Ten Absolutely Baffling Locations for Broadway Musicals – Listverse
Released in 1967, Mel Brook’s black comedy The producers was a hugely successful film that also featured one scene that completely blew all new viewers away. The film’s premise follows two Broadway producers who devise a plan to put on a show so terrible and so raunchy that it immediately flops, prompting them to collect on insurance. The musical in question was none other than “Spring for Hitler,” a pastoral celebration of one of the most diabolical men in all of history.
Obviously, this musical-within-a-musical about a fascist dictator never appeared seriously on Broadway and was in fact a satire written by Brooks to humiliate and ridicule the Nazis. But that doesn’t mean other completely bizarre plot locations haven’t made it all the way to the New York theater circuit. This is a list of ten real, fully produced Broadway musicals, based on concepts that it would take an absolute lunatic to associate with musical theater.
Related: Top ten musical moments from musical TV shows
10 Evil Dead: The Musical
Broadway has a long tradition of transforming horror films into fun, comedic adventures. Musicals like ghost of the opera And Sweeney Todd have even transcended the concept of camp spectacle. They are often even considered brilliant in their own right. But when it comes to translating cinematic special effects from screen to stage, it’s much easier to have a murderous hairdresser or opera singer than it is to produce the gory, blood-soaked gore-fest that it Evil Death franchise.
But Torontonians George Reinblatt, Christopher Bond, Frank Cipolla and Melissa Morris were undeterred and put together a musical adaptation of the first two. Evil Death films at the Tranzac Club in 2003. Now the audience could see how the badass monster hunter Ash not only dispatched the evil Deadites, but also sang and danced at the same time. The show was so successful that the Canadian team moved off-Broadway in 2006. In the following decades they even went on international tours a few times.[1]
9 Small horror shop
But Evil Dead: The Musical is far from the most successful horror film adaptation produced on Broadway. Many music lovers give that honor to the famous cult classic Small horror shop, a movie musical about a meek plant store worker, a beautiful woman who is the source of the worker’s affection, and a giant, man-eating plant. There is also a heartfelt ballad sung by a dentist who takes great pleasure in the sadistic nature of his work.
Small horror shop is a 1982 doo-wop musical adaptation of a 1960 horror B-movie of the same name. It was actually one of composer Alan Menken’s first projects that made him famous before he started working on the musical numbers for the Disney films of the nineties. Small shop is certainly not the most obscure entry on this list, but the fact that it requires a talking plant to span the length of the entire stage while retaining the full puppetry mechanism easily justifies its inclusion.[2]
8 Hands on a hardbody
In 1997, documentary producer SR Bindler filmed Hands on a Hardbody: the documentary, which followed a competition from Longview, Texas, where participants had to hold a Nissan Datsun truck for as long as possible. The last remaining participant was allowed to take the truck home. The documentary was well received and highly praised, but it would be a downright foolish idea to write a musical about a group of people waiting with their hands on a truck for seventy-seven hours.
That is until composers Trey Anastasio and Amanda Green teamed up with book writer Doug Wright to create a musical with the same name as the documentary it was based on: Hands on a hardbody. While the musical’s action isn’t particularly gripping, the show presented itself as a huge ensemble piece, with most participants given a solo number to explain their motivations. The show also explored themes of rural poverty and classism. Hands on a hard body”went to Broadway1 in 2013, although it is considered a flop.[3]
7 To play chess
It’s not easy to create an energetic, crowd-pleasing musical about a chess game. However, it does help if the hypothetical chess musical in question also features Cold War espionage and a good dose of political drama. It also doesn’t hurt if the musical is a solid rock musical, written by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA. This is the type of musical known as To play chessfirst produced in Britain’s West End in 1986 before moving to Broadway in 1988.
More specifically, To play chess essentially recreates the real-life chess match between two grandmasters – American Bobby Fischer and Russian Anatoly Karpov – although only the characters of To play chess draw inspiration from real life. The musical was also developed by lyricist Tim Rice, who helmed Renaissance Disney films as well as other rock musicals, which also helps explain the strangely potent amount of energy put into a musical about a board game. To play chess is also what the song “One Night in Bangkok” was first written for, which would later be performed as a hit single by Murray Head in the 1980s.[4]
6 Starlight Express
In the early 1980s, famed Broadway composer Andrew Lloyd Webber wrote, fresh off the success of Catsdecided he wanted to create a musical rendition of the famous children’s book series Thomas the Tank Engine. Unfortunately (or fortunately) he was never able to secure the rights from the original creator, Reverend W. Awdry, but this did not stop Webber from creating a train-themed musical. Starlight Express was originally born on the West End in 1984 and is performed entirely on roller skates.
The plot revolves around a child’s toy train set that magically comes to life and decides to have a race to see which train is the fastest. The main character, Rusty, is the underdog of the musical, but he’s not just in it for fame; he hopes to win the heart of another train, Pearl, by winning the race. The musical has also had many different variations over the years, such as a version where the trains ‘beat’ the child in question to become real. Or another version that simply has a British character, called ‘Brexit’.[5]
5 Mr. Burns, a post-electric play
To be completely accurate, the next item on this list is not quite a musical. The first act is a play, the second act is a normal musical, and the third act is a cinematic opera. This is perhaps the most normal aspect of Anne Washburn Mr Burns, a post-electric playwhich first debuted in 2012 at the Wooly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington DC, before moving to New York a year later.
A piece has been written about this The Simpsons, but it’s also about the apocalypse. The first act follows six survivors of a vague, abstract, world-ending event who recall and enact old memories Simpsons episodes to stay healthy. The next act follows these characters years later, who have produced a traveling show based on their questionable memory of Simpsons plot points. A final act then takes place 75 years in the future, in which this centuries-old telephone game brings the characters of Mr. Burns and Sideshow Bob have combined, Itchy and Scratchy transformed into hellish demon servants, ending in an epic sword fight between Bart and Mr. Burns.[6]
4 Bloody bloody Andrew Jackson
The seventh President of the United States of America has a particularly unpleasant reputation for his adamant support of slavery and the untold amounts of damage he has caused to First Nations people. And like Alexander Hamilton, politician Andrew Jackson also happened to receive the musical version of a biopic in 2008, although the show’s creators, Michael Friedman and Alex Timbers, veered a bit more into the realm of satire than most biopics.
Bloody bloody Andrew Jackson first debuted in California before moving to Broadway in 2010. It is known for its emo, pop-punk music style, similar to bands like My Chemical Romance or Paramore. However, it is also heavily criticized for being completely indelicate in its treatment of themes such as racism and genocide. Interestingly, Michael Friedman also contributed music Mr Burns, a post-electric play.[7]
3 Obituary: the musical
Those who criticize the popular Japanese manga Obituary because there are far too few musical numbers and interpretive dance moments, you can rest easy, because composer Frank Wildhorn and lyricist Jack Murphy wrote an entire musical in 2013 based on the series written by Tsugumi Ohba & Takeshi Obata. Although the musical has yet to be performed in New York City, it will be in 2023 Obituary: the musical come to London’s West End.
It’s very tricky to fit a long-running manga neatly into a three-hour musical. Obituary manages to cover the entire plot, from Light Yagami discovering the shinigami Ryuk to the final confrontation between Light and Detective L. Although the musical was mainly produced in Japan and South Korea for the first ten years of its existence, the musical actually a script in English, for when it is time for the inevitable debut of Obituary: the musical on Broadway.[8]
2 Procession
In 1915, Leo Frank, a Jewish-American factory manager, was kidnapped from prison and lynched by a mob in the state of Georgia. Leo Frank was in the middle of a trial over the assault and murder of a young child who also happened to be an employee at the factory: a girl named Mary Phagen. A century later, it is impossible to know with 100% certainty whether Frank committed the crime. However, historians all agree that his extrajudicial lynching was a brutal, hateful example of anti-Semitism in America.
While most screenwriters would approach this heavy subject without singing and dancing, Leo Frank’s story was created in musical format by Jason Robert Brown in his 1998 Broadway musical entitled Procession. In all honesty, Procession is completely different from the more comedic entries on this list and is treated with a level of seriousness that is necessary when telling true-to-life stories like this. But it’s true that Procession has the unique claim of being a musical about a historical hate crime that most Broadway musicals cannot also claim.[9]
1 Spider-Man: Eliminate the Dark
Those who have seen the TV show Hawkeye on Disney+ were treated to a scene featuring a faux-musical retelling of the first of the avenger film, which was so well received that a real musical seems to be in the making. Longtime Broadway aficionados know, however, that this is far from Marvel’s first foray into the world of musicals. In 2011, Bono and the Edge put their heads together and wrote music for it Spider-Man: Eliminate the Darka show that forced the most famous webslinger to sing and dance, in addition to delivering jokes and one-liners.
Beyond the bizarre premise, Spider-Man was also infamous for its extensive amount of technical stunts and acrobatics, which caused some actors to be seriously injured during rehearsals. The musical was also ineffective in attracting comic book fans, as well as those who prefer a more classic musical. However, it took two years. unavoidable, Spider-Man lost investors more than sixty million dollars.[10]