Forgotten musicals remembered, revived

Even if you attend a lot of musical theater in the Seattle area, you might be under the impression that Andrew Lloyd Webber, Stephen Sondheim and Rodgers and Hammerstein built most of the shows that last.

"Cats" is forever, and so, apparently, is "The Sound of Music." It's been calculated that someone is performing "Oklahoma!" somewhere in the world right now. The reheated hits just keep on coming, bulldozing the less popular but sometimes more interesting shows out of the way.

Seven years ago, the Showtunes! Theatre Company began offering alternatives, kicking off with a Town Hall concert version of Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents' Broadway fizzle "Anyone Can Whistle."

The company was so encouraged by the response that it went on to present Cole Porter's "Out of This World" at Meany Theater, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt's "110 in the Shade" in Bellevue and the Rodgers/Sondheim/Laurents musical "Do I Hear a Waltz" in Issaquah.

Theater preview


"Dear World," music and lyrics by Jerry Herman, book by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, direction by Marcus Wolland and presented by Showtunes! Theatre Co., 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday, Kirkland Performance Center, 350 Kirkland Ave., Kirkland; $15-$24 (425-893-9900 or www.kpcenter.org).

Showtunes' scaled-down shows, which emphasize songs over dialogue and plot, found a home during the past year at the Kirkland Performance Center, beginning with a splendid version of Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick's Pulitzer Prize winner "Fiorello!" Another rarely performed prizewinner, Jerry Herman's "Dear World," directed by Marcus Wolland, will play Saturday night and Sunday afternoon.

Maggie Pehrson and David-Edward Hughes, the company's co-producing artistic directors (they also have roles in the show), picked "Dear World" to revive because it's a strong women's vehicle, because it had never been done here and because of the music.

"The tunes are what count in our staged concert readings," Hughes said in an e-mail interview. "Jerry Herman wrote a lovely score for it that is much less familiar to audiences than his 'Hello, Dolly!,' 'Mame,' 'La Cage aux Folles,' or even 'Mack and Mabel' " — to name another less-than-successful show that gradually developed a following."

Based on Jean Giraudoux's 1946 play "The Madwoman of Chaillot," it opened on Broadway in early 1969. "Dear World" won a Tony for its star, Angela Lansbury, cast as Countess Aurelia, a dotty lady who challenges post-war Parisian greed and corruption. Although it closed after 132 performances, it did make more of an impression than Katharine Hepburn's songless, witless film version of "The Madwoman," which briefly played movie theaters at the same time.

Among the songs in "Dear World" are "I Don't Want to Know," "Kiss Her Now," "And I Was Beautiful," plus several numbers that were added after Lansbury finished the Broadway run, including "From the Bottom of the Glass."

Hughes notes that Showtunes is officially committed to "mounting book-in-hand, concert stagings of lost, forgotten and lesser-known musicals." One of its models is New York's Encores series.

"Maggie and I wanted to take a road-less-traveled approach to musical theater," said Hughes, who previously collected several obscure show tunes for his mid-1990s Re-Bar show "Broadway Maladies."

"I grew up musical-theater crazy in Hawaii, co-founded an all-teen company in my high-school days and have stayed with musical theater as much as I can," he added. Among the shows he'd also like to revive are "Finian's Rainbow," "Promises, Promises," "On a Clear Day" and "The Golden Apple." The Showtunes shortlist is already growing long for next season.

Next up this season are "Barnum," by Cy Coleman, Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble (April 14-15), and the West Coast premiere of a Charles Strouse musical, "Dancing With Time" (to be presented as a fundraiser June 30). Strouse agreed to do it after seeing Showtunes' recent concert version of his 1966 Broadway show, "It's a Bird ... It's a Plane ... It's Superman," and liking it.

John Hartl: johnhartl@yahoo.com.