Steven Suskin: Second Act Trouble: Behind The Scenes At Broadway's Big Musical Bombs
Broadway musicals are so reliant on the deft combination of composition and performance that it's a miracle anyone ever raises the curtain, let alone has a long, successful run. Steven Suskin's Second Act Trouble looks at theater's grandest failures by compiling pieces written right when they happened. Reporters for New York newspapers were on the scene for the out-of-town tryouts of the ghastly 1968 musical version of Breakfast At Tiffany's (starring Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain, with a last-second rewrite by Edward Albee) and the out-of-control New York previews of Gerome Ragni and Galt MacDermot's 1972 Hair follow-up Dude (plagued by flighty staging innovations that included a stage covered in dirt, and an orchestra situated in the balcony). The book contains firsthand accounts of star misbehavior by the likes of Jerry Lewis, Carol Burnett, and Liza Minnelli—the latter abetted by an in-over-his-head Martin Scorsese—and fragments of memoirs by producers and publicists. It's practically a primer on how art-by-committee becomes predictably tedious.
