Dude- The Musical: Fan Thread

[myshikobit]

Posted: 10/23/08 at 1:29pm

So, I'm an avid student of flop musicals, and my latest favorite is Dude, which was a 70's rock musical flop with music by the composers of Hair, in case you didn't know. Unfortunately, there isn't as much published info on Dude as there is Carrie the Musical. So, I'm posting this thread so that people with more information than myself on the show can teach me and other fans interesting facts, or pics of the set, etc.. I'm in love with the OBC, and I'd love to learn more about the show. Peace =)

[WithoutATrace]

Posted: 10/23/08 at 1:37pm

I know you're leavin' Dude. So long dude, so long dude, so long.

Wish I had been alive to see it.

[stagescreen]

Posted: 10/23/08 at 1:50pm

I'll help spread the DUDE love...

WAaaa Waaaa Waaaaa Waaaaaaa the Forest is on FIIIIIRe!


I love the DUDE album...love Nell Carter, and have to agree with Peter Filicia that it has one of the most exciting overtures in the canon. A pretty infectious score! I would love to hear what the show sounded like at the Broadway...

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 10/23/08 at 5:50pm

I missed out on this one but did catch Via Galactica. No idea what the hell was going up their on stage but the music was good

I have an old cassette of a demo plus an instrumental LP of more songs from it.Listen to it & it is hard to see why it flopped.

[InfiniteTheaterFrenzy]

Posted: 10/23/08 at 5:53pm

Count me in as a Dude fan. "Suzie Moooooon, Mooooooon."

Actually, I've found that there's plenty of material published about Dude the musical. There is a whole huge chapter on the original Broadway production in the book, Second Act Trouble : Behind the Scenes at Broadway's Big Musical Bombs, by Steven Suskin. Of course, there's analysis in Not Since Carrie. And the show is documented in almost every book written about the phenomenon of the musical Hair, including, I remember, Lorrie Davis' Letting Down My Hair: Two Years with the Love Rock Tribe--from Dawning to Downing of Aquarius. The original New York Times review is in one of the anthology books as well, but I'm sure you can access it easily online as well. I don't remember what the original liner notes were like; can anyone enlighten on that front?

Also, Dude is not by "the composers of Hair". Hair only had one composer, Galt MacDermot, and yes, he alone, also composed Dude, as well as the Tony- winning Two Gentlemen of Verona, the other post- Hair 70's flop Via Galactica, The Human Comedy (which I LOVE). Dude also has one librettist/ lyricist in common with Hair as Gerome Ragni and James Rado shared credit for both book and lyrics in Hair, and Ragni did the work on his own for Dude.

In conclusion, I love Dude. I am going to go listen to it now,

[InfiniteTheaterFrenzy]

Posted: 10/23/08 at 5:53pm

Count me in as a Dude fan. "Suzie Moooooon, Mooooooon."

Actually, I've found that there's plenty of material published about Dude the musical. There is a whole huge chapter on the original Broadway production in the book, Second Act Trouble : Behind the Scenes at Broadway's Big Musical Bombs, by Steven Suskin. Of course, there's analysis in Not Since Carrie. And the show is documented in almost every book written about the phenomenon of the musical Hair, including, I remember, Lorrie Davis' Letting Down My Hair: Two Years with the Love Rock Tribe--from Dawning to Downing of Aquarius. The original New York Times review is in one of the anthology books as well, but I'm sure you can access it easily online as well. I don't remember what the original liner notes were like; can anyone enlighten on that front?

Also, Dude is not by "the composers of Hair". Hair only had one composer, Galt MacDermot, and yes, he alone, also composed Dude, as well as the Tony- winning Two Gentlemen of Verona, the other post- Hair 70's flop Via Galactica, The Human Comedy (which I LOVE). Dude also has one librettist/ lyricist in common with Hair as Gerome Ragni and James Rado shared credit for both book and lyrics in Hair, and Ragni did the work on his own for Dude.

In conclusion, I love Dude. I am going to go listen to it now,

[sweeedboy]

Posted: 10/23/08 at 5:54pm

Where does one get the recordings for both Dude and Via Galactica? Are there legal versions not on LP?

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 10/23/08 at 5:55pm

Rado & Ragni also had their own off broadway flop . It was called "Rainbow" & it was all sung thru. Have a live recording of it I have not listened to in ages.

[folkyboy]

Posted: 10/23/08 at 7:27pm

I have "Dude" on CD. i think i got it from Amazon? but it's legal. although not entirely complete...

i only would've love to have seen the faces of the audience at the one performance when the dirt kept kicking up in the faces of the attendees at the Broadway Theatre. talk about tragically comic!

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 10/23/08 at 7:32pm

There was so much music written for this that the CD you speak of (I have it also) probably contains a fraction & God knows how many of the numbers on the CD were actually still in the show when it opened.

The amazing thing that the theater still looks as good as it does. It was where Cinerama originally premiered & was torn up for Dude & Candide

It still looks great in spite of this.

Updated On: 10/23/08 at 07:32 PM

[RentBoy86]

Posted: 10/23/08 at 8:38pm

I only remember about learning about "Dude" through my scenic design class. I'm going to go hunt for the CD for "Dude." I think I'd like it. And I wish there were pictures of the set design! Why doesn't Eugene Lee have his own design book or something?

[songanddanceman2]

Posted: 10/24/08 at 6:10am

Its a fun score but very flawed

here are some of the original reviews

Dude - Much Ado About Nothing
by Douglas Watt
New York Daily News - October 10, 1972


As you probably know, the Broadway Theatre has been practically turned inside out during the past few weeks to accommodate Dude (The Highway Life), a musical show that opened there last night. All things considered, wouldn't it have been simpler to rent an empty warehouse?

Dude is a boisterous, sprawling, unfocussed entertainment - a kind of half-baked allegory - bent on telling us in the broadest theatrical terms about growing pains, about life and love and the joy in simple pleasures. What it winds up as is an overblown recital of a few dozen songs, some of them pleasant, by Galt MacDermot (music) and Gerome Ragni (book and lyrics), two of the writers of Hair. Call this "Son of Hair" and too big for its britches.

The Broadway has been converted into an arena theater, the sets sloping down from mezzanine level to a matted round playing area, which is flanked by other seats and beyond which still more seats rise on the former stage. The band is spread out, brass and woodwinds on two levels at one side wall and strings far across against the other wall. There are also runways and lots of gear, including a block-and-tackle arrangement to transport players high into the air, even up through a hole in the ceiling itself.

This cluttered environment is dripping with microphones, many hanging over the scene like shiny tears, others hand-held with long cords trickling down the aisles and still others planted in aisle railings. In Tom O'Horgan's staging, the entire auditorium becomes a playground for the cast, whose voices boom, shriek and occasionally purr grandly from the many speakers.

Now there is no doubt that such gospel voices as those owned by Salome Bey, who is called Mother Earth, and Delores Hall, who is called Bread, are richly endowed instruments. And although Ralph Carter, who plays the young boy Dude, often gave me the odd impression of a kid imitating an adult, it must be admitted that he is a spirited little singer.

But throughout this wildly energetic but mostly lame evening I was more impressed than I probably should have been by the presence of two honest-to-goodness actors in the cast. They were William Redfield and Rae Allen, who played ham actors playing Adam and Eve, bickering parents of Dude and several other people I can't remember. They were very poorly treated by the inane dialogue and lyrics Ragni provided them with. But they acted out this poor stuff, finding in it a curious sort of conviction where there was none to begin with, and I felt both pained for them and full of admiration.

The mature Dude is played by Nat Morris, who gets to find a girl along the Highway of Life to writhe frustratedly on the floor, between his chattering, insensitive parents and to sing a couple of soul-type songs. Allan Nicholls plays a sort of guide named #33.

Randy Barcelo has designed many colorful, circusy costumes for the cast of men, women and children and O'Horgan himself has evidently attended to the lighting which seems, like the music, to come from everywhere.

Despite all the activity, Dude is a remarkably dull show most of the time, gaining momentum only toward the end when a couple of MacDermot's best tunes turn up. It struck me as being an extremely pretentious and juvenile affair and certainly not worth all the fuss.

[songanddanceman2]

Posted: 10/24/08 at 6:10am

A Young Man Named Dude
by Richard Watts
New York Post - October 10, 1972


At the Broadway Theater last night, where Dude was having its opening performance, those of us whose tickets were marked "foothill" had to do some climbing. There we found the playhouse interestingly transformed. In the center was a small round stage totally surrounded by members of the audience, some apparently located in the "valley" or on the "hill". Up and down the aisles the actors kept rushing while they clutched their microphones with the wires trailing behind.

Everything started promisingly. The first of the players descended from the ceiling on a trapeze, actors representing such positive and negative forces as Mother Earth, the Moon, Bread and Zero arrived, and I thought the scene was, as some of the dialogue suggested, the Garden of eden. It even seemed possible that Gerome Ragni, the author, was playing a dirty trick on Arthur Miller by bringing in ahead of him another play about the creation of the world.

Tom O'Horgan, the director, has employed a lot of ingenious ideas for staging and for a long time the ingenuity works. But eventually it becomes evident that in the process of production something has been overlooked. They forgot to include a play, and i felt it grew confusing in purpose. Dude has a subtitle, which is "The Highway Life" and it is one of the many things about a disappointing evening that puzzled me. What is a "highway life"?

I at least gathered that the narrative had to do with good, evil, the need for love, and the conflict between constructive and destructive urges in mankind. But the way in which it goes about making its points struck me as being more bewildering than illuminating. I'll cheerfully admit it may be my fault that, outside of knowing there is a young man named Dude, I found out little more about him. Is he perhaps a kind of modern Christ? There are good things, like the moment when two of the players start to do a scene from Shakespeare, but not enough of them.

One of the disappointments to me was galt MacDermot's rock score. Mr. MacDermot is one of our most brilliant of popular composers, as he has demonstrated in Hair, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and the incidental music for last year's Central Park production of Cymbeline. His songs for Dude are what used to be known in critical circles as "adequate," but my impression last night was that the songs were pleasant but commonplace, not at all the sort of superior modern music we expect from him.

the large cast includes such well known players as William Redfield and Rae Allen. All of them are talented, particularly Ralph Carter in the title role. But my favorite member of the company was a perky little stout black girl whose name I was unable to discover. Dude has an attractive home and it was undeniably a novelty, both of which may help it at the box office. But after the first half hour it made me unhappy.

[songanddanceman2]

Posted: 10/24/08 at 6:11am

Naive Pretensions of Dude
by Clive Barnes
The New York Times - October 10, 1972


nchoate energy has its attractions and there were big and powerful gobbets of theatricality hanging around all over the Broadway theater, where Dude made its bow last night. But this godson of Hair never quite makes it. Its pretensions are always clearer than its achievements, yet even those pretensions are not without a certain naiveté that might endear the show to come.

The music is by Galt MacDermot who, of course, composed Hair and the book and lyrics are by Gerome Ragni, who was that musicals co-author. And the staging is by Tom O'Horgan, who made history with the broadway version of that same hirsute phenomenon. But those wonderful folks who gave us Hair, here give us a brave try.

Nothing seems to have been done on a small scale. The interior of the theater has been ripped out and reconstructed to provide a new kind of auditorium, which I found attractive and versatile. The main stage - placed where the orchestra usually is - has become a kind of circus ring. Above the ring are trapezes hidden by greenery and the like. The actors run along rostrums, walk up aisles, while the orchestra is suspended right up in left field.

this type of staging is not particularly unusual, yet it does have a freshness for Broadway, and seems a real attempt to involve the entire audience for a big musical in a closer relationship with the cast than is customary. Mr. O'Horgan gives the show a roaring vitality, which, while occasionally overbearing, does have that gut-busting zest that has become O'Horgan's hallmark as a director. There is also an almost gothic sense of fantasy to his work; he has the manic imagination and innocence of a child indulging his nightmares in daylight.

Mr. Ragni is an artist of the same jib. But here the lack of discipline to that imagination, a freedom that proved so charming in Hair, chains the musical down instead of liberating it. In Hair the very aimlessness of the piece, its random poetry and shafts of insight could afford the luxury of a nonstructure because it was describing a life style that deliberately embraced nonstructured patterns as its aim. Dude, on the other hand, seems to be an allegory about "that great theater in the sky", and an allegory that is not clear, even on its primary level, is in no end of trouble.

The idea of Dude, or what I can make out of it, is both complex and simplistic. It is, I presume, an attempt to demonstrate once more that all the world's a stage and the actors Jesus-people at their symbolic heart. It is about the loss of innocence. God (or someone remarkably like him) is called #33 and enters the scene in approved deus ex machina manner from the sky. He is helped by three ecologically minded goddesses, Mother Earth, Bread, and Suzie Moon, and hindered by a bad guy Zero, with an entourage called Esso and Extra.

Two actors turn up, Reba and Harold, who are under the impression that they had been engaged to play in "Richard III". Willing to do anything for their art, they become Adam and Eve, are tempted by Zero, and have a little boy, Dude. Dude grows up, is tempted by some very strange brands of sex and drugs, and succumbs. Reba and Harold blame each other in their suburban home, but #33 comes on at the end, assures that life is just show business, Zero is defeated and the world is made safe for peace and innocence.

Apart from the primitive naiveté of the book the show's major thrust rests on MacDermot's music - loud, strident, over-amplified and yet often effectively powerful.

MacDermot's music is still basically rock, but it has more variety than it had in the days of Hair. Strong elements of gospel singing find their way into the score, together with more than a smidgen of country music. There are some passionately lyrical numbers here, especially those of #33's ecology matrons, yet the music never flies to those melodic pinnacles of hair.

This is the kind of show that has the cast sweating almost before it starts, and Mr. O'Horgan has deployed his forces with a military desperation in a situation never quite lost but never far from grim. The cast starts by running around the theater on some crazy, but oddly exciting marathon, and from then on the players work like galley slaves being chased by an unfriendly galley.

William Renfield and Rae Allen as the actors might well be playing in a different play, and have the worst written parts. It is to their credit that they play them with such expertise. Salome Bey, Delores Hall and Nell Carter are full-throated and huskily ecstatic as the ecological deities, Ralph Carter and a beautifully unself-conscious little boy, Nat Morris, excel as the two ages of Dude (Editors Note: Mr. Barnes seems to have confused Nat Morris and Ralph Carter; Carter played the boy Dude, and Morris the older Dude.), and Allan Nicholls deserves applause for his charm and a bronze for his long-distance running.

dude is described as "The Highway Life", and I suspect that it was not on the highway long enough. Another couple of weeks of previews might have made a vital difference to a musical that aspired high but fell short.

[songanddanceman2]

Posted: 10/24/08 at 6:11am

Loping and Groping
by Brendan Gill
The New Yorker - October 21, 1972



There are many kinds of failure in the theatre, some of them so attractive that at first glance they threaten to be mistaken for success. Dude, a musical bearing the subtitle "The Highway Life" , is not of this order; it fails in an open and particularly irritating way, being almost as meager in its talents as it is grandiose in its ambitions. The only attractive thing about it is the setting, which transforms the conventional interior of the Broadway Theater into an indoor-outdoor circus-cum-forest, with ropes, nets, movable platforms, and pathways running up hill and down dale, through what were once boxes and the bleakness of backstage. (From time to time, actors lope strenuously round these pathways, advancing with witless circularity over the highway life.) Aside from a couple of pros in the persons of William Redfield and Rae Allen, who give the impression of doing their best to accommodate themselves to an army of hooligans hamming it up at some rank Hackensack Amateur Night, the large cast is inept and mysteriously self-confident. It speaks and sings the mind-numbingly maladroit words of the book and lyrics as if they were Keatsian in style and Kantian in content. Peremptorily, they require of us in the audience that we dig it, man - an injunction that repels me quite as much as if Christopher Robin were to demand that I go skipping down to Buckingham Palace with him and Alice. Most of the cast is very young, and perhaps I should find it in my heart to be more forgiving of the self-satisfaction with which they mouth inanities that, so their tone indicates, they believe to be profundities. the musical is full of shallow generalizations about love and goodness and God and friendship and nature - in short, about everything-nothing, which is surely the least fruitful subject on earth. I would rather that somebody read aloud to me the fine print on a candy wrapper. The book and lyrics of Dude are by Gerome Ragni, the music is by Galt MacDermot, and the direction is by Tom O'Horgan. This is the trio that invented Hair, and they have come a long way since then, every inch of it apparently in the wrong direction.

[songanddanceman2]

Posted: 10/24/08 at 6:12am

Dude - It Lets Down Its Hair Pedigree
by Walter Kerr
The New York Times - October 22, 1972


Dude might have been waved away as just another failed musical if it hadn't been for two things: its pedigree and its challenge. We were entirely aware of both as we sat - in the foothills, in the mountains, in the valleys, among the trees - watching it on opening night. The pedigree? Dude was by the authors of hair, that watershed rock festival that changed the minds of the country about what it wanted to look at and listen to. The challenge? The producers and authors of Dude made it plane by word and woodwind, by hammer and chisel, that they were out to restructure the contemporary theater in every conceivable way.

Let's take the restructuring first, since that is where the occasion's failure is most obvious and most immediate. The show had begun with the notion that the physical theater itself must be reshaped if the experiences we're going to have inside it are to take on a new and different life. To bring this about, the Broadway theater was torn apart and rebuilt: the old orchestra floor was completely covered over with a green whirlpool of a stage, what had formerly been the stage became a steep bank of seats facing the old bank of seats that had constituted the balcony, small pockets of spectators were tucked into the spaces between so that the acting area should seem to be entirely surrounded by attentive eyes, a rock group was suspended from one theater box and a collection of country fiddles caged at some distance across the house, the ceiling became a tangle of baroque cupids, circus rigging, and the vine leaves of Tanzania.

The first impression that all of this created however, was one of undue familiarity. What did it remind us of? A seedy carnival somewhere, anywhere. It looked exactly like the kind of one-ring circus that might be hustled out of baggage cars and hastily thrown together in any arena across the land. Since we already have an ample supply of just such arenas, one couldn't help wondering why so much money should have been spent to transform another kind of house into yet one more mini-Madison Square garden.

The second thing one noticed was that the stage was inconveniently small. In all of that great space, the actors had the least room to roam in, and although they occasionally - but decreasingly, as though winded - took off on the run up the aisles or onto ramps that rose toward the ceiling, they were inevitably forced to congregate, in their buttoned union-suits or the winged gauzes of road-show angels, on the cramped central circle whenever anything important was to be done.

There, little children found themselves awkwardly trying to step over the prone bodies that writhed on the floor, facing more or less the same kind of traffic problem most of us had had coming cross town on the way to the playhouse. Rae Allen, saucy and accomplished as she is, found herself gasping into her microphone as she bent backward over the stooped forms of four companions, desperately trying to satisfy the director Tom O'Horgan's passion for varied postures in an amphitheater without elbow room. The clutter was not only visual. Because the acting area provided no outlets for microphone wires, the wires had to be trailed through the audience, leaving them tangled and exposed on the stairs at intermission time and creating a problem that might have disturbed an alert Fire Commissioner. The stage was not truly functional: it could not take care of the production's needs.

The third fat question mark that cropped up had to do with the enforced creation of a four-sided audience in order to promote closer relationships between performers and spectators - and, for that matter, between spectators and spectators. Why this struggle for intimacy, for eyeball-to-eyeball contact, when crucial material was going to be confined to microphones anyway? In the far distance loomed all those audience faces (I have no objection to this premise, and in fact would like the faces closer). In the acting area between, singers directed their messages not to the open house but to microphones in their hands, closeted in a performing privacy. The material could have been phoned in.

Wherever one turned, the restructuring denied itself. Perhaps that is not so surprising. restructuring implies more than tearing apart an old formula, a tired architecture. It suggests that a new one is going to be put in its place. But the one specter that has haunted the rock musical from its beginning is its structural flimsiness, its cavalier primitivism as architecture, its intertwined innocence and gaucherie. At the outset the gaucherie didn't matter so much: indeed one of the principal charms of Hair as it was first done at the Public Theater was its disclosure that the flower children were in fact children and that they were, as children, thoroughly likable. When Hair was redone for broadway, the innocence was somewhat scuttled, the gaucherie covered over by a manic drive. But the drive and the decibels were at that point quite enough; it was fun making acquaintance with a counterculture so exuberant.

The best subsequent ventures have either supplied themselves with spines by borrowing from Shakespeare - "Your Own Thing", "Two Gentlemen of Verona" - or from St. Matthew. On a few occasions - "The Last Sweet Days of Isaac" most notably - they have been able to find themselves texts that would have played virtually as well as straight short plays. But in the main they have been no more than fierce ragbags of assembled song, living when they did live on melodic and rhythmic excitement, feeble the moment narrative or humor was attempted. Transplanted concerts, they possessed musical sophistication but no other. On or off Broadway, that is an inherent weakness.

It may have become the inadvertent function of Dude to expose that weakness so blatantly that all future rock musicals will have to face up to it before they dare take guitar or saw in hand. Dude's challenge was so explicit, occasionally so arrogant (it managed a lofty sneer at Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine), simply so vast that we were no longer able to close our ears to what is childish in our enthusiasm for what is current (and once in a while exhilarating).

We forced ourselves to listen for the new humor and we heard: "The house that Shakespeare built must have been some erection.", "Get down there off your asteroid", "Did you ever see a whole bunch of human organisms playing the organ with their organs?" At the same time that a spokesman was exclaiming "I'll show you theater!" one of his colleagues - that good actor William Redfield, alas - was muttering about the smell of goosegrease and "the excitement of opening tights". Nothing of this, obviously would have been considered good enough, or even bad enough, to have done duty at Minsky's in the twilight of burlesque.

Because the evening was subtitles "The Highway Life" and the auditorium was indeed sectioned off into Foothills and valleys, we strained for some half-coherent account of a contemporary journey, symbolic or actual, echoing Kerouac or Kesey or "Easy Rider" or perhaps introducing us to a new one. But the mountains and trees that had been so elaborately carved out of space were never investigated at all, and the "newness" we were searching for seemed confined to the information that a boy-Dude was born, turned into a man-Dude who tried sex and drugs, and wound up urging us all to realize, along with D.W. Griffith, that Love is everything. Even these crumbs of content were quite hard to come by: they seemed carelessly scrawled telephone messages that "librettist" Gerome Ragni had left about for us to pick up, when and if we could, between Galt MacDermot's songs.

The songs - some crawling for cover behind gospel or stock country rhythms - were simply asked, and that incessantly, to mask the absence of anything strong enough to offer frame or excuse for the evening. As the Titanic goes down, the orchestra plays. Mr. O'Horgan, called upon to restage the venture during its last days of preparation, seemed to have exhausted his catalogue of gropes. Sex was indicated by surprisingly mechanical grappling on the limited grappling spaces, Love by garlands of paper flowers wafted about by the available girls. It all felt as though it ought to have been photographed in 1918 by Van Damm.

Before drawing what conclusions we can, mention should be made of one remarkable young performer: Ralph Carter, as the boy-Dude, firmly occupied every inch of space he was allotted, back straight, head up, squared mouth quivering, with breathtaking glissandos. Conclusions? Rock musicals, if they are to sustain themselves as genuine theater pieces rather than arena concerts, are going to have to meet the obligations earlier musicals have accepted, always with difficulty, often with pain. Music is the ultimate making of any musical. But the music must have something to stand on, something other than its own beat to move it, something to demand one particular song rather than another at a particular moment, hopefully something in the way of wit to keep it company. Unless the score does rest on a structure, you might as well listen to it at home. Dude forced the issue, and we may yet be grateful to it for that.

[songanddanceman2]

Posted: 10/24/08 at 6:13am

Trash Basket
by T.E. Kalem
Time Magazine - October 23, 1972



In a recent address to his freshman class entitled "The Decade of Shortcuts" Yale President Kingman Brewster, Jr. cited three ways in which some students of the last decade sought to find exhilaration and inject zeal into under-graduate life. one was the demand for "relevance", another was the glorification of the "happening" ("anything was good as long as it expressed the real, now self"), and the third was "trashing", an ugly resort to violence. Brewster concluded that despite a residue of change, some of it beneficial, these "patent medicines" bred disillusionment and fostered a cult of unreason. Such attitudes left no room for a university's proper, enduring concern with truth and beauty as embodied in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The end result, argued Brewster, was "a yearning for structure, a sense of emptiness which is left even after a full menu of disorganized experience in the raw."

The American theater's decade of shortcuts has been uncannily similar. There have been scads of "relevance" plays about Viet Nam, racial injustice, middle-class hypocrisy, and identity crises - all without the residue of a single durable work of dramatic art, which is the theater's proper long-term concern. The "happening" became a proliferating desire for instant sensation. "Participation" was extorted from the audience, often with arrogant ill grace. Obscene words were flung at playgoers to the point of shock fatigue, and nudity was flaunted. As for trashing, the classics were vandalized and literacy, craft, formal structure and verbal text violently abused.

This theatrical decade of short cuts is perfectly epitomized by Dude, a bulging trash basket of a musical, and an open declaration of total aesthetic bankruptcy. It combines the worst of Hair with the worst of jesus Christ Superstar - a void-plumbing feat. Dude unravels a numbingly incomprehensible allegory ranging from the dawn to creation to the limbo of suburbia, or something like that. Galt MacDermot's rock score is a wall of inchoate sound, and Tom O'Horgan stage-manages this debacle like a mass epileptic convulsion. This time around, more is being buried then the $700,000 production cost, and taps will not be sounded.

[songanddanceman2]

Posted: 10/24/08 at 6:14am

Bombs Away
by Jack Kroll
Newsweek - October 30, 1972


NOTE: This is part of a slightly longer article that also briefly reviews the shows "Hurry, Harry", "Mother Earth" and "6 RMS RIV VU"


Like a big-bottomed, teensy-brained brontosaurus stuck in the muck, the broadway season struggles to get under way. First there was Dude, advertised as the greatest thing since Hair - but we'll come back to that. Then there was Hurry, Harry, hastening to its appointment with death. Then there was Mother Earth, last of this trio of imbecilic "relevant" musicals.....


.....But back to Dude. This show, by the co-author and composer of Hair, Gerome Ragni and Galt MacDermot, was a stupid mess, a fake "multi-media" idiocy that suppurated gruesomely on the ramps, catwalks, causeways, columns, trapezes, trapdoors, and waterholes of the rebuilt broadway theater. It's the first time I ever felt sorry for a theater. The show cost $800,000, perhaps close to a million, and a fascinating article in last Sunday's New york Times describes the fiasco of rewritings, firings and constant panic that was the creation of Dude.

The key people are its producers, Peter and Adela Holzer, both successful backers of previous shows, he a shipping tycoon, she a big landowner in "Spain, South America and the Orient". They made a terrible mistake with Dude, and it's obvious that they know it, but unlike David Merrick, who gracefully closed his super-loser Mata Hari before it opened on Broadway, the Holzers opened their monstrosity, blamed the critics ("a bunch of stone faced old men") when it bombed, and announced they are through with the theater (pronounce the last word like Bea Lillie playing a drunken duchess). The chutzpah of the Holzers is one of the big things wrong with brontosaurus broadway. Such people are the brazen imperialists of the theater, which can well do without their piratical illiteracy. Only in America can a million dollars be thrown directly into the garbage disposal that is the cultural machine operated by the Holzers and their ilk.

Copyright Newsweek. All rights reserved.

[songanddanceman2]

Posted: 10/24/08 at 6:20am

Playbill =- Opening
http://www.orlok.com/hair/holding/photographs/dude/DudePlaybill.html

Preview Playbill
http://www.orlok.com/hair/holding/photographs/dude/DudePrevPlaybill.html

Fun press ads etc (complete with change of directors on each add lol)
http://www.orlok.com/hair/holding/photographs/dude/Dudebits.html

First ad for Dude
http://www.orlok.com/hair/holding/photographs/dude/Dudead1.html

Another Add which ran in the NY Times
http://www.orlok.com/hair/holding/photographs/dude/Dudead2.html

Hirschfield Dude
http://www.orlok.com/hair/holding/photographs/dude/HirschfieldDude.html

Publicity cast Pic
http://www.orlok.com/hair/holding/photographs/dude/Duderehearsal.html

Vogue Publicity shots
http://www.orlok.com/hair/holding/photographs/dude/D-PhotosVogue10-15-72.html

[myshikobit]

Posted: 10/24/08 at 12:06pm

Songanddanceman2, you are my hero, err, my #33. That was a hell of alot of info =). Thanks.

[temms]

Posted: 10/24/08 at 12:28pm

I adore the score, as well. There are a couple of "archival" recordings floating around, including one from closing night... The score as a whole actually sounds great. The CD is a combination of two different albums, and neither particularly shows the score off to its advantage. Also, the track listing on the CD is wrong (it lists the Salome Bey tracks out of order and includes one title that isn't actually on the disc.)

Galt MacDermot has put streaming versions of the original albums on his site, if anyone isn't familiar with the score. Listen to the overture, if nothing else.

"The Highway Life" - songs featuring members of the original cast in the show arrangements/orchestrations:

http://azulweb.streamguys.com/macdermot/dude_the_highway_life.asx

"Salome Bey Sings Songs From 'Dude'" - 12 songs recorded prior to the show, all sung by cast member Salome Bey (includes 3 songs not on the CD version):

http://azulweb.streamguys.com/macdermot/songsfromdude.asx

I actually managed to track down a script (long story) - unfortunately, even reading it doesn't really help you decipher what was going on. I asked Tom O'Horgan about it, once. His response: "MacDermot's best score. And one of the most talented casts I've ever worked with. But it was never going to work. I tried to fix it, and then got blamed for it."

I also tracked down a "Via Galactica" score and recording after many years, but between the two, "Dude" is definitely the better score. There's an instrumental version of "Via Galactica" on Galt's site, but it doesn't sound very much like the score did in the theatre.



Galt MacDermot's Website Updated On: 10/24/08 at 12:28 PM

[Princeton78]

Posted: 10/24/08 at 3:52pm

I wonder how much money this show lost...
I also would kill to see pictures of either the set or the marquee.

[Scott Briefer]

Posted: 11/1/08 at 12:58am

Dude lost approximately 800K which was a ton of money for it's time. I saw Dude. It was fascinating. I also saw Via Galactica. Does anyone remember, Got Tu Go Disco? Saw that one too.

[myshikobit]

Posted: 11/3/08 at 3:38pm

I'd love to find "Via Galactica" as well, if anyone knows a good bootleg. Haven't heard it yet.

[starlyricist]

Posted: 11/3/08 at 4:39pm

Same here. I've always wanted to give a listen to "Via Galactica" and "Dude".