DUDE: THE HIGHWAY LIFE
 |
| Company of Dude: The Highway Life. |
"In Lieu of Reviews"
Reviews of live theatre being impossible during these days of the pandemic, THEATRE'S LEITER SIDE
is pleased to provide instead accounts of previous theatre
seasons--encompassing the years 1970-1975-for theatre-hungry readers. If you'd
like to know the background on how this previously unpublished series came to
be and what its relationship is to my three The Encyclopedia of the New
York Stage volumes (covering every New York play, musical, revue, and
revival between 1920 and 1950), please check the prefaces to any of the entries
beginning with the letter “A.” See the list at the end of the current entry.
 |
| Rae Allen, William Redfield. |
DUDE: THE HIGHWAY LIFE [Musical/Youth] B/LY: Gerome Ragni; M: Galt McDermott; D: Tom O’Horgan;
DS: Eugene Lee, Fran Lee, Roger Morgan; C: Randy Barcelo; P: Adela and Peter
Holzer; T: Broadway Theatre; 10/9/72-10/21/72 (16)
Plagued by pre-opening problems,
including the hiring of a new director and having him reconceive the whole
show, this close to $1 million flop—when such a sum was considered enormous—was
universally vetoed by the critics. Librettist and lyricist Gerome Ragni and
composer Galt McDermott were two thirds of the team that had written Hair a few years earlier, so it seemed
only natural to hire the red-hot Tom O’Horgan, who had helped turn that show
into the era’s iconic rock musical, as the new director.
 |
| Ralph Carter, James Patrick Varrell III. |
O’Horgan staged what Harold Clurman
called a “virtually non-existent” book as a pseudo-avant garde attempt at
environmental theatre within a conventional Broadway playhouse. The orchestra
area was covered over with ramps and platforming on which the actors cavorted,
with the surrounding audience (some on the former stage) seated in sections
called the Trees, the Foothills, and the Mountains. Over the central space hung
a flowery scaffolding from which actors could descend by trapezes or to which
they could, with the aid of wires, rise. Trap doors, hand mikes, circus-like
costumes, vivid makeup, and other theatricalist devices littered the acting
spaces, from which the actors often departed to mingle with the spectators.
The object of all this to-do was the
enactment of a disorganized, vague morality tale of sorts about the birth,
fall, and redemption of man—man, that is, seen as both a modern hippie (Nat
Morris) and a black child of 11 (Ralph Carter). The other personages of this
sloppy grab bag wee called such allegorical names as Mother Earth (Salome Bey)
and Bread (Delores Hall).
 |
| Bobby Alessi, Nat Morris, Billy Alesssi. |
A few critics detected glimmers of
quality in the deafeningly amplified music, but the noise level was too high to
make the lyrics very intelligible. Energy and activity were constant, but the
evening tired out its audience rather than stimulating it. O’Horgan’s clichéd tricks
were scorned and only a few performers, among them Hall and Carter, were
singled out for praise. Cast members of note—then or later—included Rae Allen
and Dale Soules. Carter won a Drama Desk Award as Most Promising Performer.
Typical of the responses was Jack
Kroll’s that Dude “was a stupid mess,
a fake multi-media idiocy that suppurated gruesomely on the ramps, catwalks,
causeways, columns, trapezes, trapdoors, and waterholes of the rebuilt Broadway
Theatre.”
Previous Entries:
Abelard and Heloise
Absurd Person
Singular
AC/DC
“Acrobats”
and “Line”
The Advertisement/
All My Sons
All Over
All Over Town
All the Girls Came
Out to Play
Alpha Beta
L’Amante
Anglais
Ambassador
American Gothics]
Amphitryon
And Miss Reardon
Drinks a Little
And They Put
Handcuffs on the Flowers
And Whose Little
Boy Are You?
Anna K.
Anne of Green
Gables
Antigone
Antiques
Any Resemblance to Persons Living or Dead
Applause
Ari
As You Like It
Augusta
The Au Pair Man
Baba Goya [Nourish the Beast]
The Ballad of Johnny Pot
Barbary Shore
The Bar that Never Closes
The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel
The Beauty Part
The Beggar’s Opera
Behold! Cometh the Vanderkellens
Be Kind to People Week
Berlin to Broadway with Kurt Weill
Bette Midler’s Clams on a Half-Shell Revue
Black Girl
Black Light Theatre of Prague
Black Picture Show
Black Sunlight
The Black Terror
Black Visions
Les Blancs
Blasts and Bravos: An Evening with H,L.
Mencken
Blood
Bluebeard
Blue Boys
Bob and Ray—The Two and Only
Boesman and Lena
The Boy Who Came to Leave
Bread
A Breeze from the Gulf
Brief Lives
Brother Gorski
Brothers
Bullshot Crummond
Bunraku
The Burnt Flower Bed
Butley
Button, Button
Buy Bonds, Buster
The Cage
Camille
Candide (1)
Candide (2)
The Candyapple
Captain Brassbound’s Conversion
The Caretaker
La Carpa de los Raquichis
The Carpenters
The Castro Complex
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
The Changing Room
Charles Abbott and Son
Charley’s Aunt
Charlie Was Here and Now He’s Gone
Chemin de Fer
The Cherry Orchard
The Chickencoop Chinaman
The Children
Children! Children!
Children in the Rain
Children of the Wind
The Children’s Mass
A Chorus Line
The Chronicle of Henry VI: Part 1, Part
II,
The Circle
Clarence Darrow
Cold Feet
Conditions of Agreement
Coney Island Cycle
The Constant Wife
The Contractor
The Contrast
The Constant Wife
The Country Girl
Crazy Now
The Creation of the
World and Other Business
Creeps
The Crucible
Crystal and Fox
Cyrano
Dames at Sea
The Dance of Death
Dance wi’Me/Dance with
Me
A Day in the Life of
Just about Everyone
Dear Nobody
Dear Oscar
The
Desert Song
Diamond
Studs
Different
Times
The
Dirtiest Show in Town
The
Divorce of Judy and Jane
Do It
Again!
Doctor
Jazz
A
Doll’s House (2)
Don
Juan
Don
Juan in Hell
Don’t
Bother Me, I Can’t Cope
Don’t
Call Back
Don’t
Play Us Cheap!
Drat!
The
Dream on Monkey Mountain
A Dream
Out of Time
Dreyfus
in Rehearsal
