Word: pre-broadway
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Producers put shows out on the road for three basic reasons: to prepare for Broadway; to capitalize on a Broadway success already attained; and occasionally, when a show's concept and stars are more marketable than its actual merits, to bypass Broadway's fierce competition and legion of reviewers. Steep staging costs have made offerings in the first category, known as tryouts, a vanishing breed. Nowadays pre-Broadway tryouts are usually limited to one city, unless a show has a big-name cast or is a revival of a fondly remembered musical, like the current tours of Cabaret and West...
...reinvigorate the text, Miller and Director Peter Wood have gone back to its beginnings. The inspiration for the piece, Miller acknowledges, was Studs Terkel's sprawling oral history Hard Times. But during pre-Broadway workshops and a Charleston, S.C., tryout, Miller was repeatedly counseled by critics to shift emphasis from a documentary-style montage of vignettes to a focus on a particular family, resembling his own, whose growing deprivation and humiliation reflected the Depression in microcosm. These semiautobiographical characters proved unable by themselves to bear the weight of enormous events; meanwhile, the play's sweep had been diminished...
Reddin is bringing off a rare double: while his words resound in Rum and Coke, he is onstage 20 blocks away in a manic revival of the 1930s farce Room Service, a portrait of pre-Broadway opening desperation. Reddin winningly playswhat else?--the playwright, a geeky kid from Oswego who eventually has to "die" for an hour and a half so that his show might live. Director Alan Arkin seems too conscious that Room Service was adapted as a Marx Brothers movie vehicle. Mark Hamill, the fresh-faced Luke Skywalker of the Star Wars series, is mustached and growly...
Woman of the Year, now in a four-week pre-Broadway tryout, proves doubly disappointing because it not only fails to capitalize on the allure and talent of Bacall but because it does not exploit successfully an old story that might well have been updated. Based on the 1942 MGM movie of the same name, which starred Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, the musical version keeps the story line almost intact, with the perhaps inevitable change of the lead form a newspaper woman to a television anchor. She, Tess Harding, first insults, then falls in love with a cartoonist...
...seemed the natural choice to play the lyricist to Actor Robert Klein's songwriter in Neil Simon's new play, They're Playing Our Song. So Simon said after trying out 300 other actresses for the role. The critics agreed when the comedy opened a pre-Broadway run in Los Angeles. Mother agreed too. Said Ball: "It's very proud-making. I enjoyed it so much I'm going back for a second performance." She has asked for tickets for a third...