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| Off Broadway Musicals, 1910-2007 by Dan Dietz | |
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rockfenris2005 06:36 am UTC 08/24/13 |
| In reply to: | re: More Than You Deserve - Time Magazine - steven_stuart 03:18 am UTC 08/24/13 |
MORE THAN YOU DESERVE (1973) NOTES – With almost depressing regularity, Joseph Papp produced musical after musical diatribe from his perch at the Public Theatre. These all seemed to be angry, unstructured rock musicals with anti-establishment views which espoused the fashionable causes of the day (feminist, Black, environmental, anti-war). One wonders the point, because almost all were failures, with short runs and little in the way of critical or general audience acclaim. Virtually all these special-interest musicals disappeared after their brief runs at the Public (even Hair [see entry], the one successful musical in this group, quickly became a period piece; today, its strength lies in Galt MacDermot’s melodic score and not in the musical’s now quaint anti-establishment message). More Than You Deserve is a perfect case in point. It was another anti-war rock musical, this one superimposing the form of the traditional military-themed play or musical (here, South Pacific [1949], with specific references to Nellie Forbush, Bloody Mary, and Liat) against an actual historical event (the My-Lai massacre, which occurred in South Vietnam on March 16, 1968). The critics noted the musical also borrowed attitudes from the novel Catch-22 (1962) and the 1970 film MASH. Further, the unstructured, free-wheeling plot emphasized the sexual obsessions of the characters (for example, “Nellie Forbush,” here a reporter, is gang-raped by a group of American soldiers, enjoys the experience, and becomes a nymphomaniac; and “Bloody Mary” sells “Liat” to the platoon). Richard Watts in the New York Post “hated” the musical and said it lacked an “excuse for its existence.” Further, Martin Gottfried in Women’s Wear Daily called it “trash.” But Kevin Sanders on WABC-TV7 found the evening “audacious and challenging” and made the improbable suggestion that if a musical like More Than You Deserve had opened five years earlier, the Vietnam War might have ended sooner. Michael Weller, the musical’s librettist and co-lyricist, had written the vastly overpraised Moonchildren (1970), the first of a number of drearily introspective plays and films which centered around naval-gazing baby boomers. More Than You Deserve wasn’t the last musical to deal with the My-Lai massacre. In 1975, the Broadway “rock opera” The Lieutenant explored the event (but only for nine performances). The first performance of More Than You Deserve was given on November 21, 1973, the official press performance was on January 3, 1974, and the musical closed on January 13 (the total number of performances was sixty-three). THE CONFIDENCE MAN (1977) NOTES – Perhaps the darkest and most cynical novel in American literature, Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man is not only his greatest work; it may be the greatest of all American novels. The story takes place on April Fool’s Day, when a satanic master of disguises passes the day on a Mississippi River steamboat where he cons everyone he meets, first stripping his victims of their money, then later of their faith. Jim Steinman’s musical version (also known as Songs from “The Confidence Man”) briefly appeared Off Off Broadway on April 6, 1977, and was later produced at New York’s Queen’s College in 1986. In 2003, a studio cast recording was released by Original Cast Records (CD # OC-6058) with a cast which included Norbert Leo Butz, Chuck Cooper, LaChanze, Julia Murney, Andre De Shields, Andrea Marcovicci, and KT Sullivan. | |
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