You can now listen online to Part Two of Groucho Was My Father, a three-part series in which Miriam Marx remembers her dad, Dr. Hackenbush. The third and final part airs next Saturday.
Also at the BBC Radio site, they're running a two-part series on The Chaplin Archive, a repository of work left by Charlie Chaplin. I apologize I didn't know about this earlier but as I write this, you have about four hours to go listen to (or if you know how to do it, capture) Part One. Part Two should be in its place after that. Thanks to Jeff Abraham for letting me know.
The New York Times editorial writer(s) say that what the Republicans are proposing to cut from the federal budget will not help the economy but will, in fact, hurt it. And it does make sense: You don't help bring down high unemployment by causing hundreds of thousands of people to lose their jobs.
While you're over there, Frank Rich has a good column about how Republicans really aren't serious about bringing down the deficit. They're just using that as an excuse to cut the kinds of programs they always want to cut, regardless of how good or bad the economy is. He notes, "That's not to say there is no fiscal mission in the right's agenda, both nationally and locally — only that the mission has nothing to do with deficit reduction. The real goal is to reward the G.O.P.'s wealthiest patrons by crippling what remains of organized labor, by wrecking the government agencies charged with regulating and policing corporations, and, as always, by rewarding the wealthiest with more tax breaks." I wish America was paying a tenth as much attention to this kind of thing as they are to Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen. Why are their personal dysfunctions so much more interesting than those of our elected officials?
Thank you for keeping us posted on the fate of the Spider-Man musical. I appreciate that you're reporting and letting us decide but I have a question. Do they have to open? Could they just go on doing the show in infinite previews? Has any show ever played Broadway without opening?
No, no law that says a Broadway show has to have an opening night. Conceivably they could go on, fixing this and fixing that. What an opening night does for a show is to define its award-eligibility period and to invite the critics to come and give the show that burst of publicity that comes with everyone reviewing it at once. That's all it accomplishes...and the show is already getting publicity and getting reviewed. Assuming grosses stay high (they've lately been around 90% of capacity), they could just keep "previewing" and selling tickets...and could decide to open later if they thought more reviews would help business. Presumably, the reviewers who haven't come would attend and write about it whenever they felt like it but an official Opening Night would probably bring most of them back. Or they could just never open.
As far as I know, only one show ever tried to run for a time on Broadway without declaring an opening night. That was back in 1976 and the show was Let My People Come, a really sophomoric sex musical that seemed to be founded on two obvious principles. One was that most dirty words rhyme with other dirty words. The other was that in the seventies, people would pay good money to see a show with naked people in it. They still do but it's not quite the novelty it once was.
Let My People Come opened off-off-Broadway in Greenwich Village in January of '74. It did good business there for two a half years and then they moved it to the Morosco Theater on Broadway, which was located where the Marriott Marquis is now situated. It ran there for four months without ever officially opening because, one assumes, they knew the reviewers would savage it. The critics hadn't been that kind to it when it was on Bleecker Street...but that was Bleecker Street and expectations were lower there. I believe the Morosco had a few months open before its next show was coming in so its proprietors made a deal to let Let My People Come play there for a while for a reduced rental.
I didn't see it in New York but when it closed there, most of the original cast came to Los Angeles and the show played the Whisky A Go Go up on Sunset. My then-current lady friend, who had yet to do with me any of the deeds sung about in the show, suggested we attend. I agreed because I was curious about it and because I figured, well, maybe that will get her in the "right" mood, if you know what I mean. So I got tickets and we went for one of the least wonderful evenings I've ever spent in a theater.
The place had cabaret-style seating and we were crammed onto an uncomfy bench right in the front. Just before the show started, a staff member came around and told all of us in the front that at the end of the show, in the final dance number, we were invited to climb up on the stage with the actors and join in, disrobing if we were so inclined. A quick survey of the couples at our table revealed that nothing in the world could make any of us so inclined.
The show was disturbing in large part because the performers were so talented and giving 110%. Sitting at the edge of the stage, you could just feel how hard they were trying to make silly material work and to act like they really wanted to be up there dancing naked. Perhaps some did but they sure didn't convey that. I have seen bad shows but I don't recall ever seeing one in which I felt so sorry for the actors. I had recently turned down an offer to direct a production of Grease at a local theater and I suddenly wished I'd taken it just so I could approach the players after and offer them the chance to be in a good show. My date and I were exchanging looks about leaving but the "watch the train wreck" aspect of it kicked in. We just had to stay and see the thing through.
Near the end, there was a song called "Doesn't Anybody Love Anymore?" — not a bad tune and maybe the best one in the show. It's a plaintive, pain-filled cry...one of those songs that has to be sung at full volume by someone with serious pipes who half-screams the lyrics. They had a performer who was perfect for that task — a young black woman, maybe 25 years of age, with an extraordinary voice. She was up there, about four feet from us, screaming the song into a wholly unnecessary microphone. It was raw. It was passionate. And about halfway through, we at ringside began to realize that we were not watching a woman singing. We were watching a full-scale emotional breakdown.
She was supposed to finish the song and leave the stage. Instead, she just stood there, paralyzed and quivering, with tears streaming down her face and all of us out front feeling just awful about whatever had brought that lovely young lady to that moment. Eventually, a gentleman involved with the show came out led her off so the show could finish — and when it did, the audience quickly gave it a leaving ovation and got the hell outta there. My date and I went back to her place and did not have sex. The show, which purported to celebrate sexual freedom and hedonism, had put us in such a foul mood — especially on the topic of sex — that it had the opposite impact. To this day, I think of it as the saltpeter of musical comedy.
There are currently sporadic attempts to revive it, usually in a kind of "party" setting where audience members can mingle, sip beverages and chat before and after the performance. I assume there's no emotional breakdown in it but it apparently has the same childish songs so I'm not interested. And that's the story of the one show ever on Broadway that never officially opened. Perhaps Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark will make it two.
This runs close to ten minutes but if you want to know why this country is in so much financial trouble, it's worth the time. Columnist Matt Taibbi is interviewed and he answers the musical question, asked in his Rolling Stone piece that I linked to here, "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?"
February 26, 2011
