If you could Supervise a Revisal...

The most frustrating thing for any theatre lover is watching a show fly off the rails and miss the mark. Perhaps it has a problematic book, or maybe there is a misplaced song, but either way, the show just isn't reaching its potential. Although the creative team could never pinpoint what was wrong, you feel that you could fix the problem with a few easy changes.

For example, although I know it will never be one of the great musicals, one of my favorite shows is Carrie. I'm still not exactly sure why. Even so, I think that the main problem in the show is that, currently, it reads as a drama where almost every major character just happens to die. Where is the horror? Isn't this a Stephen King adaptation? Anyway, I think that one could possibly fix the show by setting it inside Sue's fractured mind. Throughout the show, have flashes of the horrors that await to keep the audience on edge. Maybe throw in a jump scare or two. And finally, make the climactic Prom scene take place in middle of the audience, with the house nearly pitch black.

Another (again, not great) show that I wish I could revise is Footloose. The show has the most tonal shifts per capita I've ever seen in a show. There are so many HUGE dance numbers that are immediately followed by tense scenes of family drama. I think if, perhaps, the dancing in the show was toned back and given almost a more "modern dance" feel (in the vein of Step Up), and a couple of songs were moved (I.E. Holding Out for a Hero was moved to after Chuck beats up Ariel, the title song) or cut (Still Rocking), the show could actually be pretty emotionally satisfying.

Are there any shows you wish you could supervise a revisal for?

Scarlet Pimpernel; there's so much good amid the bad.

People here will shout me down, eviscerate my taste ... but RENT. The second act is still a shapeless mess. It's clear that Larson wasn't finished with it, and what's there -- particularly the final 30-40 minutes -- is a lot of summing up, overwrought explaining, and then a synthetic and romantic ending that (to my thinking) simply doesn't satisfy. The movie more or less proves this, though everyone blames Chris Columbus, who merely used what was available. The storytelling just stops. The first act's use of the unities -- keeping it in one place in one general time frame, Christmas, like Puccini -- makes it compelling and immediate. And then it launches into "And this happened to..." Granted, this shapelessness is camouflaged by some wonderful songs, and the score doesn't disappoint. But I've never really seen the resolution fully work, because it hammers points home that have already been hit repeatedly. It's a wonderful, still unfinished show. Yeah, all the way to the bank. I still see what might've been.

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I'm against resetting shows especially if it's inside a character's mind. Some of these ideas sound worse than the original but I guess you can't please everyone.

The usual for Merrily We Roll Along:

1) Bring back the graduation scenes, along with Old Frank, and rewrite the opening monologue so it's a little more harrowing, a real anxiety-inducing breakdown to give the students proper impetus to ask: how? How did a guy with all this wind up like THAT? And, again, the ending graduation scene has a big, obvious moment for closure that, for some reason, has never been properly exploited.

2) That Frank is not a very good song.

3) Gussie needs to not be the catalyst behind every one of Frank's bad decisions, because it takes all the fun, purpose, and scary ambiguity out of the show. The point should not be "watch out for scary dragon ladies", it should be "watch where your road's going", because otherwise it's the world's most simplistic and blatant morality play. The idea should be that what happens to Frank could happen to anyone. I don't know if it's unfortunate, but that means her two new numbers should probably go.

4) Bring back Honey, it's one of the sweetest, most sincere songs Sondheim has ever written, it's a lovely melody, and it makes the rest of the show's events even more heartbreaking in retrospect. I realize that it's extremely close in proximity to the musically and thematically similar "Not A Day Goes By" (for good reason, the two parts of Honey originally bookended "Not A Day"), maybe the latter should go wholly to Mary.

5) A good going-over of the book, giving it a sharper edge and - I don't know how else to put it - better dialogue, digging a little deeper into these characters. Honestly, most of what they say is crap you could find on soap operas.

Auggie27: I agree wholeheartedly. I'll willingly make myself even more unpopular by noting that if Jon's piece wasn't patched together from bits of Puccini, Murger, Sarah Schulman, Lynn Thomson, and other - let's say - "borrowed" elements (I seem to recall, though he himself no longer does, that Steve Wishnoff was going around for a while with an updated La Boheme outline that sounded suspiciously like most of Rent long before Larson had given up on Superbia), it might have been easier to construct a souffle out of the ingredients that remained in the bowl. Yeah, I said it.

In the spirit of henrikegerman, I'm going to tackle another oft-revised Wildhorn show: Jekyll & Hyde. Let's not try to pretend this is a masterpiece that needs just one more production to make it work. Screw that. It's clearly not. It's exactly what it is to MTI: a low-ball equivalent to Phantom and Les Mis that will do them a lot of brisk business until the rights to those become more freely available -- graphic killings, a lot of blood, sexuality, a moral at the last minute, all the elements of an 1880s penny dreadful dressed up for the stage. A lovely little potboiler that critics will hate (justifiably), but audiences will eat up with the right spices. Like any play of that ilk, it's not going to be Shakespeare in any of its versions. So you serve the dish that tastes the least like ass. My recipe would be a careful mix of the so-called FCLO script and the 2006 Resurrection recording, which I think is frankly the direction the recent 2012 tour/revival should have gone in. Is it perfect? No. But I already have the blended script on hand, it works the most of any J&H script I've ever read, and I don't hate it. That's kind of a big deal.

Not strictly a revisal, but I'd also like to take a crack at Jesus Christ Superstar, not to do anything earth-shattering, but more to find a placement for "Then We Are Decided," which was added to the 1973 film and does much to explain the motivations of Caiaphas and Annas and make them seem less like Christ-killer stereotypes. The problem is, its position in the film does not work on stage. On film, it's easy to cut away from "Strange Thing, Mystifying" ("they only need a small excuse / to put us all away") and increase the tension by showing the authorities are already thinking of dealing with the problem (e.g., Judas' foreboding is not unfounded). On stage, interrupting the scene that incorporates "What's The Buzz," "Strange Thing, Mystifying," and "Everything's Alright" with "Then We Are Decided" ruins the arc of the scene -- an uninterrupted rising dramatic line of tension. Putting it after "Everything's Alright" and before "This Jesus Must Die," as some productions have, seems like a logical choice, but put so close together, it only belabors the point of why the priests must deal harshly with Jesus -- you hear two songs discussing much the same points too close together, with Caiaphas trying to convince Annas to back up his position (read the lyrics; even though the '73 film stages it the opposite way, it's a valid reading), and then both of them trying to convince the council. An audience may or may not be as intelligent as we challenge them to be, but no audience likes feeling like the creative team believes they're stupid.

My solution, based on something I saw in a Pittsburgh production several years ago, would be to use "Then We Are Decided" as a prologue before the Overture. And you cut the instrumental coda after Annas' "Then we are decided," and go right into the Overture, likely accompanied by a bit of staging for dramatic effect to signal the transition into the show proper. Done right, I think it would be an interesting touch.

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Updated On: 9/1/14 at 08:18 AM

I was just trying to imagine whether Song & Dance could work better if the two 'stories' were played simultaneously, so we could see the two characters searching for each other at the same time. It should serve to improve the otherwise complete lack of dramatic tension.

Chess. No one has said CHESS. I still find the best version of it was either the Music Circus (Sacramento) version they did in the early 90s. And the complete Dutch Score (sung in English)) was the best versions. I really think you should make it more epic and sweeping IMHO.

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I would love to revise Anyone Can Whistle. It's one of Sondheim's most under-appreciated scores in my opinion, and could do really well with a bit more of a grounded, sensical book.

I agree with ANYONE CAN WHISTLE but in the complete opposite direction. It really is quite an ugly score and the show would do well if the music were just cut and turned into a play.

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Have you ever seen Vieux Carré? Just look up absurdist theatre and you can see that there is nothing that is too weird to be a play. However, ANYONE CAN WHISTLE is not only too weird to be a musical, but a story that does not have any kind of reason to be a musical, but I do think a play could be nice.

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I can't imagine anything duller than Cora, Faye and Hapgood without their songs.

Yes, the musical score is rather sophisticated compared to the hit musicals of the same period, but that doesn't make it "ugly". Listen to it a few more times; it can be an acquired taste. And it does have some lovely, more traditional songs in the title number, "Everybody Says Don't', "See What It Gets You" and "With So Little to be Sure Of".

The problem is we are meant to connect with these characters empathetically (in a manner we usually don't with true Absurdist Theater), but the musical as written doesn't tell us this until Act II.

The first act is simply too clever for its own good.

Anyone Can Whistle always felt to me like a seven-month premature baby. SO close to being fully formed and functional, but weak and struggling because it was before its time.

Everything "Anyone Can Whistle" does, the mix of absurdism and straight-faced sentiment, the arch campiness of its various subplots, the stylized villains and Cora's male chorus of butlers, seems to presage what would become a dominant musical theatre style forty years later, with shows like "The Drowsy Chaperone" and "Urinetown" being both completely satirical and completely serious, cartoonish, camp and real all at once. None of those shows had anyone as brilliant as Sondheim attached to them. What they had in their favor, however, was time. They didn't have to invent a whole new style and tone of play, they merely had to perfect it.