Broadway Babylon by Boze Hadleigh Read Free Book Online

unite all the races of the world in a common hymn of hate.” Broun was certain, or hoped, it would be a flop. The record-breaker ran for 2,327 performances and was revived in 1954.
    Q : Apart from losing money, did a flop play ever set a record?
    A : The longest-running flop in theater history was
The Ladder
(1926), a drama of reincarnation. It ran for seventeen months in New York—at a loss of a then-monumental $750,000—because it was backed by Texas oil tycoon Edgar B. Davis. By late 1927 tickets were free, yet
The Ladder
played to mostly empty houses. Undaunted, Davis later opened it again in Boston. Wags called it the play that wouldn’t die.
    Q : Is there any way of telling that a play will be bad?
    A : George Jean Nathan, critic for the
American Mercury, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Theatre Arts
, etcetera, believed there were various giveaways, such as: “When, as the curtain goes up, you hear newsboys shouting, ‘Extra, extra!’ ” Or “The moment anyone puts anything into a drawer with a furtive look.” And “Any mystery play in which, at the very start, someone remarks that the nearest house is two miles away.” Plus “In four cases out of five, when at the rise of the curtain the wife is writing a letter and the husband, in an easy chair, is reading a newspaper.”
    Nathan eschewed one-star shows, particularly the one-woman variety: “A woman talking steadily for two hours is hardly my idea of entertainment whether in the theater or in private.” In the wake of
Oklahoma!
’s success, he noted, “It seems that the moment anyone gets hold of an exclamation point these days, he probably sits down and writes a musical show around it.” About improvisation he felt, “An actor without a playwright is like a hole without a doughnut.”
    Known to friends as difficult, to others as impossible, Nathan held that “No chronically happy man is a trustworthy critic.”
    Q : Why are classics that get made into musicals often given new titles?
    A : Sometimes it’s obvious, as with Henry Fielding’s
Rape Upon Rape
, which became
Lock Up Your Daughters
(1959). Or T.S. Eliot’s
Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats
—just
Cats
was more practical. In some cases, an original word was judged noncommercial, like “prejudice” in Jane Austen’s
Pride and Prejudice
, which became
First Impressions
in 1959. Or “cry” in Alan Paton’s
Cry the Beloved Country
, which became the lyrical
Lost in the Stars
(1949).
    It’s frequently assumed most people have forgotten or never knew the original sources, which some Broadway producers view as free material with time-tested value. On the other hand, whose bright idea was it to rename the still-popular and beloved
Little Women A Girl Called Jo
?
    Q : How could a musical of
Gone with the Wind
fail to be a financial success?
    A : The musical version, which made its American bow in Los Angeles, closed en route to Broadway, a fiasco in its native land. In 1966 a nonmusical play ofMargaret Mitchell’s novel had its world premiere in Tokyo, in a nine-hour production. It was a huge hit. The Japanese who owned the stage rights to the book then decided a musical
GWTW
might be as or even more popular. They commissioned Harold Rome to compose it and Joe Layton to stage it. It opened in Japan in 1970 as
Scarlett
.
    It was next unleashed on the West: In 1972
Gone with the Wind
opened in London, not New York, because of lower costs and less-caustic critics. Though the musical version had returned to the better-recognized title, it was still minus the film’s extremely famous theme music. The critics were divided, but Londoners made up their own minds, and
GWTW
ran a year, thanks partly to out-of-towners and tourists. Predictably, the clutch of American critics who went to London to review it slammed it. Even so, an American debut in Atlanta was planned.
    Instead it opened in 1973 in LA, then San Francisco, with Lesley Ann Warren as Scarlett and former
Bonanza
star Pernell Roberts as