Goodspeed Musical announced two-thirds of its 2012 Goodspeed Opera House season—namely Mame and Carousel—last November. This week they announced the third show, and it provides some cult-class balance to the famous crowdpleasers already on the sched.
Something’s Afoot, which runs at the East Haddam-based theater from October 5 to December 9, is a well-liked murder mystery parody done back before Rupert Holmes singlehandedly took over the form. The book, score and lyrics are by James McDonald, David Vos and Robert Gerlach, with added tunes by Ed Linderman. Not exactly names up there with Jerry Herman, Richard Rodgers or Oscar Hammerstein III (Vos and Gerlach’s other big show was Nobody Loves a Dragon; Linderman conceived a Broadway Jukebox revue in 1981). Something Afoot’s creators were working actors who found a cool format to exploit, and found their greatest success with it outside the Great White Way. Same trajectory as Nunsense, really—comic murder crises, only this one has magnifying glasses instead of habits, and it’s a whodunnit instead of a sketch revue.
Something’s Afoot ran for a whopping two months on Broadway in 1976, but has had a hardy afterlife in the summer stock, college and community theater realms.
The Goodspeed actually had a hand in the show’s development nearly 40 years ago, giving Something’s Afoot its second production in 1973 following a premiere at Atlanta’s Alliance Theater the previous year. It toured (with Pat Carroll) even before it made it to New York. There was a TV version in 1984 with Jean Stapleton and Andy Gibb. (How ’80s can you get?)
For this revival, the Goodspeed has enlisted Casey Hushion, whose Broadway credits include Assistant Director on In the Heights and The Drowsy Chaperone and Associate Director on the musical of Elf and Nick Whitby’s stage version of the Lubitsch film To Be or Not to Be. She was the interim artistic director of North Carolina Theatre and has been attached (again, as Associate Director) to the Broadway-bound musical Minsky’s. Interestingly, Hushion once directed a concert version of Carousel. Hushion’s been involved with the Goodspeed for a decade now in various positions, assistant-directing George M!, Brigadoon and Babes in Arms. She was appointed the Goodspeed’s “Artistic Associate/New Works Scout” in 2005.
Hushion has some dance credits on her resume (director/choreographer on Poe the Musical; dance captain for a North Shore Music Theatre production of Fiddler on the Roof), but the Goodspeed press release says that the choreographer for Something’s Afoot has yet to be announced.
Which, of course, means that nothing is afoot yet at all.