So reading about Evening Star and I'll Buy You a Star has led my mind to start singing "Wandrin' Star" from Paint Your Wagon. I love that song.
"Semi-staged" means somewhere between a full-scale production with sets and costumes, and a concert performance where the actors just wear evening dress and stand in front of music stands while they read their lines and sing their songs.
Every production in the "Encores" series has only five performances, so it doesn't make economic sense to design and construct a complete set, or for the performers to wear costumes as elaborate as they would wear in a fully staged production. So the shows usually have very rudimentary sets (e.g., tables and chairs for a cafe scene), and the costumes are limited to a few defining accessories. And while the actors do move around on the stage, instead of just standing in front of music stands, they carry their scripts with them, because the shows have very limited rehearsal times (the advantage of which is that it enables "Encores" to sign up some in-demand performers who might not be able to make longer time commitments). I hope that's clear.
There should be a review of the show in tomorrow's New York Times (the first performance was last night, and the review is usually in Saturday's paper) -- I'll post a link to it, if I can get on AOL at home.
Oops, I just saw mac's pithier explanation of "semi-staged". My later post wasn't intended as a correction of your post, mac -- I was just rambling on!
Thanks, ladies. I understand now. No Mac, I'm not familiar with Reader's Theatre.
I love Wandrin' Star, too. Now, I'm humming that one. Glad you mentioned it, I was getting too rambunctious here and giving "Look Who's Dancin'" a workout:
Look who's dancin'
Look who's on air
Young as a chick
With a kick like a mule
Will you look who's floatin' like a feather
Since we found that we look good together.
Loislane: We were talking about the Colman/Garson Random Harvest. Bree mentioned at one time that she had never seen that movie.
bree wrote:Which you're keeping in case the suede apron look ever comes back?
Yea, because I am eternally at the forefront of any fashion trend...NOT.
hilarious. Nah, It's great when you're dealing with hot glue or any such item which can go right through "normal" fabric and hurt you sumthin' awful.
bree has NEVER seen Random Harvest??? How can that be?
Well, you gotta find it rent it and watch it. as soon as possible. Greer is absolutely radiant and Ronald Coleman...sigh...Ronald Coleman is...sigh, well...Ronald Coleman--which is saying a lot.
I'm excited-just listened a day or so ago to Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Please let us know!
Aggie, there's a company here in SF you would love--42nd Street Moon produces 6 semi-staged productions of olde timey musicals, usually ones you've heard of a song or two from but not the whole magilla. I've seen a few of them and they are big fun!
http://www.42ndstmoon.org/
Will try to return with a "story" soon.
It's just so funny that Bree mentioned going to see A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, because a few days ago, while I was recording B'Way songs from PBS specials onto DVD, I thought about TGIB and wondered why no selections from it were ever shown and was wondering if it had ever been revived. I was going to mention that on Mac's B'Way thread, but decided to check out the IBDb first.
Guys, it's been a bit whack-o here. I am questionless at the moment and soon to leave work for drinks and a dinner with many brazilians.
I don't know, that's what they said. Anyway, I may connect on Sat. someone take point on questions!
After having seen A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, I can say that I enjoyed it and I'm glad I saw it, but I can also understand why the original Broadway production wasn't a hit. The score is charming, especially the three best-known songs (Make the Man Love Me, I'll Buy You a Star, and Look Who's Dancing -- which I now understand why Raggedy was singing yesterday afternoon), but there isn't really much of a plot, and what plot it has is pretty depressing. (The program notes describe the show as not being able to decide whether it "was supposed to be a hopeful show like Oklahoma!, or an uplifting but ultimately tragic one, like Carousel", which I thought was a good way of putting it.) Everyone in the cast was very good, especially Jason Danieley (who played Johnny and has probably the best voice in the cast) and Emily Skinner, who seemed to be having a lot of fun playing Cissy (the role created by Shirley Booth).
Here's the New York Times review:
Still Looking for Joy Under the Brooklyn Bridge
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
If you haven't got a partner, then you're wasting a great big moon," a chorus of frolicking couples sing in "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn," the kickoff entry in the new season of the Encores! concert musicals series at City Center. But the prescription for happiness implied proves pretty unreliable in this amiably melancholy romantic comedy set in the slums under the Brooklyn Bridge in the early years of the last century.
Splendidly sung, and staged with evident care, Gary Griffin's production doesn't press too hard in reanimating the gentle varied charms of this 1951 musical. It offers them up in the affectionate spirit of a loving parent who knows the children don't get along too well but can't imagine choosing a favorite.
Based on the popular novel by Betty Smith, the musical, with a book by Smith and George Abbott, music by Arthur Schwartz and lyrics by Dorothy Fields, the original production opened to a bouquet of fine reviews. In The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson said it "turns out to be one of those happy inspirations that the theater dotes on." But audiences didn't dote indefinitely. The show closed after a respectable but disappointing run of 267 performances.
The original cast album has long been championed by musical theater aficionados, who have pondered the why's and wherefore's of the production's failure. Mr. Griffin's staging at City Center, which uses David Ives's sensitively shaved version of the original book, affirms a popular hypothesis that the show suffered from an identity crisis brought on by the casting of a star, Shirley Booth, in a supporting role.
Booth, who played Cissy, the wised-up sister of the musical's putative heroine, Katie, was such a charismatic comedienne that the comic subplot detailing Cissy's dalliances with a series of lovers, all of whom she chooses to call Harry, for convenience, stole a march on the darker central story line. That concerns Katie's troubled marriage to a drinking dreamer named Johnny Nolan, and their bookworm daughter Francie (the novel's heroine).
A recent Goodspeed Opera House production returned to the source material to construct a new book that would readjust the balance, but Cissy, or rather Booth, ended up with so much of the music that the old score didn't quite fit the new book, and the Encores! mandate is to place musical priorities above all others.
And so the show remains a likable but less than compelling patchwork, the impulses of its flavorful score divided among, in fact, three worthwhile aims: to bring alive the roistering, colorful atmosphere of the immigrant neighborhood in which it is set, to scare up laughs through Cissy's quest for marital bliss and to moisten the tear ducts with the story of Katie and Johnny's doomed romance. It delivers on all three fronts but still adds up to less than the sum of its parts.
To lose any of Cissy's turns at center stage would be a shame, since Emily Skinner, a gifted singer with ample comic capabilities, has been cast in the role. Ms. Skinner can't re-create the inimitable delivery of Booth (and shouldn't be asked to try), but she is a far better singer. She delivers "He Had Refinement," the comic highlight of the score, with a shapely blend of musical polish and earthy humor, tossing in the occasional bleated note by way of homage to Booth's distinctively unpretty vocal coloring. Ms. Fields's lyrics, in Cissy's wistful résumé of her first husband's charms, are worth savoring: "He would never sit down to eat without his shirt was on/ Or come out of the bathroom dripping like a dying swan/ Or call a visitor a slob until the slob was gone/ He had refinement."
Ms. Fields and Mr. Schwartz also proved a fine match for the score's more reflective moments. Aside from the show's wry populist wit, its most enduring ingredient may be its clear-eyed acknowledgement that youthful dreams tend to wither rather than bloom with the passing of time. In "Growing Pains," a tender duet set to a subtle melody, Johnny and Francie ask the unanswerable question, "Why do we get to know/The things we don't want to know?"
Jason Danieley, a natural charmer, is an ideal Johnny Nolan. His singing is sensitive, pure and gorgeously robust, as it should be: Johnny's a failure at everything but spinning out his dreams in song. If Mr. Danieley doesn't quite capture the full pathos in this likable ne'er-do-well, a Brooklyn Billy Bigelow, it's primarily because the character always seems to be off to the saloon, a victim of the show's episodic narrative, which stretches across a couple of decades.
Sally Murphy, who plays Katie, is likewise a superb singer, and well cast as a dreamy-eyed youngster who learns life's harder lessons long before her beloved does. We can measure the toll her life takes on Katie by the shrinking wattage in Ms. Murphy's smile, and her performance of the show's best-known song, "Make the Man Love Me," hits the right quietly rhapsodic note.
There are nice, idiomatic supporting turns by John Ellison Conlee, as Cissy's latest and last Harry, and Nancy Anderson, as Katie's friendly romantic rival, Hildy. ("What's that you're readin'?" she asks Francie, with a tinge of suspicion and awe. "A book?") The choral numbers are infused with jaunty charm redolent of both period and place, and Sergio Trujillo's choreography skillfully riffs on social dances, with a special tip of the hat to the Irish. (The "Halloween Ballet," on the other hand, is scary in the wrong way.)
The score couldn't be in better hands than those of Rob Fisher, the Encores! music director. Under his supple conducting, the orchestra delivers with the warmth and verve we've come to expect but should remember to cherish.
There's another good review (i.e., it says pretty much the same things I said) of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, along with a couple of photos from the production, at:
Theatermania review of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Thanks for the very interesting reviews, Bree. I can see where the story/plot would be a major factor in the original show's being a failure. Francie was the main character in the book, and her brother Neeley, who was favored by the mother, played a very important part in Francie's character development. So - Neeley was left out of the musical and Francie didn't appear until the second act. The focus of the book was about Francie's (Betty Smith's) adolescence and her undying to devotion to her father. Omitting those elements of the novel would have been a great disappointment to anyone who had read the book, or for that matter, had seen the movie which, although it was heavily censored, stayed true to a large extent to Ms. Smith's novel. Ironically, Betty Smith collaborated with George Abbott on the book for the musical.
I've just read some interesting comments in the libretto of the original cast album of "Tree". Irving Berlin was the first to express an interest in writing the score, but then declined saying he was "temporarily dried up" after completing "Call Me Madam", which George Abbot had also directed. Gene Kelly and Ginger Rogers were the first choices to play Johnny and Katie, but both declined, Rogers stating the part wasn't big enough for her. Nanette Fabray and Martha Wright were also mentioned. Ultimately, the Nolans were portrayed by two performers in their stage debuts: recording, artist, film and TV performer Johnny Johnston (Kathryn Grayson's husband at the time) and concert violinist Marcia Van Dyke. Neither performer ever appeared in a Broadway musical again. (They were the biggest disappointment to me on the album) Shirley Booth, who had triumphed the season before in Come Back Little Sheba was the first and only choice to play Aunt Sissy. Booth won the New York Drama Critics poll as Best Actress in a Musical, beating Gertrude Lawrence in The King and I, Ethel Merman in Call Me Madam and Vivian Blaine in Guys and Dolls. When "Tree "closed after 267 performances, Booth wasn't able to go on the road as she was making the screen version of Come Back Little Sheba. Joan Blondell, who played Aunt Cissy in the movie, took over the role of Aunt Cissy when the show went on the road, but that tour only lasted two months and the show was never revived.
Wow, thanks for all the information on the show. I know the book and the movie, but have never heard of the musical!
Paging loislane ... you owe us a question, lois!
I sorta thought since you all were wandering about in Brooklyn you mighta missed me!
OK, something for Valentine's Day...
I'll be right back!
Although he was a
1) habitual mate
he decided that he'd improve by attending a
2) university for spouses.
He didn't want to have to sign his letters
3) knavishly, from me
because he loved his little
4) sweetie pan!
Although Rex Harrison was a
1) Constant Husband
he decided that he'd improve by attending a
2) School for Husbands.
He didn't want to have to sign his letters
3) Unfaithfully Yours
because he loved his little
4) Honey Pot!
I'm not going to page Loislane, (sorry Lois) because I have not the slightest doubt, that Bree's Rex Harrison answer is correct.
I am anxiously awaiting Bree's question.
Hey, it's your game, Raggedy -- whatever you say goes! And, for a change, I happen to have a new question ready, so here it is:
He wanted to spend our vacation in the mountains, and I wanted to spend it
1. At the seashore.
As we debated where to go, he became so angry that he was almost
2. Deranged,
but I remained calm, and engaged in
3. An amicable attempt to make him see things my way.
He finally agreed to come to the seaside with me when he realized that, if he insisted on going to the mountains, he would be
4. A fellow with no one to keep him company.
What the hell are you guys talking about?
We must have vacation on the mind. I've prepared a question concerning a vacation, too. (lol)
Pondering your question.
Oh, this is funny. I considered using Anthony Perkins, but changed it at the last minute. If Tony is correct, I'll post my question so you can see what I mean.
He wanted to spend our vacation in the mountains, and I wanted to spend it
1. On the Beach
As we debated where to go, he became so angry that he was almost
2. Psycho
but I remained calm, and engaged in
3. Friendly Persuasion
He finally agreed to come to the seaside with me when he realized that, if he insisted on going to the mountains, he would be
4. The Lonely Man
