Word: supermanic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Producer Harold Prince took what pop did to art and applied it to drama in his 1966 play, It's A Bird, It's A Plane, It's Superman. Though the show flopped on Broadway--folding after 129 performances--it made stage history of a kind. This was the first time a comic book hero was ever adapted to the stage, and treated as a serious work...
Andy Borowitz '80 brought Prince's show to the Agassiz Theater, and shortened the title to Superman, updating and adding to the humor of the original...
...SUPERMAN, a musical comedy in two acts, is cleverly set against a comic-book backdrop of the city of Metropolis. In the upper left-hand corner of the stage is the "DC Comics" logo. Superman--played by Randy Stone '78--first appears by stepping out of a slit in the painted-on telephone booth. One has the sense early on in the show that Superman--and indeed all of the characters--step off the pages of a comic book onto the stage. Later on in the play, rather than use regular furniture in the Daily Planet newsroom, Borowitz utilizes flat...
...plot of Superman smacks of what we have all sopped up since age seven from DC Comics. All the familiar characters are there, along with a few new faces--Max Mencken (remember H.L.) the sleazy reporter for the Daily Planet; Dr. Abner Sedgwick, a frustrated mad scientist from the Metropolis Institute of Technology (MIT); and the Flying Lings, a threesome of oriental acrobats...
Sedgwick, the villainous "ten-time Nobel prize loser," seeks to ruin Superman's reputation in Metropolis. Strongly played by Fred Barton, the mad doctor epitomizes nurdiness; he is the science wonk par excellence, dressed in white lab coat, sneakers, and ABC sportscaster's plaid pants. One of the best moments in the play comes when Sedgwick daintily galivants across the stage, trilling his song "Revenge," and rolling the "r" at each refrain...