All tagged Michael Bennett
A Broadway musical that failed to run, but that has a great deal of love and affection from die-hard Broadway fans, is the 1978 Ballroom. Drawing its inspiration from the 1975 made for TV film Queen of the Stardust Ballroom written by Jerome Kass, the musical was director-choreographer Michael Bennett’s follow-up to his masterwork A Chorus Line. Unfortunately, the show struggled to find an audience but left behind a handful of warm memories for those who could appreciate its charms.
A musical that was plagued with troubles during its gestation, that seemed to solve most of them before officially opening on Broadway, only to fold after approximately five months, was the 1973 Seesaw. Adapted from the William Gibson play Two for the Seesaw, with a book by Michael Bennett and a score by Dorothy Fields and Cy Coleman, Seesaw originally had a book by Michael Stewart, direction by Edwin Sherin, and was to star Lainie Kazan. As the musical’s hit song exclaims, however, “It’s Not Where You Start, It’s Where You Finish” and the show would arrive on Broadway with a very different cast of characters involved.
Meredith Willson gave us one big Broadway smash hit with The Music Man, one modest hit with The Unsinkable Molly Brown, and one critical failure with the musical Here’s Love. For a man who wrote so adeptly about parades and an unlikely romance between two stubborn individuals in The Music Man, Willson seemed like an ideal choice for bringing the classic holiday film Miracle on 34th Street to the musical stage. Here’s Love was that attempt, but the show failed to ignite on Broadway lasting a serviceable (if lackluster) 334 performances. Not exactly a disaster, but this was a time when the big hits were running well over 1,000 performances. The show opened on October 3, 1963, a little over a month before the assassination of John F. Kennedy, which may have led to a slump in ticket sales as Broadway as a whole experienced a weak fall and winter that season. Nevertheless, Here’s Love cannot blame all of its shortcomings on the bad timing of its opening.
Dance is an essential part of most Broadway musicals and there have been many amazing choreographers over the years. Some have really stood out, either reinventing the form and purpose of dance within Broadway musicals and/or bringing a signature style to their work that has become legendary in its own right. Today, I’d like to celebrate these gods and goddesses of the world of musical theatre dance and talk a little about how each of them left their imprint on the art form.
