| re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures | |
| Last Edit: AlanScott 04:35 am EST 12/31/18 | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 04:29 am EST 12/31/18 | |
| In reply to: re: ‘‘Tis the season; of “Here’s Love”’s unsung small treasures - Jax 03:13 am EST 12/28/18 | |
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| Well, I’ve never even listened to the whole cast recording. I find much of what I have heard to be unbearable. The stuff that’s discussed in the quotes in the Suskin book does interest me, as history, not as music. It's true that the show has been done as a holiday show at various theaters over the years, but my impression, which may be wrong, is that that’s a relatively recent development, and that for a long time it was not done much. My impression is that when the title was changed to Miracle on 34th Street: The Musical, it started to get done. It's certainly true that it's been done more than I Had a Ball, which was never licensed, or Bajour, which think I was never licensed, although I'm not so sure that it's been done more than High Spirits, which has shown up a bit over the years. As for the tour, it was a short tour, only four months, and most of the venues it played were heavily sold on subscriptions. It played the three venues where the Edwin Lester-Civic Light Opera shows were then playing in California, and it played in Dallas at the State Fair Music Hall. It did well enough in the houses that were heavily sold on subscriptions (although really just passably in San Francisco), but I think that the reasons why a marginal show toured or didn’t tour may have less to do with popularity than with whether the producer was determined to make a tour happen and sometimes whether there was a cast with some drawing power interested in touring (if it’s a star show). In the case of Here’s Love, it had Meredith Willson and the source material, which made it viable case for some sort of tour, especially since it seems that Edwin Lester wanted it for his Los Angeles and San Francisco Civic Light Operas. Without that interest from Lester, I suspect there would not have been a tour. And a few years later, Willson's final show, 1491, played for Lester's Los Angeles and San Francisco Civic Light Operas, theoretically before Broadway but the reviews were dismal, and that was it. Oddly, the Here's Love tour closed just before Christmas. You’d think it would have booked some sort of Christmas run in Chicago or Boston, but perhaps no theatres were available at that time by the time they were booking the tour. I think that if Bea Lillie had been up to touring, High Spirits could have and would have toured, but she was in bad shape, although she did do a couple of short runs of the show in stock shortly after the Broadway run. High Spirits did have a London production, which Here’s Love did not get, although High Spirits was not a success in London, where it got very negative reviews. Reading reviews of Here’s Love, it does seem like it probably was better in performance than it seems to most of us on the recording. The book seems to have played reasonably well, and the supporting cast of character actors carried it along (and even the replacement character actors carried it along). I Had a Ball and Bajour were part of the strange 1964-65 season, where there was an unusual number of also-ran musicals that managed runs of six months to a year, but only one big hit. Everything else closed at a loss, although Half a Sixpence paid off due to the two touring companies. Which shows how strange the whole touring thing could be. On Broadway, the show did not do very well without Tommy Steele, but they sent out two tours without him that did well enough to help the show pay off. Here's Love did not pay off. Really, I Had a Ball and Bajour have nothing that would make them financially attractive propositions to small theatre companies, but obviously Miracle on 34th Street: The Musical does. |
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