Yes, I want to see this. A British adaptation of the film Top Hat had a successful tour and has now transferred to the West End.
This story, Top Hat! Return to the golden age of the musical:
Forget the recession – moonlight and music and love and romance are back, in the Sunday, Nov. 27 edition of the England’s The Independent newspaper—had my hat popping off my head in cartoon-like exasperation.
It’s not just the article’s forced “trend” premise—why, in the same month when a new, arch and contemporary musical version of Matilda is being touted as the best and boldest new British musical since Billy Elliot, need anyone make the argument that theaters “want to play safe”?
But several of the shows cited here as “classic” are in fact new to the live stage. They reflect modern theater practices as much as they do trad styles. And if using old literary source material for a musical is grounds to dismiss it, well, go get those Spring Awakening guys.
The Wizard of Oz mentioned here is an all-new production produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Bill Kenwright, duly based on the MGM musical (including all the accustomed Arlen/Yarburg songs) but with some fresh tunes by Lloyd Webber in a rare reunion with the brilliant lyricist Tim Rice. Directed and co-adapted by Jeremy Sams. Nothing against Wizard of Ozes like the one coming to New Haven’s Shubert later this month (a NETworks-produced tour based on the popular 1987 Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation of the movie), but this—as the guardian of the gates of the Emerald City likes to say—is a horse of a different color.
As for Top Hat, producers have been trying to crack that as a stage vehicle for decades. I remember Tommy Tune mentioning in the mid-‘90s that there’d been a Top Hat in development with him in mind. The sticking point with adapting Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals, he told me, was not the lack of exquisite dancers available, but that the books of these musicals are rather thin. They also tend, as movies do, to liven themselves up with lots of scene changes, including hard-to-shift locales like parks and Venetian waterways. When I read that there’s a new Top Hat musical on the boards, I’m not thinking “ho hum.” I’m thinkin’ “How?”
Ultimately, the Independent article concedes that what theaters really are looking for is balanced programming: the strapped Opera North company is doing Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel because it “could bring more people to the company.” The artistic director of the Curve theater in Leicester is quoted as saying that without a “quest for something new” that musical theater would “struggle and die.” This caveat seems overblown as applied to the Curve’s impending production of Gypsy, which like Carousel is an ahead-of-its-time nostalgia-driven modern psychomusical which, whenever revived, demands extensive updating and reinterpretation. In any case, Gypsy hasn’t had a major British revival in nearly three decades.
Chide the musical theater, if you like, for underwritten “jukebox musicals” (a genre the British pioneered and still dominate). But canny revivals of well-written shows which are ripe for reconsideration, designed for large venues where, new, untried and intimate works are unlikely to want to tread anyway? Doesn’t faze me in the least, and I count myself at least as progressive and innovation-craving as the blokes at The Independent.