Big, Bigger, Biggest

Those foolhardy souls who create Broadway musicals are fond of quoting writer Larry Gelbart: “If Hitler’s still alive, I hope he’s out of town with a musical.”

The only thing more hellish than that, they agree, is being in town with a musical in trouble. Three new musicals will open this week, and not one of them had an out-of-town tryout. What’s more, “Titanic,” “The Life” and “Steel Pier” all are book-musicals based on original concepts and created by veteran talents. They are also mostly driven by ensembles, rather than stars. And all have taken their lumps in the past few weeks from the infamous New York preview crowd that seems to love to polka to the German tune of Schadenfreude--a song about taking pleasure in others’ misfortune.

The trio’s producers also have one more thing in common. “We are all terrified,” said Martin Richards, one of those behind “The Life,” speaking for both his peers and collaborators.

Running scared, of course, is the nature of a business where a $10-million investment can go up in smoke--or sink from view--after just one performance. While these are only three of seven new musicals that will have opened when this season’s Tony nominations are announced May 5, they collectively form a bellwether of sorts for a musical season that earlier was dominated by talk of the shrinking Andrew Lloyd Webber empire after the closing of his new “Whistle Down the Wind” and the announcement of losses forcing a shutdown of both the London and New York productions of “Sunset Boulevard.”

There are other contenders: “Juan Darien,” Julie Taymor’s fantasy based on an Uruguayan fable, played last winter at Lincoln Center. “Play On!,” a musical of Duke Ellington tunes strung along an updated version of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” which originated at the Old Globe in San Diego and is now on Broadway. “Dream,” a revue of Johnny Mercer songs starring Lesley Ann Warren, generated less enthusiastic notices but is also making a run for it. “Jekyll & Hyde,” seen in eight performances on a 1995 tour at the Orange County Center for the Performing Arts two years ago, will be the last contender to enter the Tony ring, opening April 26 with a new director, Robin Phillips.

This week, however, is set to be the defining one for the season. “Steel Pier,” “Titanic” and “The Life” all are much-anticipated shows, and each provides its own window on the state of the art form.

Can “Titanic,” with its wildly inventive British director, Richard Jones, successfully bring a postmodern vision to a legendary story line? Will “The Life,” which is about the hustlers, pimps and whores of 1980 42nd Street, take the Broadway musical “10 steps beyond ‘Sweet Charity,’ ” as was claimed by Cy Coleman, composer of both shows?

And will “Steel Pier,” a bittersweet romance set against the backdrop of 1933 marathon dancing, succeed in reinventing the traditional American musical and solidify this season as the year of John Kander and Fred Ebb--creators of the 1975 musical “Chicago,” which is enjoying a smash revival, but who otherwise have not had a commercial Broadway hit in more than 15 years?

Only a few seasons back, when the British flag was flying high over Broadway, who would have guessed that all seven new musicals of the 1996-97 season would be made in America?

‘Titanic,” which cost $10 million and opens on Wednesday at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, ran into heavy seas even before it began rehearsals last winter. Michael Braun, one of the producers, died on Jan. 27, leaving his partners to scramble for his $4-million investment. New anxieties arose in late March when previews had to be postponed for a couple of days because of technical problems with the elaborate and complicated sets, and the New York media was set to buzzing. It looked like “Titanic” might have hit an iceberg even before leaving port.

“When you have a title like ‘Titanic,’ you have the kind of awareness which can make you the butt of every joke in town,” says Michael David, president of the Dodgers, the chief producing entity for the show. “But if anybody thought that we were doing this musical called ‘Titanic’ simply to put lavish scenery on stage and sink something, then they’re not aware of what I hope our reputation is for doing something new, unexpected and, hopefully, perversely exciting.”

Indeed, “Titanic” is a huge and risky gamble for the Dodgers, a production team that developed off-Broadway in the 1970s and steadily built a respected reputation on Broadway for their savvy mix of glitzy, sleek revivals (“Guys and Dolls,” “The King and I” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”) as well as adventurous, groundbreaking originals (“Into the Woods,” “The Who’s Tommy”).

A musical called “Titanic” would not have seemed right for the Dodgers four years ago when composer Maury Yeston (“Nine”) and veteran writer Peter Stone (“1776,” “Will Rogers Follies”) almost simultaneously had the idea to musicalize the story, which they both considered “well-ordered” for drama given its levels of irony and legendary images of both heroism and cowardice. At that time, Tommy Tune was named director, since both Stone and Yeston had worked with him--on “Nine” and “Will Rogers Follies,” respectively. It is likely, had work proceeded, that Tune would have turned the story into a traditional musical, a sort of glitzy floating “Grand Hotel.”

The Dodgers didn’t come into the picture until two years later, by which time Richard Jones was on a short list of directors who both the producers and creators felt could transform the well-known story into something that wouldn’t, as Stone put it, be a musical version of “A Night to Remember.” Jones is known as an inventive opera director whose “Ring Cycle” has been in repertory at Covent Garden for four years, and his London production of “Into the Woods,” the Stephen Sondheim musical that the Dodgers successfully presented on Broadway, had David convinced that he was right for “Titanic.”

“It is a story about a humanity rather than one particular member of that humanity,” says David of Stone’s book, which focuses on the hubris of the ship’s builder, owner and captain, representatives of an age arrogant about its technology that is irrevocably humbled by the tragedy, which claimed more than 1,500 lives.

Confounding audience expectations as well are Stewart Laing’s modernist designs, which rather than re-create the original’s first-class cabins, modeled after Versailles, instead try to represent a microcosmic world in which machinery is pitted against nature, the upper classes against the lower classes.

Two weeks before opening night, producers and the creative team clearly were in crisis mode even while presenting a united front--moaning about economic and artistic circumstances that have forced them to make changes under what Stone calls “an impossible deadline.” The enormously complex logistics of the show--the elaborate lighting and scenery--made prohibitive both out-of-town tryouts and workshops, which are the usual route of development for the Dodgers. David said that timing for the show also was limited both by Jones’ availability and also by the fact that a multimillion-dollar movie about the Titanic is set to be released this summer.

“We wanted to take the window of opportunity to tell the story our way, without the advantage of ice and metal breaking,” David says. “It’s a crazy, wild cultural gamble,and we know it’s a thin line we have to hit, but this is where the action is on Broadway for us right now.”

Action is also what the hustlers, pimps and whores of “The Life” crave, reviving in spirit, if not real life, Broadway’s recent history. Today 42nd Street has become a haven for mega-stores, restored historic theaters and Disney, but the musical’s book was inspired in 1979 when writer Ira Gasman (lyricist and co-librettist with Cy Coleman and David Newman) chanced upon a real-life Times Square fracas and felt it could make riveting theater. Gassman contacted Cy Coleman, one of the most respected tunesmiths of the Broadway stage who is the composer--in addition to “Sweet Charity”--of such hits as “On the Twentieth Century,” “Barnum,” “City of Angels” and “The Will Rogers Follies.”

Gassman and Coleman have created a world of feverish and hopeless dreams and schemes belonging to disenfranchised characters with names like Fleet, Queen, Jojo and Memphis. Nearly 18 years after the idea was conceived, “The Life” will open on Saturday at the Barrymore Theater after countless readings, a couple of workshops and changes in both its director and leading man after the originals--director Joe Layton and actor Ed Battle Jr.--died.

“There is a Yiddish word, besecht, which means ‘everything happens for a reason,’ ” says Martin Richards, who is co-producing with Coleman and Roger Berlind. (The latter is also a producer on “Steel Pier.”)

“Everything that happened, with the exception of the deaths, has had a fortuitous effect.”

In fact, “The Life” has undergone so many incarnations that the creative team dates the seed of what eventually reached the Broadway stage to a workshop production, directed by Layton and starring Battle.

Battle played Fleetwood, a coke addict who manipulates and betrays his lover, Queen, a street prostitute who has been saving money for their escape from the tawdriness of “the life.” Early on, the show was being slated for off-Broadway, but as it developed, says Richards, the producers came to believe its earthy subject matter could be conceived in the tradition of such bittersweet musicals as “Threepenny Opera,” “Porgy and Bess” and “West Side Story.” With Broadway in sight, the show’s budget ballooned from $600,000 to $6 million.

After the death of Layton, the creative team had to shop around for a new director, considering such talents as Declan Donnellan and Stephen Daldrey before teaming up with Scott Ellis, who later dropped out to develop “Steel Pier.” Coleman had worked with the London-based director Michael Blakemore on the Tony-winning “City of Angels,” but felt that the subject matter was too parochially American for Blakemore, who is noted more for drama (“Joe Egg,” “Lettice and Lovage”) than musicals. About three years ago, however, Blakemore became quite taken with the subject and asked to become involved. He, in turn, brought in screenwriter David Newman (“Superman,” “Bonnie and Clyde”) while Richards brought in choreographer Joey McKneely, the young Jerome Robbins protege who had done Lloyd Webber’s ill-fated “Whistle Down the Wind” and “Smokey Joe’s Cafe.”

The result, says Coleman, is a musical with a lot more heart and, well, heat. Whether audiences will go for it remains to be seen. A concept album released two years ago on RCA, which featured some of the songs covered by such artists as Liza Minnelli, George Burns and Lou Rawls, sold well for a show album but has had little impact on advance ticket sales, according to Berlind.

John Kander, composer of “Steel Pier,” says that he left a note for Peter Stone at the stage door of the Lunt-Fontanne where “Titanic” is in previews: “I don’t know about you, but I wish I were in Boston.” He immediately got an affirmative note back from his friend, Kander says, “along with a lot of exclamation marks.”

Working under the duress of New York preview audiences, says Kander, has been the most frustrating experience of preparing “Steel Pier” for its opening on Thursday at the Richard Rodgers Theater. “You get so much conflicting opinion from very savvy people that it can make your eyeballs twirl. At least when you’re out of town and you get reviewed and a number of critics point to the same problem, then it’s probably a good idea to take a look at that part of the show.

“I’ve found the best way is what Mr. [George] Abbott taught us when we were working on ‘Flora, the Red Menace’--that was simply to sit in the audience and listen for the response. You know when you hear coughing, you’re in trouble.”

It is not surprising when Kander says that a friend, after seeing “Steel Pier,” asked him if he and Fred Ebb and their collaborators (director Scott Ellis, writer David Thompson and choreographer Susan Stroman) were attempting to “reinvent” the old-fashioned American musical. Indeed, “Steel Pier” is certainly the most traditional and least risky of the new musicals, which one might expect from the songwriting team the Washington Post once called “Broadway’s foremost advocates of the power of positive thinking.”

Their glow suffuses this bittersweet story set in 1930s Atlantic City about a “dead” stunt pilot who gets a three-week reprieve from death to fulfill his fantasy of love with a young songbird and save her from an abusive relationship with a conniving marathon dance announcer (played by Gregory Harrison). Finding the silver lining has been something of a specialty for the team, which has written memorably jaunty tunes for such dark musicals as “Cabaret,” “The Happy Time,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and “Chicago”--the last of which, two decades after its premiere, appears to be right in sync with a cynical post-O.J. audience.

“ ‘Steel Pier’ is absolutely the opposite of ‘Chicago,’ ” says Kander. “It has all the warmth and goodness and compassion that [“Chicago”] didn’t have. But we don’t ever think in terms of ‘breaking new ground’ for the musical theater. We write about what we care about. In this case, it started out with working with people we knew and liked and had worked with before and wanting to do something about marathon dancing.”

The “Steel Pier” creative team--Ellis, Stroman and Thompson--had worked together before not only on the 1988 revision of “Flora” but also on “And the World Goes ‘Round,” an off-Broadway revue in 1991 of Kander & Ebb songs that featured a young singer named Karen Ziemba, for whom “Steel Pier” would be written. (The flyboy is played by newcomer Daniel McDonald, with Debra Monk as the wise-cracking second banana.) Four or five years ago, says Ellis, the group got together and simply started doing readings of the play while Kander and Ebb sang the songs, gradually building up to a two-week workshop during which many of the roles were cast.

In much the same way as producer Garth Drabinsky prepared “Ragtime” for its full production, producer Berlind, who signed on two years ago, then arranged for an eight-week workshop of the production last summer, during which the strengths and weaknesses of the musical were exposed. It proved to be of incalculable help, according to the creative team.

Kander is thrilled that suddenly there are “all these American musicals around” but he fears he and Ebb as well as Sondheim and Coleman were all part of the “last generation to be allowed to fail.”

“I’m sorry that there are not younger composers represented this season,” he says. “It’s going to be tougher for the next generation. Not just because of financing, but because we demand more deftness and skill in musical theater.

“Everybody talks about the old days as if everything then was a masterpiece, but some of those shows were pretty much stitched together: a socko number for the stars, a funny number for the comedian. Now the standard is really much higher.

“But I think, however tough it gets, you’ll still have any number of artists who are willing to gamble their life--and sanity--on it.”

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* “Titanic,” Ticketmaster (800) 755-4000; “Steel Pier,” Ticketmaster (800) 755-4000; ‘The Life,” Tele-charge (800) 432-7250.