Flawed Musicals You'd Like To See Revised- Page 3

[Gaveston2]

Posted: 12/18/11 at 4:17pm

Thank you for the description, Sean. I don't need a video FANTASTICKS, since the show gets revived often enough in stock, but comparing the TV APPLAUSE to my memory of the OBC sounds like good holiday fun! I'll check it out.

***

henrik, there you go again with that eye for detail. Yes, we'll have to change the title if we set the story in Hollywood; maybe we'll call it FADE OUT, FADE IN, since sadly that title is so seldom used.

[iagowasframed]

Posted: 12/18/11 at 4:25pm

I agree completely. I love the score to Mack and Mabel but the book never quite works...but I don't think it needs a total rewrite just make it a little more cohesive....

[SingOutLouise2]

Posted: 12/18/11 at 6:19pm

I agree that MACK AND MABEL should be revised. The music is wonderful the book needs work.

[Gaveston2]

Posted: 12/18/11 at 7:31pm

Re MACK AND MABEL, I don't think Stewart's dialogue is a problem, but I agree the "book" doesn't work in the sense that "book" means the overall structure of the show.

The fact is Mack Sennett and Mabel Norman tried to make a go of it and failed. That's Act I.

For the rest of their lives their careers moved in opposite directions until her career was destroyed by scandal and her life was destroyed by drugs; so Act II of the existing show is just a series of contrivances to bring Mack and Mabel together to do... well, nothing really.

That's why I suggested a few pages back that an adapter should ignore history and invent a second act for characters who didn't really have one in real life.

Another choice would be to choose a different spot for the Act I curtain and end the show with Mack and Mabel's eventual break-up. But that seems rather a downer when the score, for the most part, is that of a musical comedy.

Jerry Herman has been quoted numerous times as saying the problem is Mabel's death at the climax. But I think the problems run deeper: if anything, I fear we've lost interest in Mabel by the time she dies. (If she didn't have a couple of great songs in Act II we'd have forgotten her entirely by the curtain.)

The theaters where I worked in Florida hired Ron Field to direct a production shortly after the show closed in NYC. Ron ended the show more or less as on Broadway, then had Mack repeat a line from earlier in the script: "What's the point of making movies if you can't change life?"

Ron then ended the show by repeating the entire overture as a huge Busby-Berkeley type spectacular in which Mack and Mabel get married and live happily ever after. (Michael Stewart hated it so much he flew back to France after the tech.)

I thought it was brilliant: the ending was upbeat, but in an ironic way because we knew it was only a fantasy contrasted with the reality of Mabel's sad end.

But it still didn't fix the fact that Mack and Mabel have almost no interaction in Act II.