Where Are the Hit Musicals?

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The soul of the stage may be the grand tragedy or its modern cousin, the middle-class problem play, but the essence of Broadway is the musical. Spectacular song-and-dance numbers lure the tourists from Topeka and Tokyo and wave the American flag in London's West End. Every kind of straight play can be developed in the cozy environment of a regional theater, but only on Broadway can the big, brassy musical be consistently nourished with enough cash and applause. Throughout the past season, which many have judged among the worst in a decade or more, the prime barometer of trouble has been the lack of even one new musical hit.

As Broadway approaches the May 1 cutoff of eligibility for its Tony Awards, serious attention is being given to suspending the musical categories. The only obvious alternative is to nominate a string of flops. Of the seven musicals that have made it to Broadway so far this season, four closed after runs of three weeks or less; last week's ingratiating revival of a 1959 hit, Take Me Along, folded the day after it opened. The survivors are the umpteenth revival of The King and I and two April entries, both pummeled by reviewers: Leader of the Pack, a rock nostalgia show, and Grind, a $4 million-plus spectacle set in a 1930s burlesque hall. They are to be joined this week by the season's last hope, Big River, an adaptation of Mark Twain's novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Whatever that show's fate, Broadway ticket buyers will have to depend a while longer on such holdovers as A Chorus Line, which opened in 1975, 42nd Street (1980), Dreamgirls (1981), Cats (1982), La Cage aux Folles (1983), and last year's The Tap Dance Kid and Sunday in the Park with George.

The sorry state of the musical has a lot to do with money; new productions frequently cost $2 million or more to rehearse and mount. Even hits can take up to a year to start showing any profit. The financial pressures have all but squeezed out the modestly worthy, mildly popular, moderately profitable shows that used to be the theater's mainstay. Instead, producers look exclusively for blockbusters.

In hopes of delivering them, Broadway's veteran creators have devised a variety of strategies, all in vain this season. Some say the trick is to scale back the shows and their costs. But Quilters, a genial bit of Americana, lasted only 24 performances. Some advocate looking for a beloved story, but The Three Musketeers managed only nine performances. Some call for a celebration of show biz itself, but Harrigan 'n Hart, a tribute to two founding fathers of the modern musical, barely lasted a week. Some call for presold songs, performed in low-key review style, but Leader of the Pack is struggling. And some contend the musical should reach for the opposite extreme, dealing with urgent social issues while rivaling Las Vegas in luxury, but the ambitious Grind has suffered a loss in advance sales since opening.

There is nothing wrong with most current musicals, however, that could not be solved by some intelligent storytelling. Grind and Leader of the Pack, for example, each offer rousing songs, appealing players and a wellspring of goodwill. What neither offers is common sense in constructing a narrative. Leader draws its name from an early 1960s rock hit, one of dozens written by Ellie Greenwich, mostly with her then husband Jeff Barry. The book, concocted by a committee that clearly never arrived at any binding resolutions, seems unable to settle on whether it should showcase those mostly upbeat anthems or chronicle the composers' mostly downbeat lives. The songs are treated with an awkward mix of reverence and mockery; the lives are reduced to cartoons. Singer Darlene Love, a veteran of Greenwich's heyday, announces at the outset that she is entitled to recount the story because she was part of it; but thereafter she is never seen interacting with the surrogate Ellie (Dinah Manoff) and Jeff (Patrick Cassidy).

Grind means to weep for the hard times of 1933, encompassing everything from segregation and the Depression to the woes of a refugee Irish terrorist. The terrorist sings not one but two songs about how he blew up a train on which, unknown to him, his wife and son were passengers; this is by no means the unlikeliest coincidence in which he is involved. An aging comedian whose sight is failing wanders into a backdrop (he has also somehow lost his sense of direction) and, fearing the loss of his job, shoots himself. Apparently neither he nor anyone else in the show has ever heard of eyeglasses. The capable cast, led by an energized Ben Vereen, tries to distract the audience from the story's cheap tricks and absurdities. The frenzy only underscores the falseness.

Grind's director, Harold Prince, perhaps the foremost present-day mounter of book musicals, has said that he plans to take an informal sabbatical to ponder ways of coping with the pitfalls now facing the form. The first, simple step is one that he ought to remember from the days when he staged such shows as Cabaret and Sweeney Todd: have something worth saying and tell it in the most direct and honest way. --By William A. Henry III