TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/010989/01098900.067

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 101 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.