How Does Broadway Play in Peoria?

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

The 37 theaters that constitute Broadway occupy a few acres in midtown Manhattan. But to much of America, a Broadway show is something to be seen hundreds, even thousands of miles from Times Square -- in Atlanta or Dallas, Phoenix or Detroit or any other of the dozens of cities that make up what suitcase-toting actors wearily call "the road." Like the Shakespearean troupe in Kiss Me, Kate who "open in Venice" and schlepp their show from town to town, ensembles representing recent Broadway hits take to the byways every year. This summer at least a dozen tours have offered purportedly the same entertainments as those on the Great White Way. But are they really? The idea that what you see in Peoria might be every bit as good as Broadway makes many New York theater professionals scoff. In the not too distant past there was ample basis for derision. On this summer's evidence, however, the doubters may be narrow-minded and wrong.

Producers put shows out on the road for three basic reasons: to prepare for Broadway; to capitalize on a Broadway success already attained; and occasionally, when a show's concept and stars are more marketable than its actual merits, to bypass Broadway's fierce competition and legion of reviewers. Steep staging costs have made offerings in the first category, known as tryouts, a vanishing breed. Nowadays pre-Broadway tryouts are usually limited to one city, unless a show has a big-name cast or is a revival of a fondly remembered musical, like the current tours of Cabaret and West Side Story. Sometimes what is labeled a tryout turns into a bypass of Broadway, as happened with a just closed revival of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, starring Mickey Rooney, and with the Carol Channing-Mary Martin vehicle Legends!, which ran a year to box-office triumph but abysmal reviews, then closed in January after its stars said they had no desire to bring it to the Main Stem.

The essence of the road show, however, is a touring version of a work that is already firmly established on Broadway or that recently closed. Almost all tours are of musicals, although the comedies I'm Not Rappaport and Social Security played across the nation into the summer. For audiences, the crucial but often unresearchable question is how a touring version measures up to its Broadway forerunner. Based on a sampling of half a dozen offerings, including two versions of Cats, the verdict is mostly favorable. Sets may be simpler, lighting more rudimentary, and the miked-up sound systems uniformly lousy. The more a show was shaped to fit a particular space and circumstances, the clumsier it looks shoehorned -- or stretched -- into a new configuration each week. But when it comes to performance pizazz, even second-string unknowns compete effectively with first-run counterparts -- and sometimes outdo them.

The best of the shows now on tour is also the best in its Broadway incarnation: Big River combines Mark Twain's exuberant celebration of the open road with Composer-Lyricist Roger Miller's wistful echo of frontier freedom. The book derives from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The score mixes bluegrass, gospel, Tin Pan Alley and a twangy tang of Nashville. Like the novel, the show comes alive when Huck and his friend Jim, a runaway slave, get out onto the Mississippi. The moment when they break into an up-tempo hymn to that Muddy Water -- and a backdrop lifts to reveal the signature image, a painting of a plank walk that merges into a river twisting away beyond the horizon -- remains thrilling on even an umpteenth viewing. As Jim, Michael Edward-Stevens has as glorious a voice and as hard-won a self-awareness as any of his three predecessors in the role. Romain Fruge looks a bit old to play a boy of Huck's pubescent innocence, and some of his acting is a bit cute, but no one else has been as good in delivering Huck's introspective songs of self- definition, I, Huckleberry, Me and Waitin' for the Light to Shine. Among the supporting players, Walker Joyce as a scalawag con man malevolently outperforms his antecedents. Even more impressive than these performances, however, is the production's fidelity, as unflinching and unsettling as the Broadway original's, to Twain's harrowing evocation of slavery, ignorance and lawlessness in the often idealized frontier times.

In My One and Only the chief pleasures are precisely the same as those that won Tony awards in 1983: Tommy Tune as the aviator who gives up everything for his girl and Charles ("Honi") Coles, 76, as the sage elder who teaches him to pitch woo, crack wise and tap-dance. As the love interest originally played by Twiggy, however, Stephanie Zimbalist (of TV's Remington Steele) sings indifferently, dances with studied intentness rather than carefree abandon and employs an English accent that leapfrogs from Brighton to Kansas.

Pop Singer Melissa Manchester has less trouble with the accent and none with the melodies in Song & Dance. Her Merman-size voice enhances rather than flattens the tricky satiric lyrics. But her portrayal of a young English hat designer on the make in Manhattan suffers badly by comparison with Bernadette Peters' fetching portrayal on Broadway. Manchester, 36, looks too worldly to be as dippy-innocent as the first scenes require. The part calls for her to be onstage solo for the first half of the show but to create the illusion that other people are there with her -- a trick for which Manchester, in her stage- acting debut, lacks the technique. She appears only briefly during the second act's wordless choreography. Anyone who saw the Broadway opening might be taken aback by the considerably coarser final 20 minutes, in which the cast ! puts on a vulgarized dancing display while shouting out amateurish greetings like "Hello, Atlanta!" Although the producers insist the differences in staging are small, what was a brief sentimental encounter between the separated lovers now feels bathetic.

With 42nd Street the failing is plainer. Except for David Brummel as the veteran musical-comedy director and Linda Griffin as the snappy chorine Anytime Annie, nobody in the company can act. The book has always been silly and illogical, and requires high style to bring off its camp excesses. Most at sea is Gina Trano as the kid from the chorus who replaces the injured star. Although she manages a lovely awakening into competence during the course of the musical-within-a-musical, there is nothing special about her in the earlier scenes to justify everyone's much voiced confidence in her talent.

The most popular Broadway show on the road is Cats, which through its three companies has been accounting for about half of current touring-troupe revenues. The two productions viewed deliver at least the raucous pleasures of the original. The version that has been playing in Washington since July has more elaborate lighting and staging effects than one of those that are moving from city to city every week or two, but the differences are minor. The celebrated catlike movements look more Vegas-like now. In both casts, only the dancers playing the secondary role of Alonzo (Ken Nagy in Washington, Stephen Moore touring) achieve the cool detachment of another species. The singing, although always vibrant, is uneven. In the peripatetic cast Andy Spangler glows as the Elvis-like Rum Tum Tugger and Leslie Ellis is haunting as Grizabella, the faded glamour cat, but in the Washington troupe the performers in those roles, Douglas Graham and Janene Lovullo, do not measure up.

One gutsy production radically improves on its Broadway model: the 1966 and 1986 hit Sweet Charity, dazzlingly restaged for a North American tour by its original creator and re-creator, Bob Fosse. From the first appearance in silhouette of the title character, a taxi dancer who in the face of all experience remains a fool for love, to the ironically identical finale, this version zips along with style, assurance and the ingredient it lacked in its 1986 Broadway reprise, real heart. Whereas Debbie Allen seemed too tough, too much a survivor to elicit audience sympathy when she played Charity on Broadway, the road show's Donna McKechnie -- the original Cassie in A Chorus & Line -- manages to be forever vulnerable without seeming stupid. As the buttoned-down businessman who takes up with her, says he can forgive her slightly checkered past and then finds he cannot, Ken Land is more likable and believable than his Broadway counterpart. As a result, what is virtually an identical show plays louder, faster and funnier -- to cite Centenarian Director George Abbott's hallowed instructions to performers -- and also seems more true. It is as bubbly and brisk and bittersweet as Broadway, at home or on the road, is always supposed to be.