Musicals on TV: Merrily They Roll Along

When he wasn’t touring the country writing inspirational oratory for the perpetual presidential candidate Pat Paulsen, Neil Rosen was plotting the salvation of that singular sensation, the stage musical.

Now he has a good chance of succeeding. Thanks to a commitment from cable’s Arts & Entertainment network and the financial backing of the Clairol company, taped musicals appear headed for prime time--if only on an occasional basis--and perhaps, eventually, onto the shelves of home video stores.

Television has flirted with musicals, from 1955’s pioneering “Peter Pan” with Mary Martin and the Frank Sinatra “Our Town” to PBS offerings of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods” and “Sunday in the Park With George.” For Steven Bochco, however, the TV-musical form didn’t quite work for his short-lived series “Cop Rock.”

Now television may be pursuing what has become the theater’s hot ticket, live musicals. Once the riskiest business in all of the show businesses, musicals have, like fantasy Cinderellas, come up with the right-fit glass slipper.

Genuine come-back kids.

There’s the animated musical, Disney’s box-office winners, “Aladdin” and “Beauty and the Beast,” with unrivaled scores in traditional musical style.

There’s London where musicals seem to be in almost every theater and converted warehouse. The imported, 48-year-old “Carousel” by Rodgers & Hammerstein has had even during the winter season a two-month wait for tickets. “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” after a long stay in the West End, is being readied for its transatlantic New York showing this April. The Stephen Sondheim musical “Assassins” has received a warmer reception in London than it did Off-Broadway. With at least four Andrew Lloyd Webber productions, there are almost as many London musicals as there are dramas.

And there’s New York, where musicals last year dominated commercial houses, whether recycled (“Guys and Dolls”) or dusted-off (“Crazy for You”) or spectacles (“Cats” and “Phantom”) or innovative (“Falsettos”).

Closer to home, touring musicals are the mainstay of many Southern California houses, from the Shubert and the Pantages to the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

While big, full-stage musicals generally are high-stakes gambles, more recently they’ve begun to look like sure-thing annuities, running for long periods as “Phantom of the Opera” is doing in London and New York and has been doing in Los Angeles, and then paying off with cloned touring companies that span continents and oceans.

Now the television eye turns cautiously and carefully toward the musical, looking for the lightning that has struck some ground-based shows, hoping for fireworks at night.

Next month in Los Angeles, rehearsals will begin for what CBS is calling “the most notable musical event for television,” a projected $4-million, three-hour version of “Gypsy,” starring Bette Midler in her network film debut scheduled for next season.

What isn’t explained is whether it’s Midler or the musical that will be “the most notable musical event. . . .”

More modestly budgeted than CBS’ entry and more immediate is the musical that the folks at A&E; have scheduled for next Tuesday at 9 p.m., the first of an occasional series of musicals, this time “Romance/Romance,” which gained five Tony nominations in 1988. For obvious reasons “Romance/Romance” will be repeated Valentine’s Day at the unromantic hour of 6 a.m.

Then there are the fund-raisers and pledge-seekers of Los Angeles’ KCET. The public broadcaster has set aside the first week of March for nightly shows devoted to the musical theater, from the March 3 “Great Performances” tribute to Sondheim at Carnegie Hall to recording-session films for such musicals as “The King and I,” “Guys and Dolls” and the original cast of “Company.” PBS will revisit some musicals, such as the original “King and I” with Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr, and the special “Rodgers & Hammerstein: Sound of American Music.”

The PBS network also is scheduling several musicals, such as the Feb. 17 Tony-nominated “Black and Blue,” directed by Robert Altman with the original Broadway cast.

But it’s taken Pat Paulsen’s presidential speechwriter to find a network and a sponsor for musicals that might outlast television’s one-night stands.

Rosen has had a longtime passion for musicals. Almost 20 years ago, he and Paulsen bought the Cherry County Playhouse, a summer theater in Muskegon, Mich., that is now held at the 1,800-seat Frauenthal Center. He’s been operating his theater on a long-distance basis, during seasons flying on weekends between Muskegon and Los Angeles, where he once was vice president of the Ken Kragen talent management company and later a writer-producer for “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” the Smothers Brothers, “Welcome Back, Kotter,” “Barbara Mandrell and the Mandrell Sisters,” “Tony Orlando and Dawn” and other television shows.

“Every four years I’d hope for a writers’ strike,” Rosen says, “so I could spend the summer at the playhouse.”

In the ‘90s, he decided there had to be a life beyond sitcoms. Now he’s totally Muskegon-based and musicals-immersed, spending the year arranging for the eight musicals his company stages, teaching at Grand Valley State University and working on his master’s degree. His dissertation will be on the making of “Romance/Romance,” the TV version.

“It’s important for someone to step forward and try to take art forms like musicals and get them recorded so more of us know what that form is,” Rosen says. “ ‘Phantom of the Opera’ is the most successful musical and maybe only 3.5 million Americans have had the means to see it. The musical is an original, true form in this country. That’s what I’m trying to do, to get more people to see it.”

Last year, after arranging for “Romance/Romance” to be included in his summer season, Rosen wrote to Jim McGinn, who handles the Hollywood office for Bristol-Myers Squibb, which has sponsored TV and cable productions and owns Clairol. Rosen proposed a series of live, taped musicals that would grow into a library that could be used in schools or sold or rented through video stores. McGinn liked the idea, won corporate blessing, then got A&E; interested in scheduling two taped musicals this year as starters under the commercial banner of “Clairol on Broadway.”

The rest was up to Rosen.

Working on a $300,000 budget for a two-hour show--most economical even by cable standards--he tracked down and cleared TV rights; got Barry Harmon, who wrote the book and lyrics to co-direct the show; located the sets for “Romance/Romance” that were used in San Diego’s Old Globe production and shipped them from Seal Beach to Muskegon; found the original Broadway costumes stored in Detroit and then assembled his four-member cast, all of whom had appeared in some earlier versions of the musical.

Four live shows were taped last summer as part of the Cherry County season. A fifth, closed-set taping, was held without an audience to get close-ups and other details for the final edited version.

Now preparing for next summer’s performances, Rosen hopes to tape another show for airing next winter on A&E.; His theater relies on summer visitors and residents and charges $18 for best-seat tickets, $19 when George Hearn appeared in “Sweeney Todd,” about the same when Rita Moreno starred in “Gypsy.”

It’s not always easy to get big-name performers and rights for musicals with the budget Rosen has. He’s limited himself to paying $7,500 a week for a star. “We have to live with that,” he says. “That’s all I can afford. If a star’s agent says the star got $30,000 the last time out, I just say I can’t do much about that and find someone just as good.”

He’s planning to make the theater nonprofit and then go hunting for gifts and grants. Even with the backing of the Clairol people on television he didn’t turn a profit.

But what’s important, Rosen says, is that next Tuesday he gets his first musical on television, for Rosen his own world premiere. Now he has to concentrate on getting the rights to a second musical and perhaps a third and then a fourth.

Just how hot is the hunt for musicals? Rosen tried to get the rights for one Stephen Sondheim musical that didn’t make it on Broadway, “Merrily We Roll Along.” It wasn’t available, he was told. Sondheim had rewritten it, hoping to take it to Off-Broadway.