Word: broadway
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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FRANKIE AND JOHNNY IN THE CLAIR DE LUNE. Kathy Bates returns to the role she winsomely originated in Terrence McNally's off Broadway hit about love between two lonely losers...
...must have seemed pipe dreams at the Pasadena Playhouse, where Hackman took acting classes in the mid-'50s; the school voted him, and fellow student Dustin Hoffman, Least Likely to Succeed. A decade of small parts and menial jobs kept him going until 1964, when he scored in the Broadway comedy Any Wednesday. Three years later he made a screen impact in Bonnie and Clyde, and Hackman could finally support his wife Faye and three children from his actor's earnings. The couple were divorced in 1985, after 30 years of marriage. "Acting is a selfish profession," he says...
...Fair Lady and Camelot, he reportedly said he could not get over how easy he and his partner made it all seem. Loewe was right, but in retrospect the most startling thing about the team's success is that their creativity was far from unique. In the heyday of Broadway musicals, nearly every season brought a landmark production, often two or three. The 1946-47 season that introduced Brigadoon, for example, also provided Finian's Rainbow. The 1956-57 season of My Fair Lady was, in addition, the season of Bells Are Ringing, Candide, The Most Happy Fella...
...With three striking exceptions -- Dreamgirls, Big River and Into the Woods -- pretty much every noteworthy musical of the decade has been a revival, a recycling of old songs, an import (generally from Britain) or a critical smash but commercial also-ran. The current season, which by Broadway's calendar began in May, is more miserable than most. Its first American musical, Carrie, actually a slightly postponed holdover from last season, closed within five performances at a record loss of $7 million. The sole entry since, Legs Diamond, a quirky blend of gangster spoof and show-biz biography, opened last week...
...rest almost entirely on material from the past: a Jerome Robbins retrospective; a blues-and-dance collage with no new songs, Black and Blue, from the creators of Tango Argentino; and a Duke Ellington score, Queenie Pie, left unfinished at his death in 1974, that has been touted for Broadway for three seasons. Says Rocco Landesman, a producer who succeeded with Big River and Into the Woods: "With a musical there are 40 ways for things to go wrong and only one for them to go right, which is for everything to come together...