| re: When Superman Briefly Flew on Broadway | |
| Posted by: AlanScott 07:24 pm EDT 08/12/20 | |
| In reply to: re: When Superman Briefly Flew on Broadway - Chromolume 06:20 pm EDT 08/12/20 | |
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| I think I've posted here about it seeming to me when I saw the show as an 8-year-old in May 1966 that "Ooh, Do You Love You!" got a really big response, more than "You've Got Possibilities." I like Lois's songs, except that they have too much of Lee Adams's penchant for rhyming the final syllables of three-syllable words. I remember Patricia Marand getting a nice laugh with "A guy with both feet on the ground." I hope this isn't just my imagination but there's no way for me to go back and check. :) But it is an odd show. Jack Cassidy as Max Menken got star billing, and that caused problems, according to Prince. Cassidy really didn't like it when his role started to get cut down after they opened badly in Philadelphia. They were cutting generally, but Cassidy kept suggesting new lines to replace the ones that were being cut and doing this in front of the cast, forcing Prince to say no in front of everyone. Which didn't stop Cassidy, who kept doing it (according to Prince). The actress originally cast as Lois, Joan Hotchkiss, was fired in Philadelphia, although nothing negative was said about her in any of the reviews I can find. When Prince revised and updated Contradictions as Sense of Occasion, he added later thoughts to the original chapters, putting those additions at the ends of the original chapters. One of the additions that struck me as strange was this: "I chose Patricia Marand as Lois Lane, and it was pluperfect casting." Strange just because she wasn't his first choice (or I assume she wasn't, although I suppose it's possible that they asked her and she wasn't available, and then she became available and they fired Hotchkiss). Anyway, Prince loved Linda Lavin's talent. With Max Menken getting star billing, and the show having two comic villains and being geared to comedy, it made sense to have those two numbers there (given Lavin's relationship with Max), and of course they were crowd-pleasers. Lavin was already favored by Prince, who kept giving her small bits when he took over A Family Affair, which seems to have been somewhat resented by some in the company. (I base that last on what a member of the company said at a talkback when Mufti did A Family Affair.) Lavin had just gotten raves for The Mad Show, which she left immediately for Superman. She was definitely an up-and-comer. Anyway, between the Philly opening and the Broadway opening they got rid of Lois’s rather lachrymose and self-pitying first song “A Woman Alone” (and Strouse adapted the melody with adjustments in Dance a Little Closer). Lois’s “It’s Superman” is an improvement (and I’m just realizing that this is similar to what had been done with “Lovely” during the Forum tryout). And where she had “I’m Not Finished Yet” was something listed as “I”m Too Young to Die,” which suggests that the lyric was replaced but the music remained the same. So one of her three solos was replaced, and another seems to have been reworked in a way that suggests she was made more defiant and less of a victim. And in a show in which no character is musically dominant, she gets three solos (all of them, admittedly, on the short side) and a duet in which she is equal to her partner and tells him that he’s all wrong about everything. And Patricia Marand was a marvelous singer. God, those orchestrations! No matter how often I listen to the cast recording, I never cease to marvel at them. |
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