A Tale of Two Tryouts

The phrase “out-of-town tryout” evokes images of a train chugging into Philly, Boston or Baltimore, loaded with show folk, most of them smoking. Over here, the writers rewrite like maniacs; over there, in the bar car, the composer engages in frantic discourse with the piano--did bar cars really have pianos?--while the dance director hammers out a new step surrounded by performers wondering if this musical’s going to fly after all.

Tryouts no longer work that way, if, in fact, they ever resembled the Broadway mythology reinforced by movies like “42nd Street” and “The Band Wagon.” Air travel lacks the glamour of train travel. The phrase “not-for-profit regional theater” doesn’t sing like “out-of-town tryout.” More and more Broadway-minded musicals begin their lives at a nonprofit stage a time zone or two away from Shubert Alley.

Even now, however, seeing a musical in its embryonic form remains one of show-going’s great privileges. A tryout represents the start of something potentially big, perhaps even as large as last year’s Chicago premiere of “The Producers.”

We must remember, however, that “The Producers” does not happen every year. That much has been made clear by the current, dispiriting Broadway season.

Tonight, the 56th annual Tony Awards will put as happy a face as it can on the 2001-02 Broadway lineup.

Two of the most heavily nominated musicals--”Thoroughly Modern Millie,” tonight’s likely big winner (it has 11 nominations), and “Sweet Smell of Success” (seven nominations)--illustrate two markedly contrasting tryout tales. The moral of “Thoroughly Modern Millie”: Do not throw the baby out with the rewrites. The moral of “Sweet Smell of Success”: Don’t be afraid to start over, or nearly.

“Thoroughly Modern Millie,” based on the 1967 film, tried out in the fall of 2000 at the La Jolla Playhouse. I saw it there, then I saw the heavily revised edition last month in New York. And I have never seen a promising show go south so badly from tryout to Broadway.

In La Jolla, “Millie” had a relaxed comic spirit. Its silliness didn’t feel leaden; it was buoyant. True, the show didn’t yet have an ending, and the score was all over the place, veering from new material (by composer Jeanine Tesori and lyricist Dick Scanlan) to songs from the film to period artifacts revised. But its problems were fixable.

Encouraged by the La Jolla reception, the creative team went to work and apparently couldn’t stop from futzing with every single element, even the elements that worked. The Broadway “Millie” features eight new songs, as well as a greatly expanded, spanking new and plug-ugly design scheme, selling fantasy Futurist images of Manhattan. In the title tune, and the most fetching new ditty, “Forget About the Boy,” the new orchestrations and arrangements sound labored, fussy and restless. The key changes come willy-nilly, and neither tune lands as well as it did in the tryout.

In story terms, the flapper Millie bends over backward to clarify what show people love to call the heroine’s “journey.” Now, Millie has a big moment in a new song (“Not for the Life of Me”) early on, in which she gambles everything on little ol’ New York by defiantly tearing up her one-way ticket back to Palookaville. The way Sutton Foster delivers it, it’s the eat-’em-alive 11 o’clock number--and look at the time! It’s only 8:13!

Right away you know something has happened to Foster’s performance. By the time she tackles the actual 11 o’clock star solo, “Gimme Gimme,” it’s as if the song were called “Gimme Gimme Gimme That Tony.” And if Foster wins one tonight, the Tony committee may have to consider changing “best actress” to “most actress.”

What happened? Director Michael Mayer and company, I suspect, decided that in the wake of Sept. 11, the show really was about New York as fantasy island, the isle of dreams and reinvention--Oz, though an utterly charmless one.

Compared with “Millie,” the saga of “Sweet Smell of Success” is more modest. In the wake of its indifferently received Chicago tryout, the show has improved somewhat. The musical, based on the incomparable 1957 film about a vicious gossip columnist and a barnacle of a press agent, now has a sharper opening number, one less egregious ballad for the overexposed young lovers, a less messy and more satisfying ending. These changes, by director Nicholas Hytner and his team, are all to the betterment of the show.

But the changes are more cosmetic than organic, and they’re not enough. The overriding problem of tone hasn’t been solved. “Sweet Smell” plays nice and easy when it should play rough. It’s not nasty enough to please the aficionados of truly dangerous musicals, and it’s not exhilarating enough in its showbizziness to wallop the Wednesday matinee crowd. The shifts in storytelling emphasis make little sense. Why does Hunsecker, valiantly portrayed by John Lithgow, take the weaselly Falco (Brian d’Arcy James) under his wing? Who knows? What are we supposed to make of Falco’s “I-want” biggie, “At the Fountain”? Who can say? Why wasn’t Jack Noseworthy (as the hipster jazz pianist Steve Dallas) replaced by somebody better?

The wrapping looks better, but the candy underneath remains as it was in Chicago: soft.

Compared with tonal uncertainties such as “Sweet Smell” and the half-spoofy, half-sincere “Millie,” another best musical Tony nominee, “Urinetown”--10 nominations in all--stands out as a triumph of deadpan certainty. (The fourth Tony-nominated new musical, “Mamma Mia!,” stands out primarily as a triumph of ABBA.)

A Brecht-and-Weill goof set in a metropolis where you have to pay to pee, “Urinetown” was written by Mark Hollmann (music and lyrics) and Greg Kotis (book and lyrics). It had its tryout of sorts at the 1999 N.Y. International Fringe Festival. The Broadway version represents an entirely new staging, a wholesale recasting and a merry instance of a one-joke show being told so brilliantly, one’s quite enough.

Tony-wise, “Urinetown” has slimmish chances up against the aggressive I Love New York campaign that is “Millie.” I missed “Urinetown” in its earlier incarnation. But judging from the Broadway edition, director John Rando and his partners in parodic crime have made some exceptionally shrewd decisions in assessing the material’s comic strengths.

In Chicago, the next year’s worth of out-of-town tryouts include two tantalizing prospects. Later this month, the Twyla Tharp/Billy Joel dance musical “Movin’ Out” begins a commercial pre-Broadway engagement. Already the show’s New York opening has been set for Oct. 24. And next June, the Stephen Sondheim/John Weidman musical comedy “Gold!” opens at the Goodman Theatre.

Seattle, meanwhile, is reportedly about to open its first official commercial Broadway-bound tryout. Now in previews, “Hairspray,” at $10 million, is squarely in the “Millie” range, and staged by Jack O’Brien, San Diego’s Globe Theatres artistic director. New York is already buzzing with promising word of mouth about the stage version of the 1988 John Waters film, featuring music by Marc Shaiman (the movie “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut”). That’s how New York is: The vultures are always circling, but you can spy the occasional bluebird of optimism.

From there, who knows?

In retrospect, a once-in-a-decade hit such as “The Producers” probably could have opened cold in New York, thereby saving $1.5 million in tryout costs. But that’s why you take a show out of town-so you can later say, “Well, in retrospect....”

And then the real work begins.

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The 56th annual Tony Awards will be broadcast from 8 to 9 p.m. on KCET-TV and from 9 to 11 p.m. on KCBS-TV.

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Michael Phillips is the chief theater critic at the Chicago Tribune, a Tribune company.