There’s no business like show business, of course, and there’s nothing like the business of shows about themselves. Broadway has long been brilliant at perpetuating its own myth, from 42nd Street (the place as well as the show) and The Producers (the people that call themselves that as well as the musical of that name) to A Chorus Line (the ‘gypsy’ dancers that are the backbone of the Broadway musical, as well as the now legendary 1975 musical that celebrates them).
I’ve just come been to a press event to introduce, for the first time, the cast that have been put together for the imminent Broadway revival of the show, and it reminded me that I date my own time in London to this very show, too: it was the very first West End musical that I saw after arriving in London, aged 16, from South Africa (where I was born and brought up). And I remember it was the very last Saturday matinee of its London run at Drury Lane in March 1979.
I subsequently saw it, too, on my very first trip to New York, four years later in 1983, where it was still running at the Shubert Theatre (and continued to do so to 1990, where it established the record for the longest run in Broadway history to then, since eclipsed by Cats and now The Phantom of the Opera). And there’s something buried in the vamp of Martin Hamlisch’s song, “One” – to which the chorus line took their places this morning – that reduces me to tears, instantly.
Apart from the anticipation of seeing this show again when it returns to New York iN September, after an out-of-town try-out in San Francisco in July, was the excitement of seeing inside a Broadway theatre I’d never been to before today: the press event was held in the Hudson Theatre, an old theatre buried in a modern hotel but now only used for conference events. But just as A Chorus Line now lives again, it’s also exciting that the theatre still lives on, too, albeit in different circumstances.
They will both live forever; much as vampire victims famously do, but the Broadway musicals about vampires never do. Elton John’s latest musical, Lestat, opened on Broadway last night, and to read this morning’s reviews, it seems that it will complete a trilogy of Broadway vampire flops that have seen Dance of the Vampires and Dracula both bomb, too.
Elton John’s winning streak that has seen him become the most successful contemporary musical composer today – with The Lion King currently playing on both sides of the Atlantic and Billy Elliot in London – has now officially deserted him. It also marks a first attempt by Warner Brothers to enter into a market that Disney have successfully cracked of turning film properties into stage hits; but the wittiest line I’ve heard about the show is that the producer in charge of it has been described as “the aptly-named” Greg Maday.
