Tag: WTF?

Oh What Fresh Hell is This?

If you recall, back in February, I briefly posted about the flop musical Rockabye Hamlet. The show was a disastrous rock opera which reconceptualized the Bard’s classic at a concert (complete with Ophelia, played by the ever game Beverly d’Angelo strangling herself with a microphone cord). Well, the undead are virtually unstoppable. Much to my surprise and utter amazement I find that the disaster is receiving similar treatment to the other (and far more worthy) 7 performance bomb of 1976, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue: a revised concert presentation complete with new title.

The show, now called Something’s Rockin’ in Denmark, (I’m not making this up, you know) will be playing the St. Lawrence Center for the Arts in Toronto this coming weekend for three performances, with composer Cliff Jones culling material from the various productions to create his definitive and final version.

Here is the press release:

One of Broadway’s legendary flops was the 1976 rock opera based on Hamlet.

Now this infamous musical by Cliff Jones will be presented as a staged concert for three exclusive performances in Toronto on July 25-26 at the Jane Mallett Theatre, St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts.

Originally commissioned for C.B.C. Radio, KRONBORG: 1582 played at the Charlottetown Festival (Prince Edward Island) to critical acclaim in the summers of 1974 and ’75, followed by a Canadian tour with Brent Carver as Hamlet and Beverly D’Angelo as Ophelia.

Renamed Rockabye Hamlet, and substantially revised under the direction of Gower Champion, it opened on Broadway at the Minskoff Theatre Feb 16, 1976, starring Larry Marshall, D’Angelo and Meat Loaf. It played a efw weeks of previews (which composer Jones says were ecstatically received by audeinces) then it opened to 7 out of 7 negative notices. ROCKABYE HAMLET closed a week later.

With new revisions by Jones and re-titled SOMETHING’S ROCKIN’ IN DENMARK, the show then enjoyed a 14-month run in Los Angeles. The musical won twelve Dramalogue Awards (L.A.) and has since been successfully produced many times.

For this new concert staging of SOMETHING’S ROCKIN’ IN DENMARK, Cliff Jones has adapted his script and score, taking the best of all previous productions. He will also direct the show, joined by Lona Davis as musical director and Mimi Woods Doherty as choreographer/assistant director. The cast of 18 features Ted Ambrose, Lisa Bell, Matthew A.C. Campbell, Trevor Covelli, Scott Freethy, Michael Harvey, Laura Higgs and Gerald Isaac.

SOMETHING’S ROCKIN’ IN DENMARK plays Friday, July 25 at 8 p.m. and Saturday, July 26 at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. The Jane Mallett Theatre, St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts, is located in downtown Toronto at 27 Front Street East. Tickets are $40 (lower orchestra) and $30 (upper orchestra) and may be reserved by calling the box office at 416-366-7723 or 1-800-708-6754, go online to www.stlc.com

Witness the Toronto re-birth of this wondrous, eclectic musical!

The Phantom Takes Manhattan

Bring Back Birdie
Annie 2: Miss Hannigan’s Revenge


and now Phantom…Once Upon Another Time

Andrew Lloyd Webber is fast at work on his impending sequel to his monstrously successful The Phantom of the Opera, which finds the characters a few years later in New York, where Christine has become a successful opera singer.

The show’s first act was presented at the Sydmonton Festival this month and first word of the plot and storyline are starting to come in. From Andrew Gans at Playbill:

The new musical, directed by Jack O’Brien, is set in Coney Island in 1906. The Post describes the musical’s first half as such: “The Phantom, having fled Paris, is running a freak show. At night, he crawls into his lair and makes love to an automaton that looks like Christine. Christine, meanwhile, has become a famous opera singer. But she’s fallen on hard times because her husband, Raoul, has squandered their fortune. So she’s accepted a high-paying gig from a mysterious impresario to open a new amusement park. On her first night in New York, she draws back the curtain in her hotel suite and comes face to face with her new employer — flash of lightning, crash of chords — the Phantom! Christine has a child, Gustave, but is his father Raoul or the Phantom?”

Hold everything. He makes love to an automaton that looks like Christine? Is anyone else completely horrified/hysterical with laughter at that? I know I am, and it’s out of a vague discomfort at the entire prospect.

I’m not suggesting that a musical theatre sequel cannot be a success, it’s just that for the most part they’ve been nothing but complete and utter disasters, with those two follow-ups I mentioned the most notable. (Though there was some success with the eventual Annie Warbucks that played off-Broadway in 1993, it was still better to leave well-enough alone).

I’m trying to think of a musical sequel that has been a success, but none seem to come to me. Perhaps Divorce Me, Darling, the follow-up to The Boy Friend, has done alright for itself, but it’s nothing close to being an established title.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Let us hope this lunacy is just a trend…

An article at Playbill discusses an alarming problem that is fast becoming the latest headache for the house staff at Broadway theatres: text messaging. Now, I think the text message is an excellent way of communicating in a situation in which talking on the phone isn’t a viable option. However, it is made especially clear by the house management prior to the show either usually in the form of an announcement or in some cases an insert in the Pllaybill for audience members to turn off all electronic devices. Considering there is a law against the use of cell phones in theatres, one might assume this would fall under the ban. Most shocking is the item about Jake Gyllenhaal and Reese Witherspoon at a matinee of August: Osage County. If you’re only going to attend one act (especially when you think they probably received comp tickets) and spend the entire time on your blackberry, why bother coming at all? There are other people who could use the ticket, who would want to be engaged. It was also recently reported on the message boards about the incident at Gypsy last weekend where a teenager in the second row spent the entire first act texting to the increasingly unhinging frustration of Patti LuPone, who eventually wouldn’t re-enter the show in the second act until the girl was relocated or removed.

There was a time with one of my older cell phones, I would even remove the battery for the duration, just in case it accidentally turned on during the performance. Paranoid as I might be, I occasionally double or triple check the phone during a show to make sure it is off, even though I know I shut it down prior to the curtain. There’s always intermission people!!

In the words of your friend and mine, Mattie Fae Aiken, “Just…show a little class!!”

When You’re Good to Mrs. Brady

Though most of you remember her as the perennial TV mom, Mrs. Carol Brady from The Brady Bunch and its various offshoots into variety, comedy and even drama over the years, Florence Henderson was a premiere musical theatre ingenue in the 1950s. She made her Broadway debut in the chorus of Harold Rome’s Wish You Were Here. She continued to make a name for herself in national tours (most notably the first road company of The Sound of Music), Laurey in Oklahoma! at the City Center (with Barbara Cook as Ado Annie), the title role in Rome’s Fanny and a superlative turn in the final Noel Coward musical The Girl Who Came to Supper, her final Broadway appearance to date. TV soon called, and of course, Wesson Oil.

Anyway, here she is in an entirely new realm. Leather mama…? This is a kinky spin on a Kander and Ebb favorite at a tribute of theirs a few years ago. Say whatever you will about the performance, she looks phenomenal.

What Were They Thinking…?

Oh kids. This is too awful and hilarious (awfully hilarious…hilariously awful…?) not to share.

“He Got It in the Ear”

Rockabye Hamlet is the notorious flop rock opera adaptation of, yeah, you guessed it. (The setting: a Rock concert). A rare Canadian musical import, the show was originally commissioned for radio under the title Kronberg 1582. With direction from Gower Champion, of all people, it played 7 performances at the Minskoff in 1976 and featured Beverly d’Angelo in her sole Broadway appearance to date as Ophelia. Larry Marshall was Hamlet (fortunately for him, he followed this immediately with the role of Sportin’ Life in the acclaimed ’76 revival of Porgy and Bess) and none other than Meat Loaf played a supporting part as a Priest. This number is how they chose to adapt the famed play within a play. Honeybelle is played by Judy Gibson.

I dare you to listen to the whole thing.