Second Act Trouble: Behind the Scenes at Broadway's Big Musical Bombs (Applause Books) - Hardcover

Suskin, Steven

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1557836310 ISBN 13: 9781557836311

Publisher: Applause, 2006

Synopsis

If Broadway's triumphant musical hits are exhilarating, the backstage tales of Broadway failures are tantalizing soap operas in miniature. Second Act Trouble puts you with the creators in the rehearsal halls, at out-of-town tryouts, in late-night, hotel-room production meetings, and at after-the-fact recriminatory gripe fests. Suskin has compiled and annotated long-forgotten, first-person accounts of 25 Broadway musicals that stubbornly went awry. Contributions come from such respected writers as Patricia Bosworth, Mel Gussow, Lehman Engel, William Gibson, Lewis H. Lapham, and John Gruen. No mere vanity productions, these; you can't have a big blockbuster of failure, it seems, without the participation of Broadway's biggest talents. Caught in the stranglehold of tryout turmoil are Richard Rodgers, Jule Styne, Jerry Herman, Cy Coleman, Charles Strouse, John Kander, Mel Brooks, and even Edward Albee., The infamous shows featured include Mack & Mabel; Breakfast at Tiffany's; The Act; Dude; Golden Boy; Hellzapoppin'; Nick and Nora; Seesaw; Kelly; and How Now, Dow Jones.

About this title

About the Author

Steven Suskin has written a dozen books on theatre and music, including A Must See! Brilliant Broadway Artwork(0811842177'), 'Show Tunes: The Songs, Shows, and Careers of Broadway's Major Composers(019125991'), 'and the Broadway Yearbook series. A long-time theatrical manager and producer, he lives in New York with his wife and two children.

Reviews

What makes a musical go wrong? Theatrical manager and producer Suskin (Show Tunes; Broadway Yearbook series) attempts an answer in this lightly entertaining, obsessively edited compilation of newspaper and magazine articles and memoir excerpts, enlightened and corrected by Suskin's own commentary. A flop usually boils down to a few variables: conflicting artistic visions and/or personality conflicts, "star vehicles that failed," a nonexistent second act or costly rewrites and recastings. The earliest musical documented is Flying Colors (1932), the latest The Red Shoes (1993), with the majority from the '60s and '70s and no examples from the AIDS-torn '80s. Most of these gossip-laden, name-dropping, cattily amusing essays are too short to give more than the sketchiest outline of a show's trials and tribulations. Aspiring Broadway writers and producers looking for edification may be frustrated. The two exceptions are William Gibson's deeply felt excerpt about the posthumous musicalization of his close friend Clifford Odets's Golden Boy, an essay so literarily superior that Suskin refrains from his standard in-essay editorializing, and the book's grand finale, Lewis H. Lapham's long, funny, in-depth Saturday Evening Post article about the 1965 disaster Kelly. 100 color and b&w illus. (Jan.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Applause
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1557836310
• ISBN 13: 9781557836311
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400