With So Little to Be Sure Of '04

The most intriguing thing about writing season-preview articles is that one can never know in advance how things will turn out for the productions at hand. Sometimes one's educated guesses are right on the money: Did anyone think that Jackie Mason in a musical was a great idea? But so many factors can come into play that predicting the fate of a forthcoming event, even one already seen elsewhere, can be extremely tricky.

Then too, there's the issue of frankness. When I write such preview pieces, I may indicate certain perceived drawbacks inherent in a forthcoming show. But it's only fair to withhold judgment, so if in conversation with friends I may make dire predictions, I feel it fitting to refrain from revealing in print my more serious misgivings.

I'll soon begin my annual preview pieces on the new season's musicals, and once again I'm preceding them by taking a glance at the musical season just ended, attempting to figure out just how predictable it proved to be. And the simple answer is: not very.

True, some things could be guessed in advance. Everyone knew that Hugh Jackman would be good in The Boy from Oz, or at least everyone did who had previously experienced Jackman as a musical-theatre man. I certainly could not have predicted Jackman's perfect attendance record, which is highly commendable. After its much-cheered off-Broadway debut, there was no reason to think that Avenue Q would not be well received uptown. And the show's size meant that it would at least survive and probably catch on. Needless to say, few if any could have predicted that the season's first new Broadway musical would also be its Tony winner. Nor could one have predicted that Avenue Q would be front-page news for almost a full week following the Tonys.

Because of the reception at Encores!, everyone knew that Donna Murphy and Wonderful Town would again win good reviews. Truth to tell, though, I also suspected that this Wonderful Town would be a very hard sell on Broadway. Much as it pains me to say it of one of my favorite musical comedies, Wonderful Town is simply not the sort of show likely to have wide appeal to today's audiences. A good Bye Bye Birdie would be a far better bet for success than Wonderful Town.

The notion of asking a pair of unknown chorus hoofers to fill the shoes of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers seemed risky, and so it proved, even if Never Gonna Dance had other problems, including a lackluster book and unattractive musical arrangements. And it wasn't difficult to predict the acclaim Big River would win; it had already been cheered in Los Angeles, and local critics were bound to welcome a show that allowed deaf and hard-of-hearing actors to play leading roles in a Tony-winning musical.

Because they were fitted out with new books, it was tricky to predict the Broadway fate of Taboo, Bombay Dreams, and The Boy from Oz. Having seen the London productions of the first two, I was dubious. In the case of Taboo, I just didn't think there would be sufficient local interest in a show about London's New Romantic movement of the early '80s. And in the case of Bombay Dreams, I felt that Bollywood films were too alien to the general Broadway audience to allow the show to function as an unannotated stage version of a Bollywood movie, which is more or less what it was in the West End. The fact that Thomas Meehan, the king of Broadway librettists after The Producers and Hairspray, was revising Bombay for Broadway made one wonder if they might somehow be able to make it work. Then again, it was extremely unlikely that Meehan would have a third consecutive musical smash.

I noted in last summer's preview that putting Judy and Liza on stage as characters in a story ran the risk of silliness, and the result in The Boy from Oz was just that. The show turned out to be even more preposterous than expected, but it did contain more than a few moments of treasurable cheesiness.

Turning now to the less predictable aspects of the season, I was dubious that they'd be able to pull off Wicked. Reading the novel, I couldn't quite imagine how they could boil it down into a coherent show. And the truth is, they didn't. But what I hadn't counted on was the enormous affection for the land of Oz, not to mention the power of the show's logo. It turned out that audiences couldn't wait to see a lavish prequel to The Wizard of Oz, and Wicked may also have filled a gap left open by the lack of a new Disney stage spectacle since 2000. If I may have been right in suspecting that Wicked wouldn't quite work, I was entirely wrong in predicting that the show would need strong reviews to survive and fill the Gershwin. Several important notices were indeed negative, but they couldn't prevent Wicked from becoming a grand-scale crowd-pleaser.

This time last year, Caroline or Change was simply an off-Broadway Public Theatre musical. So was Kander and Ebb's The Visit, until it got cancelled. Given the involvement of Tony Kushner, George C. Wolfe, and Jeanine Tesori, there was always the chance that Caroline would transfer to Broadway. What was much less predictable was the decision to move the show even after a less-than-great off-Broadway reception. Sure enough, the reviews that greeted the transfer were with several exceptions about as negative as the first set. The show's move to Broadway may ultimately prove to be a noble gesture rather than a wise business decision.

From the screaming reception I witnessed at an early preview of the revival of Little Shop of Horrors, I imagined that the Broadway premiere production would thrive. Instead, it has more or less limped along, surviving but never turning into a hit. I predicted in one of my preview pieces that Alfred Molina would make a wonderful Tevye. I hadn't counted on his and his director's determination to play the star part so naturalistically that the character sometimes receded into the background.

But I did predict that Assassins would get a far better critical reception this time around than it had received off-Broadway in 1991. I always believed it to be a strong piece, and I suspected that Sondheim's subsequent work would only make Assassins look better thirteen years later.

Which brings us to a host of tantalizing new questions. Will La Cage aux Folles hold up in a Broadway revival? Can Sweet Charity succeed on Broadway without a major musical-theatre star? Can a Frank Wildhorn show receive good reviews? Will lightning strike again for the team of Nathan Lane and Susan Stroman? Can Chitty Chitty Bang Bang repeat its London success on Broadway? Can a Monty Python movie make a successful stage musical?

One may amuse oneself attempting to predict the answers to these and many other questions. But of course, one never knows.

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