In the current penchant for adapting any movie – hit or flop – for the stage, it’s perhaps no surprise that someone has now alighted on bringing Xanadu – the 1980 movie musical flop featuring songs by the Electric Light Orchestra that starred Olivia Newton-John in her first film after the success of the film version of Grease – to the Broadway stage.
It finally opens there tomorrow at the Helen Hayes Theatre, and I caught a preview last Thursday – the night before the press officially started being admitted, as they do in New York, ahead of the official opening. But without pre-empting what the reviews are yet to declare, a fascinating feature in the New York Times on Saturday offered a window into the minds of the young(ish) group of debutant theatre producers who have raised some $5million to bring the show to New York. “We’re trying to stay true to the spirit of the film,” 37-year-old producer Robert Ahrens is quoted as saying. “But nothing is perfect, so we’re trying to improve on it.”
But I don’t think anyone would ever make a claim for perfection for the film version of Xanadu. Indeed, playwright Douglas Carter Beane – whom Ahrens, according to this feature, “stalked” to do the book for it, until his initial no turned to a yes – has astutely remarked of the film elsewhere, “I blame cocaine… It’s like people say, ‘When you hear Ray Charles play, you can hear the heroin’? When you watch Xanadu, you can see the cocaine up on the screen.”
I hesitate to say that when you watch Xanadu on stage, you can see the helium of its creators being intoxicated by camp – and the producers desperately hoping for a winning formula. Dan Vickery, a 43-year-old pharmaceutical company adviser, tells the New York Times, “When I did research to try to understand what is popular, there is an element that is good music and a brand name”. This, presumably, has both: title recognition and songs that people recognise, too.
But if the producers themselves lack name recognition, that’s intentional: “Pretty much if you look at every show in town, you’re seeing the product of someone from the establishment,” said another, 26-year-old Brian Swibel. “Our show feels indie, because this is an entirely fresh team on the producing side.”
And, as in London, what the theatre establishment needs more than ever is replenishing of its ranks with fresh talent. But – and this is the most ominous sign for the producing of this musical – that talent needs to learn its craft, not assume it knows best while flying blind. Yet another of the producers, 26-year-old Tara Smith (who is Swibel’s girlfriend and who worked in reality TV before turning to screenwriting and developing her own musical), says, “Our advertising company will say, ‘We think you need to do X, Y and Z’. They’ll give us the statistics behind it. We’ll look at each other and be like, ‘We kind of want to try it this way’. They’ll say, ‘It’s not done that way’, and we’ll say, ‘Well, we want to try it.’”
I suppose that part of growing up is learning by your mistakes. But you also need to accept the wisdom of your elders. And to paraphrase Stephen Sondheim, if Everybody Says (Xana) Don’t, maybe there’s a reason. In fact, even that title got there first: in 2003, there was a little gay musical that played off-Broadway called Zanna Don’t! and it didn’t: there was even talk of taking it to Broadway, but it never got there. There’s a lesson in there somewhere….
