Great Plots for the Taking

It’s Shakespeare’s world; we just live in it, and the living arrangement is working out fine. Eternally we’re made to feel welcome.

He’s a music lover, which helps. In his world the songs and dances never lie low for long. They’re the food and drink of love. There’s always another masque around the corner, another ball, a fool or knave or clown knocking off a song graced with lyrics of almost shocking beauty. There’s always someone capering, a lovelorn sap or other sighing over a beautiful air’s “dying fall.” As Stephen Greenblatt notes in his introduction to the Norton Shakespeare, even the witches of “Macbeth” cut loose with an “antic round.”

Is it any wonder our own century has spawned so many musicals based--loosely, tightly, inbetweenly--on the plays of Shakespeare?

This is the dramatist, after all, who wrote in “The Merchant of Venice”: “The man that hath no music in himself / Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds / Is fit for treasons, strategems, and spoils.” In other words--Shakespeare’s--”Let no such man be trusted.”

Just past the midpoint of 1999, we find ourselves in a boom cycle for Shakespearean musicals. “Play On!,” now previewing before its opening at the Pasadena Playhouse next Sunday, takes its cue from “Twelfth Night,” relocating Shakespeare’s Illyria to 1940s Harlem and songs made popular by Duke Ellington. “The Boys From Syracuse” (1938), based on Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors,” opens Sept. 22 in a semi-staged concert version starring David Hyde Pierce as part of the Reprise! series at UCLA’s Freud Playhouse.

This fall brings a major Broadway revival of “Kiss Me, Kate” (1948), the backstage bifurcation of “The Taming of the Shrew,” featuring Brian Stokes Mitchell and Marin Mazzie of “Ragtime.” The libretto is getting a tweak from John Guare, who shared a 1972 Tony Award for “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” based on the play by you may know who.

Throw in “Romeo and Juliet, the Musical From William Shakespeare”--Terrence Mann’s adaptation opening next month at the Ordway Music Theatre in St. Paul, Minn.--and you’ve all the evidence you need. And there’s always another “West Side Story” coming. Someday. Somehow. Somewhere.

In the realm of Shakespearean musicals, “Play On!” proves that there is life between the kingdoms of Smash Broadway Hit and Instant Broadway Flop. In 1996, director Sheldon Epps and librettist Cheryl L. West (“Flyin’ West”) premiered their Duke-meets-the-Bard project at San Diego’s Old Globe Theatre. The following March a commercial edition, small-scale by Broadway standards, opened in New York to mixed reviews. It folded at a loss.

But its makers sensed an afterlife. Regional productions in Chicago and Seattle pleased audiences. The Pasadena Playhouse edition, co-produced by the Arizona Theatre Company, moves to Tucson and Phoenix later this year. More productions, Epps says, are in the works, including one for New Jersey’s Crossroads Theatre Company, to be directed by Andre De Shields, an alum of the show. (He won’t be in the Pasadena cast.)

Epps is quick to stress that “Play On!” doesn’t follow closely the “Twelfth Night” narrative. Rather, it’s a free-hand, Ellington-soaked Harlem fairy tale, about “Vy,” a budding female songwriter up from the South, who goes undercover in male drag to woo a chanteuse named Lady Liv at the behest of the smitten bandleader, the Duke.

While creating its own score from the ground up, “West Side Story” has something in common with “Play On!” It likewise borrowed only the central notion of its inspiration, “Romeo and Juliet.” The 1957 “West Side Story” sprang from the brain of director-choreographer Jerome Robbins. He wanted to treat the Shakespeare tragedy in present-day (mid-1950s) terms, in which Juliet would be Jewish, Romeo an Italian Catholic. “East Side Story” was the working title. Once it became the Sharks and the Jets, librettist Arthur Laurents’ title moved across town.

The key to that show’s success?

“Look who was involved,” says theater historian Ken Mandelbaum, whose book “Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops” contains several less fortunate attempts to tune up Shakespeare. “With ‘West Side Story’ they had a wonderful conception that obviously turned the writers on. They were inspired.”

The decades pass, and “West Side Story” suffers a little--from age, overexposure, one too many high school attempts, the usual reasons. Yet it endures; its makers utilized just enough Shakespeare to establish a blueprint before going their own way.

Other Shakespeare musicals remain curios and don’t travel well, if at all. One of several “Twelfth Night”-based musicals, “Your Own Thing” (1968), featured song titles such as “The Now Generation.” It racked up 933 performances off-Broadway. These days, to quote an Ellington song used in “Play On!,” it don’t get around much anymore. Nor does “Music Is,” another adaptation of “Twelfth Night.” Nor “Love and Let Love.”

Mod as all get-out, “Your Own Thing” was “delightful at the time,” according to Mandelbaum. So too, for many, was the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” four years later. The spirit of “Hair” floated over to this version of Verona, which looked like 1972 New York City, and no wonder: Like “Hair,” the music was by Galt MacDermot. The John Guare lyrics glanced on free love, “sado-mas / And all that jazz.” The moral? “You can’t love another without loving yourself.”

Lorenz Hart would’ve spit in that line’s eye. The lyricist of “The Boys From Syracuse” was a jaunty melancholic who might as well have been named Jaques, after the wry, sad, wise man of “As You Like It.” Hart wrote of love as a source of soul-sickness, the kind you can’t live with, or without (“This Can’t Be Love”). Yet he was his own brand of romantic, and when his tart observations blended with composer Richard Rodgers’ choicest melodies, well . . . what was that line about the food of love?

The “Syracuse” score, not without clunkers but a pip in the main, redeems its pell-mell, what-the-hell book by George Abbott. (Abbott swiped exactly one line from Shakespeare’s original, and then, in an aside, immediately credited the source.) Mandelbaum credits Abbott with fashioning “a tight farce,” based on Shakespeare, who stole from the Roman master Plautus. “But the book really isn’t as funny as you want it to be,” he says. For a planned Roundabout Theatre revival of “Syracuse,” Nicky Silver (“Free Will and Wanton Lust”) has been commissioned to revise the libretto.

However that turns out, “Syracuse” songs on the rarefied, joyous order of “Sing for Your Supper” should hang around for centuries. They’re positively Shakespearean in their delight, even though they owe little to Shakespeare. The sheer musicality of the source material, even a dopey farce like “Comedy of Errors,” cries out for a heightened sense of storytelling. In opera, everyone from Verdi to Britten has tried their hand at giving Shakespearean tragedy, comedy, even history a new, heightened voice.

For every “Otello,” though, in the wings waits a flaming “Fire Angel.” That show was a semi-legendary London bomb, Nicol Williamson starring in a musicalized “Merchant of Venice.” “Rockabye Hamlet”? Sorry. Gone away, gone away.

So has an obscure but tantalizing 1939 relic, “Swingin’ the Dream.” That show, an all-black musical take on the frequently musicalized “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” featured Louis Armstrong as Bottom in an 1890s New Orleans-set production. Along with Armstrong, the cast included Butterfly McQueen as Puck and Maxine Sullivan as Titania. The orchestra showcased, among others, Benny Goodman and Lionel Hampton. The dances, many set in a “Voodoo Wood,” were choreographed by Agnes de Mille.

It ran for 13 performances, closed and vanished. “That one I’d love to have seen,” enthuses Epps.

Four hundred or so years ago, he says, “Shakespeare did what any really good librettist does: He writes up to the big moments. He’ll structure a scene to lead to a soliloquy; he wrote perfect lead-ins to the equivalents of the ‘big number.’

“The play ‘Twelfth Night’ is patterned like a musical. There are moments in it where the characters are moved to such an emotional point that they can’t speak anymore.

“So they sing.”