Word: broadway
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...impresario is all but ended in the commercial theater. Practically everything that comes to Broadway nowadays is funded by committee and imported wholesale from somewhere else. Off-Broadway, however, the American theater's boldest, most ambitious, quirkiest, most pedantic and at times most infuriating showman holds sway more forcefully than ever. Joseph Papp has built, at the New York Shakespeare Festival, a personal barony more than an institution. Although he sometimes describes his $14 million annual operation as the biggest "regional" theater in the nation, its six-theater complex and staff of 125 stand in the shadows of his outsize...
This has caused more than a little resentment on Broadway, not least against Lloyd Webber himself, since it sometimes seems that half the musicals running at any one time are his. What American can compete with him? Charles Strouse has not had a hit since Annie (1977). Marvin Hamlisch's A Chorus Line is still strutting its stuff, but the show opened in 1975. Jerry Herman's 1983 cross- dressed love story La Cage aux Folles packed in the tourists, but its appeal came more from the frisson of seeing men in black lace and garter belts than from...
...with his Plantagenet saga Blondel and a major triumph in Chess, a cynical look at a championship chess match between a Soviet and an American that boasts a brilliant score by Bjorn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, two members of the rock group ABBA. It is scheduled for a Broadway opening in April. In 1986 he reunited briefly with his former partner on a 30-minute private entertainment called Cricket for Queen Elizabeth's 60th birthday...
...small collection of genre songs (pop, rock, mock-soul) for children, like Joseph, emerged instead as an overblown extravaganza that the composer, despite his initial enthusiasm for the production, later disowned. "It was a mistake to have put it anywhere near where it could be considered a Broadway musical," Lloyd Webber says, though he still defends it as a vehicle that brings to the theater people who do not ordinarily attend. Aside from the high-tech overkill of the staging, Lloyd Webber's heart was not really in the writing; he had come too far from ( Joseph to be able...
COVER: Andrew Lloyd Webber brings his smash Phantom to Broadway...