Well, dear readers, tonight I will be heading over to Image Entertainment to do a commentary track for Bert I. Gordon’s 50s classic, The Beginning of the End. I will have with me Susan Gordon and her mother Flora. I will have a complete report for you tomorrow, but I’m really looking forward to doing this. The film, about giant grasshoppers run amok (we all know about giant insects running amok, don’t we?), is part of a genre I’m very fond of – the grade B 50s horror/sci-fi movie. I’m certain we will hear lots of anecdotes – for example, I’ve already heard a very amusing story about the Gordon’s trying to wrangle the grasshoppers for the shoot.
I have decided that I want to run amok. Excuse me for a moment.
There. That was fun. I ran amok and no one was the wiser for it. I did it in the privacy of my very own yard. I recommend that everyone pauses right now to run amok. If we all run amok at the same time, it will be a communal thing and we will have a mind-meld, or is it a meld-mind, amok-wise. And if you run amok in privacy remember, no one will be the wiser for it. Does anyone have an inkling or even a penciling of what the hell I’m talking about?
By the way, the word “amok” has an interesting history. It was invented by Delmer Plink. Delmar Plink was a slightly backward dyslexic ham baster and he was given to episodes of running around like a crazy person, for no reason whatsoever, usually while he was basting a ham. One day, his mother, Thelma Plink, said to him, “Delmer, my goodness, if you keep running around like that you’ll put yourself into a coma.” Delmer thought that was ever so amusing. He’d never heard the word coma before. He got a piece of paper out and wrote it down. Since spelling was not his forte (his forte was ham basting) he wrote down “koma” but since he was dyslexic it came out “amok” and the rest is history.
Wasn’t that a fine story about Delmer Plink? Sweet Smell of Success opened officially last night. The reviews are in and they are, for the most part, not pretty. Oh, a couple of critics had good things to say, like Clive Barnes, but most were pans. I find this interesting. Let’s all click on the Unseemly Button and find out why, shall we?
I find the travails and reviews of Sweet Smell of Success and, for that matter, Seussical, interesting because both shows came out of very long workshop gestations. They both took years to write. I have been saying for quite some time, that the workshop process is an odd one; that is, it’s evolved into something that I don’t think is necessarily healthy. From its very first workshops, both Seussical and Sweet Smell had incredible buzz. The word was they were the shows to beat, they were in great shape. The subsequent workshops got even better buzz. Then both shows went out of town for their tryouts and both shows found themselves in major trouble. How could shows with such incredible buzz find themselves in such trouble? After all, in both cases, many people who attended those workshops came out saying these were the best new musicals to come along in years. What went wrong?
In my opinion, that question has many answers. Amongst them is, some of the buzz is self-generated, and that kind of thing always backfires, because it sets up expectations. When The Producers, a show which, if memory serves, did not workshop more than once, (and even that may have not been a full workshop), went out of town (to Chicago) and opened without the relative hoopla that surrounded Sweet Smell and Seussical. It hadn’t been written about and posted about over and over again. They wrote the show they wanted to write (based on a hit film) and they went out of town and did it. Apparently, it pretty much worked from the get-go and they changed very little.
Also, I think that these people invite their friends and people who are conducive to overreaction. I have attended quite a few of these things, and if you heard the whooping and hollering that goes on after every number, you’d be shocked. And these people always say things like, “I know there’s work to do, but don’t change much, it’s fabulous”. Well, you know what? That isn’t what the creators need to hear. Of course, in the old days, people just went about their business, wrote their shows, took them out of town and, if they were in trouble, either fixed them or not. For example, would Breakfast at Tiffany’s have benefitted from the workshop process? I doubt it. I think it would have added two years on its journey, and the result would have been the same. Would Gypsy have benefitted from the workshop process? Hard to know, but they certainly got it right without one. And it didn’t take them seven years to do it. They didn’t listen to a lot of their friends and “yes” people, nor did they listen to a lot of people with an opinion on everything. They listened to their own creative hearts and minds, did their work, took it out of town, opened, learned from the audiences what was and wasn’t working and did their work. But, I think nowadays, people get cocky, they do these workshops, get all this buzz, and then are so shell-shocked by the out of town reaction, that they never recover from it. When Seesaw was out of town and in terrible trouble, they didn’t just try to make cosmetic changes to it, they revamped the whole thing from start to finish. Same with My One and Only. People don’t seem to be willing to do that kind of drastic work. It’s fine for shows like The Wild Party, the La Chiusa version. Those creators didn’t seem to care what people thought, they were happy to have a few musical theater people think they were brilliant.
When Michael Bennett started the workshop process it was something wholly other. What it’s turned into isn’t always so beneficial these days. Regarding Sweet Smell (which I haven’t seen), my guess is that its producers will keep it running despite the reviews. That is the new trend. In the old days, Seussical and Sweet Smell would have shut down within weeks of reviews like that (like Tom Sawyer did, last season). But there’s too much ego involved with producers these days. They’d rather keep losing money than admit defeat. And they do lose money – even if they keep shows open six months, they lose their entire investment. I suppose the hope is, that if they run the thing for six months they can get a tour. That’s what happened with Seussical (which will be a very different show when it hits the road), but Seussical appeals to kids, so it may ultimately come out okay. Look at The Scarlet Pimpernel – three different incarnations on Broadway, and then a tour. Given the amount of money that was poured into that show, will they ever get it all back? Highly doubtful. But the days of the David Merricks, et al, are gone. He felt a responsibility to his shows, but he also felt a responsibility to his money.
I still would like to see Sweet Smell of Success, which sounded like it was a good idea and which I was really looking forward to.
What am I, Ken Mandelbaum all of a sudden? I think I need to run amok right now. I think I need to get off my soapbox right now, although I do like standing on my soapbox, especially the Caress box, which crushes quite easily and makes a pleasing sound when it does so. What the hell am I talking about? Perhaps I’d better have a Diet Coke and calm down.
Why must one always calm down? To me, down looks perfectly calm, it’s up that’s so damn hyper. Let’s calm up, that’s what I say and I say it loudly for all to hear.
Oh, I keep forgetting to tell you that Mr. Michael Shayne is the only one who figured out which album I sang on using a pseudonym. He was a good sleuth. He used good deductive logic, like my close personal friend Mr. Stephen Sondheim would have done. By looking through my albums, he was able to find the one album that listed a singer without a picture. The CD was Unsung Irving Berlin and the pseudonym was Billy Waring (singing a country-flavored Berlin song on disc two). What I find interesting is that no one has ever figured out it was me – no one even asked who the hell Billy Waring was or where he came from.
Today’s topic of discussion: If you think it’s been hard choosing favorite songs from the composers we’ve done so far, today it will be really hard, at least for me. What are your favorite Burt Bacharach/Hal David songs. I’ll start: the sublime Window Wishing, Make It Easy on Yourself, Walk on By, She Likes Basketball, A House is Not a Home, The Windows of the World, and Here I Am. There are, of course, a million others, but those came to mind immediately. Your turn.