Yes, The Gospel at Colonus, my bad. It was when it was at BAM that it was in competition with Sunday and La Cage. And I did like it at BAM. Never saw it at the Lunt-Fontanne.
It's not so much that I have a problem with the source material for most of Herman's shows, but still they are not ambitious in the way that Sondheim's choices were. (Of course, it's understood that many of the ideas for those shows did not originate with Sondheim.) In fact, at one Sondheim almost worked on a musical version of The Madwoman of Chaillot that Bob Fosse was to direct, with a book by S. N. Behrman, and the Lunts starring as the Countess and the Ragpicker.
Musicalizing Auntie Mame in particular seems an unambitious idea, and the execution, however successful at the time, seems to mostly water down the source material.
The Matchmaker Is a good piece of source material, but it's also an obvious one, which cannot be said of any of the shows on which Sondheim worked.
More important, Herman's collaborators do not seem to have stimulated him in the way that Sondheim's collaborators stimulated him. So even when Herman was inspired enough on his own to produce his best work for Mack and Mabel, his collaborators seem to have been lost.
I don't think that the second act of Sunday is exactly meant to be jarring but when you jump ahead 100 years and bring in a completely new group of characters for Act Two, the writers must know it's going to jar people, even if they also try to make it feel inevitable.
I do think that the second act is meant to be a completion. Personally, I felt that much more when the original production had Groener and Plunkett as the leads, and at the Kennedy Center (even if there were things that I didn't much care for in the production), than at the Roundabout production, although I did see that's what they were going for.
I completely forgot about America's Sweetheart. Thank you for the reminder.
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