Liza and the Rink

Can someone tell me ehy Liza left The Rink so early. I searched but could not find anything. Was the show a hit?

Updated On: 6/16/06 at 09:01 PM

Don't Ah Ma' Me!

Ahh the joys of Chita singing that live . . .

---

Yes Liza was battling addictions at the time and missing many performances. They replaced her with Stockard Channing who by all reports was excellent in the role but failed to sell tickets. I can't really say how good she was: the show closed about 2 weeks before I arrived in New York in the summer of 1984!

---

I saw the show a week or two before Liza left and it was really sad to see her in the condition that she was in. However, I really liked the show and the score. I think it's one of Kander and Ebb's best scores. For those who haven't heard the score, they should give it a listen. The London cast recording is also excellent.

I also am wondering how that revised version at Cape Cod will be.

The score is pretty good, though I find it far from one of K&E's best.

I would love to hear the score with more modern orchestrations, the syntheized 80's sound just well.. sounds crappy.

Back when KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN was trying out in Toronto, I did an interview with Kander and Ebb for my radio program. AT that point we only had a demo of a few SPIDER WOMAN songs so I decidied to devote the program to THE RINK and both remained very proud of their work on the show. Kander explained that they had written it with Chita in mind and Liza came into it much later...she wanted to play Angel. Fred Ebb thought that was what hurt the show. Audiences couldn't accept Liza in a role that wasn't flashy and glamourous. She was also a little too strong for the vulnerable Angel.

The script is solid enough and even if the characters are not the most likable or sympathetic, they are real. I suspect in time we will see properly cast revival that will blow everyone away.

---

"The script is solid enough"
It's lame and totally cliched in alot of the scenes that aren't exclusively Angel and Anna.

kmc

---

I don't know whether the show's failure can be blamed so squarely on the audience's expectations for what they wanted of Liza. She had played downtrodden characters before. There are pleasures to be had with the cast recording, but there were also some truly terrible, cliched and ludicrous moments, both in the book and score. I was actively embarrassed for Chita Rivera having to perform that gang rape ballet at the end of Act One (it wasn't exactly the match for Robbins' choreography for Anita's rape in West Side Story), and some of those songs ("Angel's Rink and Social Center," "Mrs. A." "All the Children in a Row") are not highpoints in the Kander & Ebb canon.

I do remember some nice staging for "After All These Years," (the wreckers tap dancing on bubble wrap), the joyfulness of the title song (on roller skates), the spooky, moody staging for "Colored Lights," Chita and Liza oggling Frank Mastrocola's hot ass for several minutes in "The Apple Doesn't Fall," and of course, the celebrated scenic effect of the entire rink setting disappearing in the finale. That was something. But for the most part, this was a nasty, unpleasant show. The surviving authors would be better off leaving it alone.

---

Updated On: 6/18/06 at 01:08 PM

She had an awful lot of ENERGY onstage the night I saw her in the show...and even more afterwards at the old Charlie's on 45th Street.

Those were high-flying days...

---

or is the proper term Afro-Italian?

No, Jason Alexander's first B'way show was the original production of MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG in 1981.

I remember waiting for my friend outside the theatre after one of the previews, and Jason came out and was talking to some friends about all of the changes they had ben through. At one point they all wore costumes representing the different eras and they wer scrapped. Numbers were being chnaged, dropped and added...he said that he didn't think they had played two performances exactly the same. I stood there listening to every word while pretending to read my playbill...

---

McNally already updated the book in the late 1990's, taking out all topical references that set the story in a specific time period. The stuff about the father fighting in Korea is gone, the reference to "that peanut farmer in the White House" is gone, and the entire lyric of "All the Children in a Row" is different. It is no longer a hippie anthem, but is now a song about Angel traveling around looking for her dad.

In the new version "the present day" could be 2006, the 90's, the 80's or the 70's.