Word: kopit
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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WHEN A GOOD STRAIGHT PLAY IS TURNED into a musical, the basic question is whether music adds anything. In the case of Arthur Kopit's WINGS, a 1978 succes d'estime about a former pilot and air-show wing walker whose mind has been frazzled by a stroke, the answer is an emphatic yes -- sometimes. In the new version off-Broadway, Jeffrey Lunden's score provides evocatively dissonant metaphors for what is going on inside the afflicted woman's head. But when Arthur Perlman's book and lyrics guide her into banal emotional bonds with a therapist and fellow patients...
...tours or revivals of Broadway hits. "Original" hits are rare; and these days they all seem to be Phantoms. In 1989 Ken Hill's version recouped its $1 million investment in an amazingly quick eight weeks and has since toured profitably. Another Phantom, by Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit (Broadway's Nine), ran for a boffo year in Chicago, has been playing for seven triumphant months at the Westchester Broadway Theater in Elmsford, New York, opened this month in Kansas City, Kansas, and St. Petersburg, Florida, and is due in six other cities. The show may never play Broadway...
Phantom. Yeston (music and lyrics) and Kopit (book) completed their version in 1985, but when Lloyd Webber announced his Phantom, they found it tough to raise money. Kopit and Lloyd Webber briefly discussed collaborating, but their visions of the Phantom didn't mesh. The Yeston-Kopit version was dead for nearly six years, then miraculously resurrected at Houston's Theater Under the Stars. Yeston's melodies often skim the roiling emotions Lloyd Webber's music swims in, but they are sophisticated show tunes, operatic and operettic by turns. Kopit balances the Phantom-Christine romance with an All About Eve , rivalry...
...that the story has limitations. The Phantom can sing only one kind of song to Christine: I-adore-you-and-you-ab hor-me. Poor pastel Raoul can never be much more than a Parisian Freddy Eynsford-Hill. And yet -- in the magnificent Lloyd Webber version, the appealing Yeston-Kopit or even the lame Ken Hill -- the story works. The Phantom and Christine sing ) their volcanic sentiments in a plot as spare and potent as legend...
...these little Phantoms are springing up," says Hill, "purely because of the enormous success of Andrew's show." Yet very few theatergoers attend other Phantoms in the belief they're getting the Lloyd Webber. "People are coming to our show," Kopit says, "not because they can't get tickets to the Webber version, but because of the Phantom story. There is something dreamlike and mythic in the story of an innocent girl and a dark, foreboding, romantic figure who gets her under his power. We can identify both with the girl and with the deformed figure, who is perhaps...