TWO high-profile musicals trying out in regional theaters may be Broadway bound.
The first is “The Visit,” the new musical from songwriters John Kander and Fred Ebb, and playwright Terrence McNally, which opened last week in Chicago starring Chita Rivera.
Kander says Rivera, one of Broadway’s great dancers, is “giving the performance of a lifetime, even though she’s playing a woman with a wooden leg.”
Based on Friedrich Durrenmatt’s brutal play about a rich old woman who returns to her hometown seeking revenge on a former lover, “The Visit” was supposed to open on Broadway last spring, but was derailed by the withdrawal of its star, Angela Lansbury.
The show lay dormant until Chicago’s Goodman Theater decided to give it a twirl, with Kander and Ebb’s old pal Rivera in the lead.
Reviews have been generally favorable.
The Chicago Tribune said the show “doesn’t reach for overwhelming effect, yet its intimacy carries a tremendous wallop.”
Variety said “The Visit” “rumbles with the originality of a significant new American musical,” and he heaped praise on Kander and Ebb’s “gorgeous” score.
The paper added, however, that the show needed to be pruned of “esoteric clutter.”
Kander and Ebb both say they hope producer Barry Brown will be able to get the show to Broadway next season, with Rivera as the leading lady. (The show’s price tag: $10 million, at the very least, according to sources).
Brown’s spokesperson said “no decision has been made yet” about a Broadway production.
Some theater people have wondered whether “The Visit,” which ends with a brutal murder, is too harrowing for mainstream Broadway audiences.
But Kander, who calls his show ” ‘The Merry Widow’ turned on its head,” points out that most of his shows with Ebb – including “Chicago,” “Cabaret” and “Kiss of the Spider Woman” – were based on plays or books that many people initially thought were too dark to be made into musicals.
“The stuff that people say is a terrible idea for a musical is what seems to stir our imagination,” he says. “Standard light comedy – John loves Mary – I find much harder to write.”
Another show that may head to Broadway is the revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Flower Drum Song,” which opened Sunday night at the Mark Taper Forum in L.A.
The L.A. Times called it “raffishly entertaining.”
Variety said the production is “too compelling an effort to imagine it wouldn’t make its way to Broadway.”
“Flower Drum Song,” set in San Francisco’s Chinatown in the 1950s, was considered unrevivable because of its patronizing view of Chinese immigrants.
But this production has an entirely new book by David Henry Hwang, author of the hit play “M. Butterfly.”
The old book dealt with a mail-order bride from China who comes to San Francisco to marry a nightclub owner.
Hwang’s version is about a producer of traditional Chinese plays who hits hard times because his audience has all but dried up.
To drum up business, he allows his son to book club acts into the theater late at night. Eventually, the son learns the value of keeping alive some traditions.
Ted Chapin, who heads the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization, said the revial “is worthy of coming East.”
It will likely play San Francisco for some more tweaking before opening on Broadway in the 2002-2003 season.