Old Classic Musicals (film or otherwise) with New Books — Page 2

For instance, Gaveston, one of my "class four revisals" is "Little Me," written as a book musical built around a series of sketch comedy bits for Sid Caesar to do his legendary "foreign gibberish babble" routine in as many languages as possible. That, however, is a uniquely Sid Caesar comedy gift.

The first revival, with Victor Garber and James Coco, split that titanic role into two while increasing the stage time of both actors. To accomodate Garber's leading-man image and clowning skills, the absurd physical comedy of many of the "heroic" characters was increased, and the gibberish bits mostly removed.

The second revival, starring Martin Short, kept much of Garber's physical comedy, but revised the script to allow Short's various characters more chances to be fussy and effete, to get hysterical and to go into tantrums, since this, like Caesar's gibberish routines, is Short's signature bit.

For a less famous example, consider the treatment of Lucy in "The Threepenny Opera." Brecht and Weill wrote the near-cameo role of Lucy as an opera diva role/parody of an opera diva role. Since most Lucys since have been far from that, Lucy's role is drastically cut down, and the scene in which she tries to assassinate Polly is almost always gone. Wallace Shawn's translation/rewrite/adaptation of Threepenny not only reinstated Lucy's role, but rewrote her as a transsexual to accommodate the casting of a powerful countertenor.

Well best12bars, if what you're saying is true, then the works of Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lener and Lowe, and the Gerswins can be tampered with.

Why not?

Why is it okay to tamper with the book, but not the music and lyrics?

Who decided that?

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"Why is it okay to tamper with the book, but not the music and lyrics?

Who decided that?"

I'm not going to say who decided, or whether it is right, but my guess is that because the book often does not live on the way a score will many people see it as more malleable. The score, whether as a whole or individual songs, has a greater chance of entering the public perception of what it should consist of through recordings and movie versions. The script can be largely forgotten when a piece is either rarely done and only known through recordings and memory, or, as is often the case, gets heavily rewritten for its movie version.

"Well I can thank heaven that I live in a world where The King and I, Carousel, Oklahoma!, The Sound of Music, and South Pacific sure don't need no revision from anybody."

For the record, The Sound of Music does get revised, as many productions alter the tune-stack, through re-ordering songs, dropping some and adding others, to more closely match the movie. And this, of course, does necessitate some (usually fairly minor) rewrites to the book to accommodate that.

I'm not sure if Ira Gershwin would be flattered or insulted that you credited his "cunning cottage" reference in the lyric of "I've Got a Crush on You" to Lorenz Hart.

Thank you, PJ. Even as I typed "Hart" I thought it sounded wrong. I should have checked.

I know the relatively obscure meaning of "cunning" as "cute" or "pleasing", because I've looked it up. But I doubt many listeners know it; IMO, they accept it because of the alliteration, not because it makes sense to them.

Of course, what do I know? I can't even keep track of who wrote the song. But the passage is mentioned by a number of sources as one of Ira Gershwin's less successful.

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To use a different example (and this one IS by Hart), I grew up on Beach Party movies and couldn't understand the lyric "Hate California, it's cold and it's damp/That's why the lady is a tramp." It wasn't until I moved to California that I realized how foggy and cold the strip of land along the ocean actually is.

And yet I fully accepted the lyric because I had heard it so many times from Sinatra (speaking of someone who re-wrote lyrics at will) and Lena Horne.

Updated On: 5/18/13 at 07:27 PM

That also may be because FORUM is possibly the most notable of that rare breed of musicals where the book is arguably more famously celebrated than the score.

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We've all heard the stories about Zero Mostel being a force of nature impossible to control in the original production- doing extended stand-up, announcing boxing scores, and corpsing constantly onstage.

When Usher Raymond (is he still just Usher? I think he goes back and forth) played Billy Flynn in Chicago, the "tap dance" from the film was inserted into the show to show off his triple-threat ability, a rarity among Flynns.

I always thought that Colin Mochrie and Ryan Stiles in FORUM together would have been impeccable.