Broadway Music MVPs 1960-2010: The Most Valuable Players of the Past 50 Seasons
By Peter Filichia (2011 Applause Theatre & Cinema Books)
I can’t say I’m fond of made-up competitions that pit creative artists against each other as if they were playing sports. But with his earlier The Biggest Hit and the Biggest Flop of the Season, 1959-2009 and now this new volume which takes its cues from the more nuanced hit-and-flop determinations of major-league baseball, Peter Filichia has found fun, frisky formats through which to structure his vast knowledge of Broadway history.
This book is charming right off the bat, so to speak, with a preface that defends the baseball/theater metaphor and works it imaginatively for three pages.
Filicia’s as good with behind-the-scenes anecdotes as he is with the glamorous footlight stuff and showtune passion-sharing, so this is wide-ranging and enlightening book, its data and personal opinions bolstered by dozens of firsthand interviews with an array of Broadway talents, from Kaye Ballard to Larry Gelbart to Anthony Rapp. If you find the manner in which the info is arranged to be unwieldy, don’t worry; Filicia’s indexed it.
Best of all, Filichia doesn’t take his premise all that serious. In treating theater seasons as if they were baseball seasons, he duly each year’s top rookies, “managers” (producers), comebacks, “relievers” and of MVPs, all that seriously. But he’s happy to explain how strong other contenders were, and he openly questions some of his own choices. He’s not interested in using a new way of marking greatness in the theater industry as a chance to redress wrongs done by the Tonys or other awards. Sondheim, for instance, is treated as erratically here as he is in the non-Filichia leagues: Reliever of the Year for the Candide revival, Comeback Player of the Year for Company, MVP for Follies and complicit in a host of awards won by his stars and collaborators.
Mostly, Filichia tells the stories he wants to tell, aiing to provide variety and insight within an entertaining framework. The MVP for 1986 is Betty L. Corwin, who developed the Theater on Film and Tape Archive in the Billy Rose Collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Some rookies are obvious: Barbra Streisand’s breakthrough in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, for instance. But some equally obvious rookies, such as Kristin Chenoweth in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, are overlooked, perhaps because they received appropriate recognition from the Tonys or other award-givers. Or just because Filichia has more interesting showbiz legends to spin. The Comeback king of 1985-86 is Michael Rupert in a Sweet Charity revival; he’d been on Broadway as a teenager in The Happy Time a quarter-century earlier.
So the Comeback winners aren’t all old, and the Rookies aren’t all young; Tyne Daly (Gypsy) and Mickey Rooney (Sugar Babies) are excellent choices. Nice to see Jerry Lewis acknowledged as a Reliever for how he brought new life to the ‘90s revival of Damn Yankees. David Merrick’s cited as Best Manager of 1961-62 for his audacious and unethical ads for Subways Are for Sleeping in which he quoted people who’d loved the show and just happened to have the same names as the major New York theater critics.
Filichia knows in advance that as much as they want to respect the views of theater critics and historians, they want to argue and bitch about them even more. He does a great play-by-play in Broadway Musical MVPs, and wisely offers lots of chances for readers to scream “Throw the bum out.”