"Unopened": 'The Baker’s Wife'

 

[The failed Broadway première of The Baker’s Wife is the subject of New York Times theater and arts journalist Laura Collins-Hughes’s entry in the “Unopened” series.  Published on 5 November 2020 in the “Arts” section of the Times—and  posted on the paper’s website as “Patti LuPone Was a Constant. The Other Ingredients Never Cooked” on 4 November—the report examines the breakdown of the transfer of the novel and screenplay by Jean Giono for the 1938 French film La femme du boulanger, directed by Marcel Pagnol (1895-1974), to the American musical stage.

[This is the last of the five articles in the Times’ “Unopened” series on failed Broadway attempts.  As I’ve been saying all along, the reports aren’t connected except by the common theme.  Reading all the articles, however, provides an overview of the reasons for and causes of aborted Broadway openings, some of which had every expectation for success.  If you haven’t been reading the whole series, I recommend going back and catching the four preceding articles, posted on 26 February and 1, 4, and 7 March.]

“WHAT COULD GO WRONG? EVERYTHING”
by Laura Collins-Hughes
 

With a marquee creative team, this romantic musical should have been a sure bet. One great song survived the out-of-town turmoil.

The producer David Merrick [1911-2000] was no slouch at offstage drama. With a new musical in rough shape on the road, he devised an audacious caper to fix it.

The place was the Shubert Theater in Boston, the year 1976, the show “The Baker’s Wife” — with music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz [b. 1948], a book by Joseph Stein [1912-2010] and a cringe-making trail of reviews that seemed only to be getting worse.

At the start of the five-city, six-month Broadway-bound tour, in May, the Los Angeles Times had kindly deemed the show “not an embarrassment.” By September, The Boston Globe declared acidly that it didn’t “have a prayer.”

To Merrick, the song “Meadowlark” — sung by the title character, played by a not yet famous, 27-year-old Patti LuPone [b. 1949] — was part of the problem. It was more than seven minutes long, and he wanted it out. So after a Wednesday matinee, he ordered the conductor, Robert Billig [b. 1947], to pull all of the sheet music for the song and bring it to the stage.

“I did as I was asked,” Billig recalled by email this week, “and Mr. Merrick put the music in his attaché case and departed for New York.”

The notoriously combative producer left the others to figure out how to make the evening performance work around the hole he had just smashed in it.

“This could all just be myth,” LuPone said by phone the other day, hushing her voice for effect, “but let’s hope it’s true: He was heard in a bar the night before saying, ‘I’ll get that song out of the show if I have to poison the birdseed.’”

“Meadowlark,” which went on to become a cabaret standard, a popular audition number and one of LuPone’s signature solo songs, didn’t stay cut. Billig got on the phone to Schwartz, Schwartz called his agent, threats were made. The orchestra got its music back the next day.

“By that point in the proceedings,” Schwartz said recently by video call, “this is why we couldn’t fix it.” Meaning the show, that is. “Because everything had sort of descended into chaos. Nobody was making really rational decisions.”

In terms of sheer, eye-popping dysfunction, the “Meadowlark” incident — which amuses Schwartz now — is emblematic of the grim slog that was the cross-country out-of-town tryout for “The Baker’s Wife,” whose star, Chaim Topol [Israeli actor, singer, and comedian, b. 1935; aka:  Topol], eventually followed other axed creatives out the door.

Even LuPone, playing Geneviève, was a replacement for the original leading lady, Carole Demas [b. 1940], who was let go in Los Angeles. At that same stop on the tour, Jerome Robbins [choreographer and director, 1918-98] came to see the musical, invited by Merrick and Stein in the hope that he might take over the production. No dice.

“There was like a revolving door of directors,” Schwartz said.

“Every time somebody joined the company,” LuPone said, “we looked at them and went, ‘Oh my God, what did you do that put you in the bowels of hell?’“

“The Baker’s Wife” arrived with great ambitions, expected to join the string of Schwartz hits already on Broadway in the autumn of ’76: “Pippin,” “The Magic Show,” “Godspell.” It still hasn’t played there, and not until 2005 did Schwartz and Stein find its proper shape. But its creation story does have a happy ending, and we will get to that.

First, though, the horror show — which, like all the best horror shows, begins with no inkling of trouble.

In 1972 or ’73, when Schwartz was a 20-something boy wonder, Neil Simon [playwright, 1927-2018] invited him to lunch. Broadway’s reigning king of comedies, Simon suggested they write a musical together. But none of the ideas that he proposed — “Mutiny on the Bounty,” maybe? — appealed to Schwartz.

Then, over dessert, Simon told the story of Marcel Pagnol’s 1938 French film “La Femme du Boulanger,” in which a village baker’s much younger wife leaves him for a man nearer to her age. By the time Simon got to the ending, Schwartz was in.

And he stayed in after Simon, newly widowed, dropped out of the nascent project and Stein, who wrote the book to “Fiddler on the Roof,” joined it.

Centering their musical on the baker, Aimable, Schwartz and Stein had hoped to cast the “Fiddler” star Zero Mostel [1915-77]. When he turned them down, they took Merrick’s suggestion and went to Topol, who had played Tevye in the 1971 “Fiddler” movie.

“It turned out to be a kind of disastrous choice,” Schwartz said. “Because Topol was never comfortable playing someone who was an older and less attractive man. He had this sense of virility and sexiness.”

“Nothing could be done as long as Topol was there,” LuPone said, recalling one performance when he didn’t like the lyrics and substituted “blah blah blah” instead. “He sabotaged the show.”

A group of his fellow actors wrote to Actors’ Equity, lobbying to have him fired. (Reached by telephone, Topol’s agent declined to make him available for an interview.)

But by the time Paul Sorvino [b. 1939] replaced him, in late October on the tour’s last stop — at the Kennedy Center in Washington, less than a month before the scheduled Broadway start — the actors were so “bloody and beaten” that they only wanted to be left alone by this new leading man who was trying to rally them, LuPone said.

For her, some of the erosion of morale involved “Meadowlark,” which tells the story of Geneviève’s decision to leave her husband. In LuPone’s recollection, it was consistently in the show until Merrick’s stunt in Boston, the tour’s penultimate stop. After that, “it was out, in, out, in, out, in, between Boston and Washington,” she said.

The last time it was pulled from the show, she remembers walking out of a company notes session and telling “the director du jour,” John Berry [1917-99], that he could go straight to hell.

“I left and went into my dressing room, started crying, started smashing stuff,” she said. “And like a flock of sea gulls after the notes session, the company came in and put a Valium in my throat — and then left the room!”

LuPone laughed. At this distance, she cherishes her forged-in-fire “Baker’s Wife” anecdotes, and she is sure about the disheartening disappearance and reappearance of her big song — a number that, at her own concerts, fans demand to hear as much as they demand “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.”

But Billig, the conductor, said he didn’t remember the song being pulled more than once. Schwartz, whose daughter, Jessica, was born during the tour, was at home for much of its second half. Still, he said the song would not have been out of the show after his agent objected vociferously the first time.

One point of agreement about “The Baker’s Wife” back then is that it never did come into focus, no matter how relentlessly it was reworked. (To those who blame Stein’s book, Schwartz retorts loyally that “if we didn’t solve things, it’s because we didn’t solve them together.”)

Toward the end, as the show kept unraveling, those involved badly wanted out. Eventually Schwartz and Stein — who remained friends until Stein’s death at 98 in 2010 — went to Merrick and asked him not to take it to Broadway.

And when the closing notice went up that November?

“The entire company erupted in tears of joy,” LuPone said.

After they closed, LuPone, Sorvino and other cast members recorded an album of Schwartz’s favorite solos and duets from the show, which attracted a cult following and put “Meadowlark” into the world.

Trevor Nunn [English director, b. 1940] heard songs from the album enough times in auditions to pique his interest. In 1989, he directed a revamped version of “The Baker’s Wife” in London and supplied what was to Schwartz and Stein a crucial insight: that the central character is not the baker but the village — that it’s the story of a community responding to a small domestic crisis that touches them all.

It wasn’t until 2005, though, at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey, that Schwartz finally saw a version of “” that felt finished to him. The director Gordon Greenberg [b. 1968], who years earlier had fallen for the show through the album, worked with Schwartz and Stein to realign its bones, lending it what Greenberg called a “Gallic shrug.” Alice Ripley [b. 1963] played Geneviève — about 40 in that incarnation, but still with an older husband and a 20-something love.

Before the pandemic struck, Greenberg said, he had an offer to direct “The Baker’s Wife” in London that would have put him in rehearsals there right about now.

But it’s the Paper Mill production that Schwartz comes back to. As his favorite review said, it was the lovely little show that he and Stein had always wanted. It only took 30 years.

“For a long time, of course, it was the child that didn’t survive,” Schwartz said. “I’m really proud of the fact that we never gave up.”

[Before the scheduled Broadway opening on 21 November 1976 at the Martin Beck Theatre, The Baker’s Wife went on a five-city try-out tour.  It opened in Los Angeles at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on 11 May 1976 and closed there on 26 June; then it traveled north to San Francisco and played the Curran Theatre from 29 July to 31 July. 

[The Baker’s Wife opened at the Municipal Opera House (the “Muny”) on 16 August and played there until 22 August before moving on to Boston.  It played the Shubert Theatre from 15 September to 2 October, then moved south to Washington, D.C., to open at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Eisenhower Opera House on 4 October.

[The closing notice was posted in Washington and after the final performance there on 13 November, the tour ended and the planned transfer to Broadway was canceled.  The Baker’s Wife has never played in New York City except for a staged concert presentation by the York Theatre Company on 26-28 October 2007.

[The Paper Mill Playhouse (the “State Theater of New Jersey,” Millburn, N.J.) production of The Baker’s Wife, directed by Gordon Greenberg, ran from 13 April to 15 May 2005.  The review I believe Collins-Hughes cites was published in Section NJ (“New Jersey”) of the New York Times of Sunday, 24 April 2005; in the notice, reviewer Naomi Siegel wrote: “And, after 30 years of fine-tuning, Messieurs Stein and Schwartz will have the lovely little musical they always wanted.”]

"Unopened": 'Scratch'

 

[Adam Langer’s examination of Scratch (for “Old Scratch,” a nickname for the Devil), is number four in the Times’ “Unopened” series.  It was published in the “Arts” section of the New York Times of 4 November 2020. The web version of the article, posted on 3 November, had the same headline as the print version.

[Once again, let me suggest that readers who are just finding this series go back and read the first three articles of the Times’ “Unopened,” posted on 26 February and 1 and 4 March.  Though the articles aren’t linked except by the theme of failed Broadway attempts, reading all five reports does show the breadth of the causes of the failures.  It’s a sad lesson, but a lesson nonetheless.]

“BOB DYLAN’S FIRST MUSICAL HAD A DEVIL OF A TIME”
by Adam Langer

The task: write songs for Archibald MacLeish’s adaptation of a classic New England morality tale. What audiences saw (briefly): A play without music.

It sounded like a fine idea at the time — pair two poetic giants of different generations and get them to collaborate on reinventing an American classic.

The year was 1969. The producer Stuart Ostrow [b. 1932] and the director Peter Hunt [1938-2020] already had a hit show on Broadway with “1776.” Now they were setting their sights on “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” Stephen Vincent Benét’s [1898-1943] classic 1936 story about Jabez Stone, a New Hampshire farmer who sells his soul to the devil, has second thoughts, and enlists the orator and statesman Daniel Webster [1782-1852] to argue his case before a jury composed of American villains. The tale had been adapted into a 1939 opera and a 1941 movie, but never a musical.

Archibald MacLeish [1892-1982], the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author of the Tony Award-winning play “J.B.,” which reimagined the Book of Job, would write the book. The composer and lyricist would be Bob Dylan [b. 1941] — decades before he proffered his songbook to Twyla Tharp [dancer and choreographer, b. 1941] for 2006’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and to Conor McPherson [Irish dramatist, b. 1971] for “Girl From the North Country.” (That show’s Broadway run was interrupted by the pandemic.)

“Stuart had this idea that we would get the oldest poet of note and the youngest poet of note to work together,” Hunt recalled in a conversation earlier this year, before he died at 81 from complications of Parkinson’s disease.

“I thought coupling the Republic’s poet laureate and America’s balladeer was a unique invitation to young and old audiences,” Ostrow added in a recent email.

“Scratch” took its title from the name the devil calls himself in Benét’s story. MacLeish offered a deeply-considered meditation on the nature of good and evil, obliquely asking whether the ideals upon which America was founded could endure in the time of Richard Nixon [1913-94; 37th President of the United States, 1969-74] and Vietnam.

The show would be the “opposite of a musical,” MacLeish wrote to Ostrow in papers now held by the Billy Rose Theater Division of the New York Public Library; “it would be a “ballad play,” featuring an actor in modern dress who would sing songs and serve as conduit between the audience and the action onstage.

As for what this 20th century troubadour would sing, well, that was Dylan’s job.

MacLeish proposed some song titles — among them, “Red Hands,” “Lower World,” “New Morning,” and “Father of Night,” and Dylan, who’d wearied of the limelight and was trying on new personas, started writing on spec.

The poet effused over Dylan’s initial contributions. “Those songs of yours have been haunting me — and exciting me,” he wrote to Dylan. “‘New Morning’ marries the opening as though they’d been intended for each other.”

But Dylan and MacLeish were separated not only by age but by background, style, temperament, and sensibility. MacLeish divided his time between his western Massachusetts home and a private club in Antigua, and was the product of boarding schools and Ivy League universities. Dylan, a more instinctive, less deliberative artist, was the Minnesota-born son of a Jewish appliance store owner, and was, as he averred on “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” his latest album, “born on the wrong side of the railroad track, like [Alan] Ginsberg [Beat poet, 1926-97], [Gregory] Corso [Beat poet, 1930-2001] and [Jack] Kerouac [Beat novelist and writer, 1922-69].”

A disagreement over lyrics to “Father of Night” epitomized the difference between the two visions. Dylan’s song was full of oppositions (“Father of day, Father of night/Father of black, father of white”). MacLeish liked the melody but thought the song should comment more exclusively on the nature of evil; he suggested alternative lyrics: “Father of night, father of dread/Father of cold in the void overhead/Father of serpent under the stone/Father of fear in the dark alone.”

As relayed in Dylan’s fanciful 2004 memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One,” a meeting between the septuagenarian MacLeish and the 20-something Dylan — with the elder poet discoursing on Sappho, Socrates, Dante and John Donne — reads like deleted dialogue from the scene in “Trading Places,” when Eddie Murphy’s [actor and comedian, b. 1961] street-smart con man finds himself improbably welcomed into the home of blue-blooded Dan Aykroyd [Canadian actor, comedian, and musician, b. 1952].

Inevitably, the creative process on “Scratch” devolved; the story of how that happened differs depending on who’s telling it.

“I backed out of the production,” Dylan wrote in the liner notes to “Biograph,” his 1985 collection of outtakes, bootlegs, and previously-released material. “It was nothing really, kind of like a misunderstanding I supposed.”

Then later, in “Chronicles”: “I knew that I couldn’t have anything to add to the message of [MacLeish’s] play. He didn’t need my help anyway.”

In his 2005 memoir “Present at the Creation: Leaping in the Dark and Going Against the Grain,” Ostrow, a quadruple Tony winner whose Broadway career spanned four decades, takes issue with Dylan’s version of events, to say the least. He presents the future Nobel Laureate [Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016] as a monosyllabic dolt and poseur who froze in the presence of a true man of American letters and spent his time at MacLeish’s home pounding brandy, then conking out.

“The only impression the celebrated folk singer had made was a nasty ring from his brandy snifter on the MacLeish’s 1785 cherry table,” Ostrow wrote.

Despite his early enthusiasm, MacLeish soured on Dylan’s contributions. “Dylan proved incapable of writing new songs,” he wrote in a 1970 letter.

In an email, Ostrow put it more bluntly: “Dylan could not collaborate.”

Perhaps. But, seeing as Dylan had just released “Nashville Skyline,” which featured a duet with Johnny Cash, and, two years earlier, had worked with the Band on recordings that would become known as “The Basement Tapes,” the truth seems more specific: Dylan could collaborate when he felt like it, just not with Archibald MacLeish.

Ostrow and MacLeish considered presenting “Scratch” with songs that Dylan had already recorded, but when the show opened at Broadway’s St. James Theater on May 6, 1971, it did so as a straight play, starring Patrick Magee [Irish actor, 1922-82] as Daniel Webster, Will Geer [American actor, 1902-78] as Scratch, and Will Mackenzie [American actor, b. 1938] as Jabez Stone.

Without the balancing voice of a contemporary songwriter, it registered as pompous and outdated, characterized by what The New York Times critic Walter Kerr [1913-96] called “echoes of a vanishing style.”

“It has a vacuum where its art should be,” wrote his fellow critic, Clive Barnes [1927-2008].

The actress Joanne Nail [b. 1947], who made her Broadway debut in “Scratch,” believes that MacLeish was “too married to his words,” which landed with audiences better out of town.

“We had played previews in Boston and people loved it there because it was about their area of the country, their history,” she explained recently. “But when we came to New York, Will MacKenzie and I thought it might be too long, and some of the dialogue was not going to fly. So, we went to Peter Hunt and told him, but Archibald didn’t want to change anything.”

The show closed two days later.

“It was conceived as a musical, ergo it failed,” Ostrow said simply, by email.

As for Dylan, months earlier, he had released “New Morning,” a collection of a dozen new songs [1970], including the title track and his version of “Father of Night.” It was, Greil Marcus [music journalist, b. 1945] wrote in the Times, “his best album in years.”

[Benét’s short story was first published in The Saturday Evening Post on 24 October 1936.  The operatic adaptation by Benét and composer Douglas Stuart Moore, which they labeled a “folk-opera,” premièred by the American Lyric Theatre at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York City’s Theatre District on 18 May 1939.  The music was conducted by Fritz Reiner and the one-act opera was staged by John Houseman. 

[The presentation, which was paired with the one-act musical The Filling Station written by Virgil Thomson, ran for six performances, closing on 26 May.  Lansing Hatfield sang Daniel Webster, George Rasely was Mr. Scratch, and John Gurney sang Jabez Stone.

[Originally entitled All That Money Can Buy, the film version of Benét’s story, directed by William Dieterle from a screenplay by Dan Totheroh, was released (in New York City) by RKO Radio Pictures on 16 October 1941.  Edward Arnold played Daniel Webster, Walter Huston was Mr. Scratch, and James Craig was Jabez Stone. 

[Conor McPherson’s Girl from the North Country, with music and lyrics by Bob Dylan, started previews at the Belasco Theatre on 7 February 2020 and opened on 5 March before the theaters shut down because of the pandemic.  The musical was first produced on 8 July 2017 by London’s Old Vic (formally, the Royal Victoria Hall); it’s U.S. première was on 11 September 2018 at the Joseph Papp Public Theater’s Newman Theater in Manhattan’s East Village.

[Directed by Peter H. Hunt, Scratch started previews at the St. James Theatre on 28 April 1971 and opened on 6 May.  It closed on 8 May after eight previews and four regular performances.  The Boston try-out had previews at the Colonial Theatre from 3 to 6 April 1971 and opened on 7 April; it ran through 24 April.

[Next in “Unopened” (10 March): “Patti LuPone’s first-act ballad became a standard, but the show it came from never did.”]

"Unopened": 'A Pray by Blecht'

 

[The third installment in the New York Times “Unopened” series is the paper’s co-chief theater reviewer Jesse Green’s report on the demise of the Broadway plans for a musical with the unlikely title of A Pray by Blecht (and no, that’s not a typo).  It ran in the “Arts” section of the Times of 5 November 2020; the online version of the story was posted on 2 November under the headline “A Golden Team, a Terrible Title and a Show That Vanished.”

[As I observed in the introduction to the second installment of “Unopened,” the individual articles in this series aren’t connected (except by the common theme), but reading them all gives a (dismaying) picture of the traps and hurdles that have scuttled more than a few Broadway-bound endeavors.  I recommend, for those who are just joining the series, going back to parts one and two, posted on 26 February and 1 March, to read about the founderings of Lone Star Love in 2007 and Face Value in 1993.]

“A TOP TEAM, BUT THE SHOW VANISHED”
by Jesse Green

Would you like to see a new musical from the people who brought you “West Side Story”? For better or worse, you probably never will.

How do you top “West Side Story”?

If you’re Leonard Bernstein [1918-90], Stephen Sondheim [b. 1930] and Jerome Robbins [1918-98], the answer is: You don’t.

Well, you try. Ten years after the composer, the lyricist and the director-choreographer of that show (along with its book writer, Arthur Laurents [1917-2011]) changed the musical theater with their contemporary take on “Romeo and Juliet,” they rejoined forces to develop another project.

The idea was Robbins’s. He thought that one of Bertolt Brecht’s Lehrstücke, or teaching plays, could make a good musical, being short and pointed and fable-like. In 1967, he asked Sondheim to read “The Measures Taken,” the first in a collection of four translations, for possible adaptation. When Sondheim balked, finding the material too inert, Robbins told him to read the next play in the book.

That one, “The Exception and the Rule,” is about a rapacious oil merchant (read: capitalism) who races another merchant across a desert to win a lucrative deal. Accompanying him are a guide and a porter; when the three get lost, and the porter (read: exploited labor) tries to help the merchant, the merchant misunderstands the gesture and shoots him. Naturally, being of the ruling class, he is acquitted: Self-defense, the judge decides, applies even if the threat is imaginary.

Sondheim, eager to work with Robbins, whom he called “the only genius I had ever associated with,” thought this story might work, even though he found most of Brecht [1898-1956], and especially the teaching plays, “insufferably simplistic.” In his book “Look, I Made a Hat,” he wrote that there was “too much Lehr in each stück” — too much teaching in each play — “to hold my attention.”

Indeed, his attention waned after “taking a stab” at two songs. Giving up, he suggested that Robbins get Bernstein to write both music and lyrics. But Robbins instead asked Jerry Leiber [1933-2011], the word half of the pop songwriting team of Leiber and [Michael] Stoller [b. 1933], to work with the maestro. Though the odd couple did complete some numbers, the show stalled out. Most do, usually for their own good.

But “The Exception and the Rule,” as it was then called, had a gleam of possibility that kept it from dying completely. Perhaps it would be an exception itself, as “West Side Story,” which almost fell through several times, was in its day.

What looked like the key arrived when the playwright John Guare [b. 1938], then known for surreal way-off-Broadway comedies, joined up with a great idea for the adaptation.

The story would now take place in a television studio where the Brecht play is being readied for broadcast. The tension between the star actor playing the merchant (who was to be white) and the supporting actors playing the guide and porter (who were to be Black) would parallel the class paranoia of the inner scenes, while adding an element of racial paranoia to the mix. Sondheim, noting that the Brecht would be chopped up by scenes set in the present, “and thus not be so relentlessly Brechtian,” rejoined the team.

By April 1968, a New York Times theater column trumpeted a January 1969 opening for the new musical. Later that year, the producers announced that the Broadway star Zero Mostel [1915-77] would play the lead. It seemed a mere glitch in its inevitable success when, in October, the show, budgeted at $600,000 [$4.6 million today] and now bearing Bernstein’s awful Spooneristic title “A Pray by Blecht,” was postponed until the following fall.

[Spooneristic is a word I haven’t heard much lately, so if you’re unfamiliar with the expression, it means ‘having the form of a spoonerism.’  A spoonerism, according to Wikipedia, “is an error in speech in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched . . . between two words in a phrase.”  

[An example, from one of my middle school teachers, is “duddy stubble hall” for “double study hall” (which is where I first heard the word spoonerism—my teacher called herself out on it).  An intentional spoonerism, from comedian George Carlin (1937-2008): “Don’t sweat the petty things and don’t pet the sweaty things.”  

[The speech error is named after William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930), an Oxford don and ordained minister who was renowned for mixing up the syllables in spoken phrases.]

And then: nothing.

It was so dead that Bernstein, nine years later, describing it as “a big wonderful show that could have been,” got its title wrong. He called it “The Measures Taken.”

What happened? According to “Look, I Made a Hat,” in which Sondheim relates “almost all” of the tale, the golden collaboration was “no fun at all”; he stepped away again after he and Bernstein, who treated him as if he were “still an apprentice” from “West Side Story” days, wrote eight songs. Robbins quit soon thereafter: In the middle of auditions, he excused himself to Guare and Bernstein, left the theater and took off in a cab to Kennedy Airport.

Perhaps it is better that some shows should die so that others might live. After “A Pray by Blecht” collapsed, Sondheim went on almost immediately to write “Company,” “Follies” and “A Little Night Music.” Guare’s 1971 play “The House of Blue Leaves” jump-started his career. Bernstein and Robbins would each return to Broadway, albeit with mixed success, while continuing to excel in classical music and ballet.

Yet it was Robbins, the runaway, who couldn’t let the idea die. In the spring of 1987, at Lincoln Center Theater, he directed a multiweek workshop of a new version of the show called “The Race to Urga.” Sondheim attended only two rehearsals, which (he recalled in an email) were inchoate and disorganized.

“I couldn’t tell anything about it,” he wrote, “except that it seemed (as I’d always thought it was) self-consciously Important instead of spontaneous and exuberant, which is the chief saving grace of any Brecht play (and was Brecht’s intention).”

Guare, who provided the necessary new lyrics, recently declined to comment on the experience, having “closed the door” on it ages ago.

One person was happy to comment, though: Zero Mostel’s son Josh [b. 1946]. In the 1987 workshop, he was cast (after Kevin Kline [b. 1947] apparently withdrew) in the role originally intended for his father.

By the time the show was performed for invited audiences in May of that year, he recalled, Robbins had given up on the white vs. Black theme; Joe Grifasi [b. 1944] played the guide and Thomas Ikeda the porter, still unfortunately referred to as the “coolie.” But Brecht’s warning about the dangers of unlimited power remained — and not just in the coda, during which planted actors rose from the audience to sing about revolution. Robbins himself was a warning about unlimited power.

“Working with Jerry was torture,” Mostel said. “Thomas Ikeda literally passed out in my arms in rehearsal, from exhaustion. At our last show, Bernstein fell down the stairs trying to get out of there. Jerry was nasty even to Guare, a very sweet guy. He was so controlling and paranoid he wouldn’t tell us what time the performances were until right before they started.

“But I have to say the songs were brilliant. And the book was one of the best of any musical I’d been in. Some friends brought a 6-year-old to the show, and he said, ‘Is that all?’ — which is a pretty good review. It should have moved forward, and the reason it didn’t is that no one could stand Jerry.”

That’s a shame; a musical exploring the prerogatives of class (and the power imbalances inherent in the theater) would be exceedingly timely now. At one point, Sondheim has a police officer sing proudly of his beat, “Thirty natives and all so quiet,” to which his partner replies, “Thirty-seven before the riot.”

That’s a lyric that needs no alteration to work as satire, or tragedy — or at any rate a stageworthy bit of Lehr — in 2020.

[Readers of Rick On Theater may note that I’ve mentioned the Brecht play The Measures Taken in a number of posts.  It was produced in New York City by the experimental theater troupe Shaliko in 1974 and I used it as an illustration in my discussion “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” posted on 25 September 2013. 

[After try-outs in Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, the groundbreaking Broadway production of West Side Story opened at the Winter Garden Theatre (at 50th Street and Broadway) on 26 September 1957 and ran 732 performances before closing on 27 June 1959, a year and nine months later. 

[The production was nominated for five Tony Awards in 1958, including Best Musical (WSS lost to The Music Man), and won two (Best Scenic Design for Oliver Smith and Best Choreography for Robbins; the production also won Carol Lawrence, who played Maria, a Theatre World Award.

[Unlike the other Broadway attempts that didn’t make it to opening covered by this series, A Pray by Blecht was never even seen by a public audience.  The Lincoln Center workshop, performed as The Race to Urga before an invited audience, occurred in April and May 1987.

[Next in “Unopened” (7 March): “The Bob Dylan musical that tried to find a way—way before ‘Girl From the North Country.’”]

"Unopened": 'Face Value'

 

[Alexis Soloski’s article about David Henry Hwang’s 1993 comedy Face Value, the second installment in the “Unopened” series, which the paper dubbed “The curious history of shows aimed for Broadway that never got to opening night,” appeared in the print edition of the New York Times “Arts” section on 2 November 2020.  The online version of the story, called “David Henry Hwang’s ‘M. Butterfly’ Followup: ‘M. Turkey,’” was posted on 1 November 2020.

[The articles in this series are not connected—except for the fact that they’re each about a play that failed to open on Broadway—but it’s interesting to compare the circumstances of the plays under examination.  If readers are interested in keeping up and haven’t read the previous entry in the series, I suggest going back to 26 February and reading “‘Unopened’: Lone Star Love.”]

“FARCE THAT COULDN’T GET OUT OF ITS OWN WAY”
by Alexis Soloski

The goal: a comedy about mistaken racial identity inspired by protests over “Miss Saigon.” The result: a backstage farce that never got to opening night.

David Henry Hwang’s “Face Value” arrived on Broadway on March 9, 1993. It left five days later. For Gina Torres [b. 1969], an actress in that production, the news came as a relief. “Because we were pushing that stone uphill for a good long time,” she said.

“Face Value,” Hwang’s follow-up to the Tony Award-winning “M. Butterfly,” was a farce — and not entirely in the ways that Hwang [b. 1957] and Jerry Zaks [b. 1946], the play’s director, intended.

In 1990, Hwang, the first Asian-American to win a playwriting Tony, joined members of Actor’s Equity in objecting to the casting of Jonathan Pryce [Welsh actor, b. 1947] as a Eurasian character in the Broadway production of “Miss Saigon.” Equity rejected the casting.

When the producer Cameron Mackintosh [b. 1946] canceled the production, the union reversed the rejection, stipulating that Pryce could perform provided Asian-American actors were sought as replacements and that Pryce no longer used eye prosthetics or skin darkening bronzer as he had in London.

Hwang took the loss as only a playwright can. He went to work on “Face Value,” a comedy of mistaken racial anxiety that modeled on the farces of Michael Frayn [British dramatist, b. 1933] and Joe Orton [British dramatist, 1933-67]. It centers on a new musical, “The Real Fu Manchu,” and the pair of Asian-American actors, Randall and Linda, who plan to protest it on opening night at the Imperialist Theater.

“Fu Manchu” has cast a white actor in the title role and it includes a big number called “He’s Inscrutable,” so there’s a lot to protest. “It’s racist, sexist, imperialist, misogynist — and I didn’t even get an audition,” Randall complains.

Set largely backstage, “Face Value” crammed in yellowface, whiteface, gun play, Pirandellian asides, crisscrossing sexual complications and various people hiding in closets.

“I remember finishing the first draft and feeling well, this is going to need a lot of development,” Hwang recalled this summer.

But the producer Stuart Ostrow signed on immediately. Other producers, including Scott Rudin, soon followed. Zaks assembled a tiptop cast — Mark Linn-Baker [b. 1954] as the white actor playing Fu Manchu; Jane Krakowski [b. 1968] as a dithery actress; a then-unknown Torres as a put-upon stage manager; Mia Korf [b. 1965] as Linda. (BD Wong [b. 1960], who had won a Tony for “M. Butterfly,” later joined as Randall.)

Two million dollars were raised. Rehearsals began.

“It all came together probably too quickly,” Hwang said. “I was hubristic. I felt like, ‘Oh, I can fix it in four weeks, and then an out-of-town tryout in Boston.’ And I couldn’t.”

Torres remembers the first night of the Boston tryout. “Nobody laughed,” she said.

Frantic rewriting began, with new lines, new cuts, new scenes arriving nearly every day. “We might have cut intermission at one point,” Torres said, “like we’re going to hit them fast and furious and not give a chance to leave.”

It was an exhausting process — physically, emotionally. The play opened on Valentine’s Day to reviews that were less than loving. Hwang recalls one that ran with the headline “M. Turkey.”

But “M. Butterfly” also hadn’t done especially well out-of-town. So the producers made a decision to move forward. Torres remembered the excitement of walking by the Cort Theater and seeing her name on the posters. “We thought: ‘Oh, now we’re in New York. We can turn this around because New York has a more diverse audience. They’re waiting for us,’” she said.

Hwang began another round of revisions. Decades on, he couldn’t recall exactly what changed. “I’ve probably blocked a lot of that,” he said. But a New York Times article reported a new beginning and a new ending.

Somehow these made the play worse. The Boston script, Hwang said, at least had a certain singleness of purpose. The New York one, rewritten in desperation, did not. And it wasn’t any funnier.

Torres thinks that has more to do with content than with comedy. “It really made you look at the absurdity of color and how we perceive it in human beings, which is I believe, ultimately what killed us,” she said. She often wonders how it would play today.

“Face Value” shuttered after eight previews, with the producers, in a Times article, citing “a lack of box-office interest.” The actors moved on. Torres finally made her Broadway debut a year later with the barely longer lived “The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public.” (“What it ain’t got is fun,” the Times critic wrote.)

It would take another decade for a Broadway show to close during previews, the Farrah Fawcett-starring [actress, principally film and television, 1947-2009; aka: Farrah Fawcett-Majors] “Bobbi Boland.”

Hwang moved on, too. “I can compartmentalize pretty well,” he said. But the idea of mistaken racial identity continued to nag at it him. He revisited it years later in the Obie-winning “Yellow Face,” a semi-autobiographical comedy that also took on the “Miss Saigon” controversy as well as newer strains of anti-Asian racism.

In “Yellow Face,” a character known as DHH mounts a Broadway play called “Face Value.” It flops in this fiction, too.

That real-life debacle bruised Hwang’s ego and deflated his boy wonder reputation. It didn’t keep him away from Broadway. He has had five further shows there, plus a 2017 “M. Butterfly” revival.

“Having a play close in previews on Broadway would generally be considered one of the worst things that can happen to your career, and it is, but I survived it,” he said.

“The worst thing happened to me,” he added. “And I’m still here.”

[The première of Hwang’s M. Butterfly started previews at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre on 13 March 1988 and opened on 20 March.  It ran for nine previews and 777 regular performances, closing on 27 January 1990.  The production, directed by John Dexter and starring John Lithgow and BD Wong, won 1988 Tony Awards for Best Play, Best Featured Actor in a Play (Wong) and Best Direction of a Play (Dexter), and was nominated for four other Tonys.

[The production also won 1988 Drama Desk Awards for Outstanding New Play, Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play (Wong), and Outstanding Director of a Play (Dexter), and the Theatre World Award for Wong.  Hwang was nominated for the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

[The play was revived on Broadway in 2017 under the direction of Julie Taymor.  Starring Clive Owen and Jin Ha, the revival ran 61 performances.

[The Broadway première of Claude-Michel Schönberg; Alain Boublil; and Richard Maltby, Jr.’s musical Miss Saigon opened at the Broadway Theatre on 11 April 1991, having started previews on 23 March.  It ran for 19 previews and 4,092 regular performances, closing on 28 January 2001.  The production was staged by Nicholas Hytner and Bob Avian did the musical staging.

[The principal performers in New York City and London were Lea Salonga and Jonathan Pryce.  The Broadway production won three performance Tony Awards (Best Actor in a Musical – Pryce; Best Actress in a Musical – Salonga; Best Featured Actor in a Musical – Hinton Battle), four Drama Desk Awards, and a Theatre World Award.  There was a Broadway revival of Miss Saigon in 2017-18.

[Hwang’s Face Value began previews at Broadway’s Cort Theatre on 9 March 1993 and ran for eight preview performances, closing on 14 March.  Directed by Jerry Zaks, it was scheduled to open on 21 March.

[Bobbi Boland by Nancy Hasty premièred Off-Broadway at the Arclight Theatre (on the Upper West Side of Manhattan) on 1 March; it ran to 10 July 2001 with staging by Evan Bergman; playwright Hasty played the title role.  

[A Broadway production directed by David Esbjornson, scheduled to open 24 November 2003 with Farrah Fawcett in the lead, opened for previews at the Cort Theatre on 4 November and closed on 9 November after 7 performances.  The producer stated that “the play simply does not work in a Broadway house,” according to the New York Times.

[Yellow Face premièred at the Joseph Papp Public Theater’s Martinson Hall on 10 December 2007 after starting previews on 19 November.  It ran until 13 January 2008 under the direction of Leigh Silverman. With Hoon Lee and Noah Bean as the leads, Yellow Face won an Obie Award in Playwriting for Hwang; he earned his third Pulitzer Prize nomination for Drama for the play.

[In the play, which is semi-autobiographical, Hoon Lee played a fictional character called DHH, which stands for “David Henry Hwang.”  Francis Jue (whom I saw in Cambodian Rock Band, see my report on 14 March 2020) played HYH, a fictionalized stand-in for Henry Yuan Hwang, the playwright’s father.

[Next in “Unopened” (4 March): “Bernstein, Robbins, Sondheim and . . . Brecht?  Almost, but not quite.”]

"Unopened": 'Lone Star Love'"

[“Shows stumble and fall on the way to Broadway all the time,” writes Lisa Birnbach, an author of several books who also wrote for the Village Voice and writes for the New York Times and other periodicals, in the article below. As the proverb goes, “There’s many a slip ’twixt cup and lip.” 

[On Sunday, 1 November 2020, the New York Times inaugurated a short series in response to the many closings and non-openings of stage productions caused by the coronavirus shut-down of New York City’s theaters that started in March. A number of shows hadn’t made it to previews and stopped rehearsing when the theaters closed on 12 March 2020; others were in previews but closed before officially opening. 

[Within weeks or months, several of those productions announced that they wouldn’t resume preparations or performances, such as Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” starring Laurie Metcalf and Rupert Everett that closed at the Booth Theatre after nine previews; the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Broadway revival of How I Learned to Drive by Pulitzer Prize-winner Paula Vogel didn’t even make it to previews, which were scheduled to begin at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on 27 March 2020. 

[In “Unopened,” the Times is looking at plays scheduled for Broadway runs before the pandemic struck and still didn’t make it to opening. Of the five shows profiled in the series, some closed out of town during try-outs and others closed during New York previews. In its introduction to the series, which I’ll be posting in order, the paper’s editors wrote: 

Among the casualties of the current Broadway shutdown are shows in previews that will never officially open, as well as those whose futures are still in limbo. This series is looking at the curious history of five other shows aimed for Broadway that never got to opening night. 

[The Times started “Unopened” in the “Arts & Leisure” section of the Sunday paper and ran it on five consecutive days in the print edition. The first article, below, reports the fate of 2004’s Lone Star Love, an up-dated and musicalized adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. (The online series started on Thursday, 29 October 2020, then skipped to 1 November and finished on the three succeeding days. The web version of this report is entitled “A Not-So-Merry Mix: Shakespeare, Bluegrass and Randy Quaid.”) I’ll be spreading the articles out a little more than that.] 

“SHAKESPEARE’S BLUEGRASS TRAGEDY” 

by Lisa Birnbach 

The Broadway marquee was up, but this crowd-pleasing musical never made it out of Seattle. Among the creative differences: How fat should Falstaff be? 

Among the casualties of the current Broadway shutdown are shows in previews that will never officially open, as well as those whose futures are still in limbo. This series is looking at the curious history of five other shows aimed for Broadway that never got to opening night. 

Shows stumble and fall on the way to Broadway all the time. Then there’s “Lone Star Love,” which after nearly two decades as a regional-theater staple, finally crashed thanks to the mercurial behavior of its star, which resulted in his lifetime banishment from Actors’ Equity. 

The actor: Randy Quaid [b. 1950], who with his wife/manager, Evi Quaid [b. 1963], has since been in the news largely for brushes with the law. Today, almost 13 years after its aborted Broadway opening, the creators of the show are reluctant to speak the names of the couple at the center of the cancellation. 

He is “the actor who caused an unbelievable fracas,” or simply “that actor”; she is known as “her.” 

Flash back, though, to happier times, when “Lone Star Love” was simply a bouncy Texas-set updating of Shakespeare’s “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” complete with bluegrass music. 

Its origin story begins in 1973 with John Haber [b. 1948], a young graduate of the University of North Carolina who returned home to Chapel Hill with an M.F.A. in directing from New York University’s Tisch School. The local troupe Everyman Company asked him to direct “Henry IV, Part I” at the outdoor Forest Theater on the Chapel Hill campus. 

They wanted to cast the banjoist Tommy Thompson [1937-2003], a member of the local bluegrass band Red Clay Ramblers, as Falstaff, the portly friend of Prince Hal in the drama. Falstaff, as you may remember, was a vain rogue said to be Shakespeare’s own favorite character. 

Haber thought that the comic Falstaff from “The Merry Wives of Windsor” was better suited for the company’s mostly amateur cast. So he modernized and set the production in Windsor, Texas, post-Civil War. The band played incidental music from the side of the stage, and at the curtain call performed “Happy Trails.” 

[“Happy Trails” is a song released in 1952 by cowboy entertainers Roy Rogers (1911-98) and wife Dale Evans (1912-2001) that became the enduring theme song for their radio program (1944-55) and television show (1951-57).]

As a noble, Falstaff is an outlier, but “‘The Merry Wives of Windsor’ is Shakespeare’s only play about common people,” Haber explained recently. “After the Civil War, Texans started making money as cattle ranchers, just [the way] wealth was being accumulated in England in the 15th century. And I could picture John Falstaff as a southern colonel.” 

When Haber moved back to New York, he joined the Dodgers, a producing entity, and worked on other shows. The Red Clay Ramblers came to have a higher profile as well, releasing several albums and touring internationally. 

The play’s journey restarted in 1987, when the renowned Alley Theater of Houston asked the Ramblers if they had any ideas for a show they might bring to the venue. The band had just performed there (and in New York) in Sam Shepard’s “A Lie of the Mind.” Thompson remembered the Texas-set “Merry Wives” he had once done, and called his old friend Haber. 

The Ramblers wrote a full score of music and lyrics, and Haber made changes in the script that combined Elizabethan language with cowpoke action. The musicians played Col. John Falstaff’s wingmen, held up props, and generally added to the merriment of the enterprise. 

The Repertory Theater of St. Louis put it on the following year. From there the show meandered — the Players Theater in Columbus, Ohio; Duke University; the Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. 

It was a bona fide regional theater crowd-pleaser. Next stop? New York. 

Workshops were organized in 1996, and in 1999, with Jim Belushi [b. 1954] as Falstaff. “We loved him — he was great,” said the composer, Jack Herrick [b. 1969] of the Red Clay Ramblers. Unfortunately, Belushi had commitments to his ABC-TV series [probably According to Jim, 2001-9, of which Belushi was executive producer] and couldn’t stay with the musical, which was now called “Lone Star Love; or, the Merry Wives of Windsor, Texas.” 

It took five more years, but “Lone Star Love” finally opened at the John Houseman Theater Off Broadway, under the auspices of AMAS Musical Theater. The production was immersive before that became so trendy; audience members were ushered to the stage where the cast served up a barbecue meal. (Some thought that was too country, but when the 2019 Broadway revival of “Oklahoma!” did something similar it was considered brilliant.) 

Jay O. Sanders [b. 1953], a New York stage stalwart, portrayed Falstaff Off Broadway. Beth Leavel [b. 1955] played one of the merry wives. “Pleasant, competent, thoroughly innocuous” were some of the phrases Charles Isherwood used in his Dec. 9, 2004 New York Times review. 

Still, “Lone Star Love” had a lot going for it: words by Shakespeare, a familiar plot, charming music and, most important, investors who were willing to put money into it. 

They included the seasoned Broadway producer Bob Boyett [b. 1942], as well as Ed Burke [b. 1943?], a newly retired businessman from Chapel Hill. He had just sold his company and wanted to get into the producing game. He flew to New York to take a three-day seminar to learn how. Given his North Carolina provenance, the instructor introduced him to “Lone Star Love.” 

That the creators were fellow Tar Heels felt promising. “Living in North Carolina,” Burke told me over the phone recently, “I was country come to town. But I got hooked. 

“I went to opening night, I wrote a check, and I met Bob Boyett, the lead producer,” he added. Before long, he and his wife, Eleanor, were writing checks frequently. 

A cast album was recorded and the show was nominated for best musical by both the Outer Critics Circle and Lucille Lortel awards. Though it didn’t win, it had momentum, and after closing Off Broadway in 2005 the producers had Broadway in mind as the next logical step. 

Boyett suggested that John Rando (“Urinetown”) come aboard to direct. (His eventual credit was creative supervisor; Randy Skinner [b. 1952] was the director/choreographer). He also called in Robert Horn (who later won the Tony for “Tootsie”) to co-write the book. 

The gang realized they needed a higher profile star for Broadway. In 2007 Rando and Horn met with Randy Quaid at the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills. In 2005 the actor, a native Texan, had been Emmy nominated for playing Col. Tom Parker in a mini-series about Elvis Presley. The same year he had a choice movie role in “Brokeback Mountain.” 

Despite a career filled with distinguished performances, though, he was still best known as Cousin Eddie from the “National Lampoon’s Vacation” movies. This musical Falstaff would mark his Broadway debut. 

“He was smart and understood where we were going,” Horn said of the meeting. “It was a lovefest — we thought we’d found the perfect fit.” 

Looking back, Burke said, “Boy, did we pick the wrong horse.” 

That August, after some New York rehearsals, the production moved to Seattle’s Fifth Avenue Theater for a pre-Broadway tryout, with the New York opening scheduled for December. (“Hairspray” had gone to Broadway from the same theater.) In order to procure Quaid for the gig, he was given an unusual amount of creative approval. 

Problem No. 1: the fat suit. According to Burke, Quaid, on the advice of his wife, refused to wear it for the role. 

“Not only did our script contain references to Falstaff as a fat man — I counted eight at the time,” Burke recalled, “Jack had even written a production number called ‘Fat Man Jump.’ ” 

Instead the couple suggested, over many objections, that Falstaff should wear a “gigantic codpiece,” as it was described to me. An actor from the Seattle company remembers a crack that was shared among the performers: “It looks like he’s wearing his understudy in his underpants.” 

Participants in the Seattle production were generally loath to be quoted on the tryout, but did provide glimpses of the turmoil as captured in emails from the Quaids to the creative team. 

“With all the deceit going on and lack of paying key creative elements for the production Randy’s contract being unethicly [sic] passed around, he has no trust in the working process he does not agree to any changes,” read one note from Evi Quaid. “He no longer trusts the creative teams [sic] agenda or to Honor his contractual rights in this production. He is not willing to make changes in the script.” 

As friction grew between the Quaids and everyone else, life in Windsor, Texas, became far from merry. One day Horn said he went to the Quaids’ hotel room to talk over line changes. “Mr. Quaid was agreeing with me and showing me respect,” he recalled, “but Mrs. Quaid didn’t like the fact that he was trying to find a middle ground. 

“The nice conversation descended into chaos,” he added. “I got out of that room. It was the last time I ever spoke to them.” 

Stories of misbehavior flew out of Seattle and into the New York tabloids. 

“Jack [Herrick] and John [Haber] suffer from the fact that I was not a New York producer,” Burke recalled. “If you write enough checks you can call yourself a producer. But we had an unmanageable situation. Our contract wouldn’t allow us to hire another actor. It guaranteed that Randy Quaid would take the role on Broadway.” 

When it became clear that “Lone Star Love” with Randy Quaid could not transfer to Broadway, a closing notice was posted, per union requirements. Quaid’s understudy performed as Falstaff for the final two weeks. 

Twenty-three members of the cast and crew formally complained to Actors’ Equity about the actor’s behavior, on and offstage. After a Los Angeles hearing to review the complaint, he was banned from the union for life and fined $81,000 [about $105,000 today] — two weeks’ pay for the other members of the company. 

[Correction – Nov. 10, 2020: An earlier version of this article, relying on information from one of the show’s producers, described incorrectly the timing and purpose of an $81,000 payment. The producers Ed and Eleanor Burke made the payment as severance to members of the show’s company before it closed, not to pay a fine by Actors’ Equity against Randy Quaid. —New York Times] 

In a 2008 article in Backstage magazine, Quaid shared a letter indicating that he had chosen to resign, saying the union “tolerates racism and mounts witch-hunts and McCarthyism.” 

The marquee was already up at the Belasco Theater on Broadway, but the show never made the move. The New York Times reported the shutdown briefly: “Over the past few weeks, Mr. Quaid’s wife, Evi Quaid, said, there had been backstage bickering between the Quaids and one of the show’s producers, Ed Burke. Mr. Quaid had negotiated an unusually high degree of creative approval for the show, and there were disagreements about his interpretation of his character, who is based on Falstaff.” “How do you take a fornicator, an adulterer, an alcoholic and an identity thief and make a family show around him?” Quaid was quoted as saying. (Efforts to reach the actor and his wife for this article through their lawyers in Vermont, Virginia and Los Angeles were unsuccessful, as was outreach through their social media channels.) 

Boyett, the lead producer, remembers things a bit differently. 

“The cast wasn’t the biggest consideration for me as a producer,” he said by telephone. “I don’t really blame the Quaids. When we closed the show out of town we thought we should rest the property. The timing wasn’t good. And then we all were busy with other things.” 

Subsequently, the Quaids were charged with vandalism on their former California home and for failing to appear in court while on bail. (The office of the Santa Barbara district attorney confirmed this week that the charges were still outstanding.) In recent interviews and on social media they’ve attested to the presence of what they call “Starwhackers” — a cabal of people who are out to kill celebrities. 

Almost 30 years since he first got involved with what promised to be a lighthearted romp, Herrick of the Red Clay Ramblers remains philosophical about the experience. 

“You can’t hold your breath for Broadway,” he said, chuckling over the phone from Chapel Hill. “Work has continued on that show, and the producers have abiding faith in it.” 

[Readers of Rick On Theater may recall that on 14 April 2010, I posted an article on “Camino Real, The Musical,” an abortive 1976 attempt by a Buffalo, New York, theater company to develop a musical adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play from 1953. As with some of the plays in the New York Times series, it never made it out of the starting gate. 

[But I had a somewhat closer connection to a play putatively on its way to New York City and Broadway that never quite got here. I wasn’t in it or even associated with the show, but I was acquainted with several people who were—and I was a grad school classmate of the playwright. 

[Neil Cuthbert (b. 1951) was a Master of Fine Arts candidate in playwriting at the Rutgers University School of Fine and Performing Arts, now officially christened the Mason Gross School of the Arts. I was there for an acting MFA from 1975 to 1977; I believe Neil completed his degree in 1976. 

[Neil was one of a small group of MFA students at Rutgers who had essentially completed their degree requirements before the MFA was officially authorized by the university’s board of governors in 1975. (Another was actor Avery Brooks, about whom I’ve written recently; see “Some Out-Of-Town Plays from the Archive: Othello,” posted on Rick On Theater on 22 December 2020.) 

[Dubbed “shadow MFA’s,” Neil and his contemporaries had to remain in residence in the newly-formed school of the arts one more year to fulfill the administrative requirements for the MFA.. (I was part of the first class to enter the arts school after the degree was fully accredited.) 

[One of the things Neil had to accomplish was present his thesis play and then defend the thesis itself. The play was a script called Hot Potatoes and it was part of a spring repertory of three plays performed by the MFA acting company in April and May 1976. (The other two plays in the rep were Anton Chekhov’s The Wood Demon, staged by actor David Margulies [1937-2016], and Joseph A. Walker’s The River Niger, which Avery directed.) 

[Because Neil had been around the theater program for a time before the MFA was official—I think all the shadow MFA’s had been undergrads in the theater program at Rutgers’ Douglass College, the seed of the graduate program—he’d already written plays and one, The Soft Touch, had been staged at Rutgers in 1974 and went on the win the American College Theater Festival’s Best New Play Award, for which it received a performance at Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts’ Eisenhower Theater. 

[The play’s director was Jack Bettenbender, who died in 1988 at 67 and was the head of the program (which he also devised), and the designer was Joe Miklojcik, the theater program’s TD, with both of whom I later worked. Several cast members were still in or around the program when I was in residence. 

[The play was optioned by Gene Persson in association with Ted Chapin and Pangloss Productions for a Broadway run. It was scheduled to open at the John Golden Theatre (demolished in 1985) on 21 September 1975 under the direction of Alan Arkin; the stars were Lenny Baker, Richard Libertini, Josh Mostel, and Jo Anne Meredith. 

[Kevin Kelly in the Boston Globe declared that a description of the play “makes it sound better than it is” and dubbed it a “truly sophomoric piece of theater.” The Soft Touch closed in Boston on 13 September after a two‐week run at the Wilbur Theatre. 

[With respect to Lone Star Love, the production at UNC that started the project to musicalize Merry Wives was called The Merry Wives of Windsor, Texas and ran at the Forest Theatre at Chapel Hill in the summer of 1973. The Off-Broadway première of the play, now entitled Lone Star Love, was staged at the John Houseman Theatre on Theatre Row from 8 December 2004 to 6 February 2005 (previews started on 21 November 2004) under the direction of Michael Bogdanov. The limited-run production was nominated for two 2005 Lucille Lortel Awards (Outstanding Musical and Outstanding Choreographer) and a 2005 Outer Critics Circle Award (Outstanding New Off-Broadway Musical). 

[The Seattle try-out of Lone Star Love opened at the Fifth Avenue Theatre on 8 September 2007 and closed on the 30th. The abortive Broadway première had been scheduled to open at the Balasco Theatre (now the New Victory Theatre), on 42nd Street west of Broadway on 3 December 2007 after starting previews on 1 November. The producers announced the cancelation of the Broadway engagement on 24 September. 

[Next in “Unopened” (1 March): “A comedy of mistaken racial identity inspired by ‘Miss Saigon’ crashes and burns.”]