Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops by Ken Mandelbaum

Author:Ken Mandelbaum [Mandelbaum, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 1992-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Prettybelle team (top photo, left to right: Jule Styne, Gower Champion, Angela Lansbury, Alexander H. Cohen, Bob Merrill). Which one was the wild card? Below, an album of vocal selections from a show that never reached Broadway.

Photo Credit: N.Y. Public Library

Arnold’s novel was extremely difficult to transfer to the stage without its story becoming ugly. How does one make scenes like the flashback showing why Prettybelle’s son was institutionalized at age thirteen—encouraged by his father to learn to shoot, he shot dead three people, all of whom resembled his father—workable in a musical? Prettybelle suffered further from a problem similar to that of A Mother’s Kisses: wildly unconventional material used as the basis for a conventional musical. If the story was ever to succeed as a musical (which is unlikely), it would have needed a far more original, wacky style than director–choreographer Champion ever provided. Further, Styne and Merrill were simply the wrong team for the adaptation: what was meant to be wildly comic played uneasily, and the score, which had its moments, was nevertheless not eccentric and unusual enough for the story. Styne and Merrill were simply not comfortable writing songs for Louisiana rednecks in search of “poon” or for genteel Southern ladies singing of their defilement at sleazy motels. Lansbury, however, was never better, and a heavily made-up Charlotte Rae was a hoot as her ancient mother, constantly accusing young men of undressing her with their eyes. Prettybelle was a daring attempt at something different, something dealing with real-life issues, and with Lansbury’s incandescent performance and the wild goings-on, it was the kind of show that flop collectors boast about having caught. But even if the wrong team tackled Prettybelle, it was still material that tended to defy musicalization.

* * *

Prettybelle was near-impossible material uneasily adapted for the musical stage. Lolita, My Love (Philadelphia; Feb 16, ’71; closed on the road) has the singular distinction of being both a complete mistake and a superb adaptation, with a marvelous score and perfect leads, of one of the great novels of the twentieth century. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita had already been transferred to the screen by Stanley Kubrick and Nabokov, but in a considerably bowdlerized version. Alan Jay Lerner decided to make Nabokov’s tale of a middle-aged professor’s passion for a preteenage nymphet into a musical, and it was to become the first of the five flops with which Lerner ended his stage career. John Barry, who would later write Billy for the West End and The Little Prince and the Aviator for Broadway, was the composer.

The show opened in Philadelphia to terrible reviews and shut down for repairs. Director Tito Capobianco (who had directed Beverly Sills in many of her operatic triumphs) was replaced by Noel Willman, who had done Darling of the Day and Love Match, neither of which was mentioned in his Lolita program bio. Danny Daniels, who had replaced Jack Cole during rehearsals, was replaced by Dan Siretta, and the original Lolita, considered too ripe at fifteen, was replaced by a thirteen-year-old.

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