a passionate audience for old-fashioned musicals, or at least for their old-fashioned music. Broadway Angel, a division of Angel Records, is re-releasing 34 original cast recordings; its newest offerings are four London cast albums. Says Sabinson: "I can't buy them fast enough." Other record companies are competing, frequently offering obscure shows or minor variants to sometimes obsessive collectors.

Recordings, however, are relatively cheap to produce. Stage shows are expensive. "A major reason that revivals have a bad name," says Guys and Dolls producer David, "is that they tend to be star-driven and lacking in production values -- cardboard shows with Robert Goulet." Broadway has already had one such show this season: a cheesily staged and preposterously acted Camelot, starring Goulet in a performance as animated as a computer telephone voice, that came and mercifully went.

It may be about to get another, if less egregious. My Fair Lady, starring TV miniseries idol Richard Chamberlain, opens in early December after just over seven lucrative months on the road, topping $1 million at the box office in one week and coming close to it in another. That has been rewarding for Chamberlain: his deal is 10% of the gross. About the show itself, he is less enthusiastic. He is delighted with the role and the approach of English director Howard Davies. "On the physical side," Chamberlain says, however, "the producers, Fran and Barry Weissler, have treated it like summer stock. They have tried to ride very heavily on my name."

The Weisslers, who specialize in musical revivals, readily concede that Lady has been sparely mounted. Part of that, they say, is the director's vision, and part of it is common sense. Despite extensive alterations in sets and & costumes, it will arrive on Broadway having cost just $3 million, vs. $5 million for Guys and Dolls (not to mention almost $10 million for the costliest new musical ever, Miss Saigon). Even so, it is not yet in profit, and Broadway is a more expensive environment, with higher union costs and fewer seats in the theater. According to Barry Weissler, while the Guys and Dolls team put together a business plan based on a five-year run, "historically, no revival runs more than about two years. We look to establish ourselves for one year."

No one could call Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat underproduced. Like Lloyd Webber's Starlight Express, what started life as a sweet little piece for children has been inflated to epic vulgarity. The revival that opened on Broadway last week stars a sphinx somewhat shinier and more purple than the original, plus smaller versions of the pyramids and New York City's Chrysler Building. There's one lively visual joke: after a famine, the sheep Joseph's family tended reappear as skeletons. On the human scale, the show stars Michael Damian's pectoral muscles, which are on all but nonstop display. That is just as well because the rest of his talents range from innocuous to boring. He is a major star if, and only if, you watch the soap opera The Young and the Restless. Robert Torti plays a pharaoh as Elvis. Once you've heard the idea, the performance is superfluous.

Glittering on the horizon are Carousel, in a staging that is already a hit in London, and Damn Yankees, now a smash at San Diego's Old Globe Theater. Both concern the collision of the supernatural and the everyday, the former with tragic dimensions and the latter with bawdily comic ones. Carousel has been reimagined in its physical production; Yankees, full of passe baseball references and bygone mores between men and women, has undergone a revamping of its book. Both have the potential to make the best possible case for revivals: they are far better than anything new that is likely to be on offer.