TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/010989/01098900.067

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.7 KB | 113 lines

                                                                                THEATER, Page 67

Legs Diamond Shoots Blanks


In a season of misery, Broadway seeks a new American musical

By William A. Henry III


    When composer Frederick Loewe looked back on a career with
lyricist Alan Jay Lerner that included Brigadoon, My Fair Lady
and Camelot, he reportedly said he could not get over how easy
he and his partner made it all seem. Loewe was right, but in
retrospect the most startling thing about the team's success is
that their creativity was far from unique. In the heyday of
Broadway musicals, nearly every season brought a landmark
production, often two or three. The 1946-47 season that
introduced Brigadoon, for example, also provided Finian's
Rainbow. The 1956-57 season of My Fair Lady was, in addition,
the season of Bells Are Ringing, Candide, The Most Happy Fella
and Li'l Abner. The 1960-61 debut season of Camelot saw as well
the arrival of Irma la Douce, The Unsinkable Molly Brown and Bye
Bye Birdie.

    Any one of those shows would seem a godsend to the Wan
White Way of the '80s. With three striking exceptions --
Dreamgirls, Big River and Into the Woods -- pretty much every
noteworthy musical of the decade has been a revival, a recycling
of old songs, an import (generally from Britain) or a critical
smash but commercial also-ran. The current season, which by
Broadway's calendar began in May, is more miserable than most.
Its first American musical, Carrie, actually a slightly
postponed holdover from last season, closed within five
performances at a record loss of $7 million. The sole entry
since, Legs Diamond, a quirky blend of gangster spoof and
show-biz biography, opened last week to killer reviews, although
the producers launched a $350,000 TV ad campaign and vowed to
hang on.

    The season's musical hopes now rest almost entirely on
material from the past: a Jerome Robbins retrospective; a
blues-and-dance collage with no new songs, Black and Blue, from
the creators of Tango Argentino; and a Duke Ellington score,
Queenie Pie, left unfinished at his death in 1974, that has been
touted for Broadway for three seasons. Says Rocco Landesman, a
producer who succeeded with Big River and Into the Woods: "With
a musical there are 40 ways for things to go wrong and only one
for them to go right, which is for everything to come together."

    That did not happen for Legs Diamond. Despite five years of
development, the show that previewed in late October was, in
the blunt judgment of co-producer Arthur Rubin, "a disaster."
Librettist Harvey Fierstein apologized to the audience at the
first performance. Alluding to the practice of testing a show
out of town, which Legs skipped because of its complex sets and
lighting, Fierstein said, "Ladies and gentlemen, this is New
Haven."

    Previews continued for nine weeks -- unusually long, but
not a Broadway record -- as musical numbers, costly scenery,
characters and whole subplots came and went. On some nights more
than a hundred paying customers left at intermission or even
during the performance. One couple who marched up the aisle
during the second act seemed particularly weary of a plot device
that has the hero, a tap-dancing gang leader, repeatedly fake
his own murder. As the departing woman looked back at the stage,
she whispered, "He's alive again." Muttered her companion:
"Better he should have stayed dead."

    Even so, pent-up public enthusiasm for a new American
musical of any kind was so great that despite bad word of mouth,
some 90,000 customers came during previews, most paying the full
price of $50. Says Rubin: "We made a profit during previews."
The show built up advance sales as high as $10 million; they
still stood at more than $3 million after opening. The day after
the barrage of punishing reviews appeared, the box office sold
almost $40,000 worth of tickets.

    Whether Legs can survive its critical clobbering depends on
what kind of experience theatergoers expect for $50. Genial and
inoffensive at worst, occasionally energetic and raucously
funny, always lavish and cheerful and eager to please, Legs is
an amiable enough way to spend 2 1/2 hours. But it is altogether
unmemorable. Its basic problems could not have been altered by
a year of previews: the concept and the star. Legs traces the
rise of a big-time gang leader in the machine-gun era of Al
Capone. No matter how much the script sweetens and fictionalizes
its depiction of the short and brutal life of Legs Diamond, the
hero inevitably has blood on his hands.

    Onstage, Legs tries to sidestep this problem by making
Diamond a frustrated entertainer who gets into crime as a way
of financing himself on Broadway. The character cannot be taken
seriously, and neither can Peter Allen as an actor. A campy
night-club entertainer who penned his own single-entendre lyrics
for this show ("If you love me, let me see your knockers"), he
brings a pervasive tone of self-mockery to every moment and is
ludicrously dispassionate as a roguish ladies' man. Like most
performers who customarily work solo, he seems unable to engage
the audience in any guise but his own.

    The one surefire moneymaker on the current musical scene is
Andrew Lloyd Webber, the British composer whose shows have been
about felines, religious figures and monsters -- anything but
old-fashioned romance, conventional boy meets girl. In hopes of
matching Webber's profits, today's producers imitate his
preference for way-out concepts, the loopier the better. Part
of the reason such masters as Lerner and Loewe made it look so
easy is that they did not feel compelled to contort themselves
and their stories. Maybe they knew something worth
rediscovering.