Randy Newman’s songs return to stage in ‘All the King’s Men’
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Randy Newman’s fans know that while ‘I Love L.A.’ celebrates his hometown, and his Oscar-rewarded film music pays most of his bills, he’s also in many ways a son of the South. Especially of Louisiana, the other La., where he spent part of his childhood.
But even Newman know-it-alls may not be aware that songs from ‘Good Old Boys,’ his classic 1974 album of songs about the redneck South, helped propel a sprawling 1986 stage adaptation of ‘All the King’s Men.’ Robert Penn Warren’s 1946 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel concerned the corruption of a charismatic, Depression-era populist politician modeled on Louisiana’s Huey ‘The Kingfish’ Long. The 1949 film version won a Best Picture Oscar. But the play, adapted and directed by Adrian Hall, didn’t get much traction after an initial three-city run in Dallas, Providence, R.I., and Washington, D.C. Now the show is back with a revival at Seattle’s Intiman Theatre opening Oct. 3, having also been staged last fall in a different production at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence. In Seattle, actors will accompany themselves on instruments in the seven Newman numbers that punctuate the drama, including ‘Kingfish,’ ‘Louisiana, 1927,’ ‘Rednecks’ and ‘Guilty.’
When Newman got around to his own musical, ‘Randy Newman’s Faust,’ for the La Jolla Playhouse in 1995, he had bigger fish to fry than Huey Long: the show pitted God against the Devil in a friendly wager for the title character’s oafish soul (Faust’s, that is, not Randy Newman’s). But neither ‘Faust’ nor ‘The Education of Randy Newman,’ South Coast Repertory’s 2000 musical that used his catalog to tell the story of a Newmanesque songwriter’s artistic coming-of-age, has been much-revived. Maybe his music finally will find its stage legs with this election-season play based on a politician who was loved, feared, and ultimately assassinated.
-- Mike Boehm
