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The Last Great Broadway Season?
George Hearn, Gene Barry and the original Cagelles from Jerry Herman's La Cage Aux Folles. Appearing on the cover of the Theatre World annual remains a singular honor reserved for shows that define their season.

Broadway saw a stellar array of American composers debut new works during the 1983-84 season –

– Lyricist-librettist Richard Maltby and composer David Shire's Baby (1983 - 276) was an underrated concept musical about three couples facing the life-altering challenge of having a baby.

– Composer Henry Krieger and lyricist Robert Lorick scored with The Tap Dance Kid (1984 - 669), an original story about a African American teenager who dreams of a dance career despite his father's disapproval. Danny Daniels won a Tony for his energetic choreography.

– Composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb's The Rink (1983 - 233) paired Chita Rivera and Liza Minnelli as a battling mother and daughter facing the loss of their family-owned roller skating rink, with rape and heartbreak along the way to their eventual reconciliation. Rivera received a long-overdue Tony for Best Actress in a Musical. Minnelli left the show for her first stint in drug rehab.

– Stephen Sondheim's Sunday In the Park With George (1984 - 604) took an innovative look at the commercial and emotional challenges of being an artist, starring Many Patinkin as pointillist painter Georges Seurat and Bernadette Peters as his lover Dot. The action then switched to modern times, with Seurat's grandson facing the same issues while an aging Dot looks on. Audiences cheered for a breathtaking first act finale that recreated Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grand Jatte" while the cast sang the ravishing "Sunday."

– Jerry Herman's La Cage Aux Folles (1983 - 1,761) was defiantly old-fashioned despite its focus on a gay couple dealing with their son's marriage into a bigoted politician's family. Playwright Harvey Fierstein provided a hilarious book, and Arthur Laurents helmed one of the best musical comedies Broadway had seen in years. Numerous Tony awards (including Best Musical and Best Score) ended years of creative frustration for the composer of Hello Dolly and Mame. George Hearn won a well-deserved Tony for his performance as the loveable drag queen Albin, and won cheers with his renditions of "I Am What I Am" and "The Best of Times is Now."

La Cage took the Tony for Best Musical, but with so many fine new musicals on Broadway, theatergoers were the real winners. It was a giddy time for musical theatre lovers, but it ended all too soon. The following season brought only one hit – Big River (1985 - 1,005) a refreshing version of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn with a score by country western composer Roger Miller. With no effective competition, it won most of the major musical Tony's and ran for three years.

And then there was a sudden, chilling silence. New musicals still appeared, but they had trouble attracting a sizeable audience. For the first time since Oklahoma, a full decade would go by before a new American musical would pass the 1,000 performance mark. What happened?

Embarrassments
For starters, Broadway was now a small subculture ignored by mainstream media and the general public. With ticket prices soaring, it became difficult to get the public to notice anything but each season's biggest hit – and even then, it could be a struggle to sell a show that lacked a star. Several major composers (including Jerry Herman) and veteran producers left the field, either from exhaustion or frustration. In their wake, inexperienced newcomers mounted a series of expensive, ill-advised disasters. Projects that never should have seen the light of day made it to Broadway, losing millions of dollars and infuriating audiences –

– Into The Light (1986 - 6) sang about research done on The Shroud of Turin, while one of the scientists worries about his son's overactive fantasy life. Talk about a hopeless idea for a musical! With a mawkish story and ugly production, Into the Light was an annoying bore. The campy sight of tap dancing priests and nuns did nothing to save this one.

– Big Deal (1986 - 77) had director Bob Fosse writing his own book, stringing together some classic Depression-era songs to tell a tale of bungling bank robbers. Brilliant dances did not redeem the flimsy plot. No one involved with the show had the nerve to tell Fosse it wasn't working, but the critics and the public made their disinterest clear. Fosse spent his final years staging a surefire revival of Sweet Charity.

– Rags (1986 - 4) used an ambitious Charles Strouse & Stephen Schwartz score to tell the story of Jewish immigrants in the early 1900s, but the massive production never got the strong direction it needed and remained a dull – if impressive – muddle. Metropolitan Opera diva Teresa Stratas sounded spectacular in the lead.

– Teddy & Alice (1987 - 77) recycled some fine tunes by none other than John Philip Sousa, but the ludicrous script suggested President Teddy Roosevelt's problems with his strong willed daughter Alice stemmed from an obsession with his first wife's ghost. Such speculative psychoanalysis made for lame entertainment, despite a gallant performance by Len Cariou as Teddy. Setting Sousa tunes like "Stars and Strips Forever" to new flag-waving lyrics left audiences squirming – the intention was patriotic, but the results were clumsy.

– Legs Diamond (1988 - 64) proved that pop star Peter Allen was neither an actor nor a capable stage composer. (Writing a pop tune is one thing – creating a compelling song that serves a story's dramatic needs is another.) When Allen's producers did not have the knowledge (or the nerve) to bring in capable people to make up for his shortcomings, it was left to critics and audiences to kill the project.

Carrie: Redefining Disaster
Nothing quite matched the spectacular failure of Carrie (1988 - 5), which became the most celebrated musical flop of the late 20th century. Based on Stephen King's best-selling horror novel and subsequent hit film, the stage version was so weak that experienced producers refused to touch it. After bouncing around for more than half a decade, the project was picked up by Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company (which had succeeded with Les Miserables) and German producer Friedrich Kurz. A British staging received such a critical drubbing that Barbara Cook (playing the title character's mother) withdrew from the project, and many assumed Carrie was done for. But Kurz still brought the show to Broadway with young Linzi Hateley in the title role and Betty Buckley taking over for Cook.

As New York previews dragged on, theatergoers reacted with either silent shock or loud catcalls of rage. A tiny but vocal minority cheered it on, feeding false hopes. By combining an incoherent script, tacky special effects, hideous choreography and lyrics like "Kill the pig, pig, pig," Carrie set a new standard for "bad." The frustrating thing was that it also had moments of genuine beauty, fueled by socko Buckley and Hateley's socko performances. That is why Carrie has retained a certain fascination, especially among those who did not get to see it.

Most of us who sat through Carrie agree that this show's failure was not just understandable – it was well deserved. But something boded ill for the theatre's future, as columnist and historian Ken Mandelbaum explained –

Carrie also had non-stop energy, and, unlike so many flops, was not dull for a second. But there was something ominous about it all, a feeling that it was playing to the lowest common denominator, to people who had never been to the theatre and would respond only to jolts of pop music.
- Not Since Carrie: 40 Years of Broadway Musical Flops (NY: St. Martin's Press, 1991, p.352)

With Broadway in creative disarray, the British were only too happy to take up the slack and regain the theatrical dominance they had lost at the beginning of the 20th century. Somewhere, the ghosts of Gilbert and Sullivan were laughing.