Tragedy Tomorrow
How cool is this? An actual video of Nathan Lane in A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. Of course, being a bootleg, it looks horrible. It's also illegal. Wonder if it will be taken down soon?
This is the famous opening song, "Comedy Tonight." It's also the number that saved the show. The original 1962 production wasn't previewing well. Director George Abbott hadn't liked Stephen Sondheim's original opening number, feeling it wasn't hummable, so it was replaced with "Love Is In The Air" (which Robin Williams and Christine Baranski sing in Birdcage--also starring Nathan Lane). Hummable, certainly, but wrong for the show.
Jerome Robbins, who saw Abbott as his mentor, was brought in to doctor the show. He declared it needed a new opening to introduce the evening properly. Sondheim wrote "Comedy Tonight," Robbins staged it with a lot of gags, and, with the audience prepared to see a raucous comedy, the rest of the musical played well from then on.
The version above is fun. I like the Medea bit, which could only be done with Broadway money. But it makes me wish, somehow, there was film of the original cast.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:22 AM
2 Comments:
Is there something special about this boot clip that makes it more illegal than the thousands of others from Broadway shows and national tours on YouTube and therefore should be removed where the others should not? I'm confused...
They're all illegal. Some sources try to systematically remove them--others don't care or don't know. This clip is new, so we'll see. Generally, it's been my experience that Broadway boots are rarer than a lot of other copyrightable material.
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