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| Linda Donovan, Larry Ellis. |
FRANK MERRIWELL, OR HONOR CHALLENGED [Musical/Period/Youth] B: Skip Redwine, Larry Frank, Heywood Gould; M/LY: Skip Redwine, Larry Frank; SC: Burt L. Standish’s novel, Frank Merriwell’s School Days; D/CH: Neil Kenyon; S: Tom John; C: Frank Thompson; L: John Gleason; P: Sandy Farber and Stanley Barnett i/a/w Nate Friedman; T: Longacre Theatre; 4/24/71 (1)
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| Company of Frank Merriwell, or Honor Challenged. |
Among the pileup of one-performance theatrical turkeys
in the early 70s was this lame gobbler, which happened also to be the first
show produced under a scheme that sought to reduce costs and ticket prices for
Broadway shows by limiting the number of seats sold and keeping the weekly
gross to $25,000 oR below. Cast and crew took decreased salaries for their
efforts. Called the Limited Gross Contract, the idea failed to attract
producers and was quickly abandoned.
Frank
Merriwell was a devastatingly unimaginative musical version of
the one-time popular Frank Merriwell stories about an all-American boy at
turn-of-the-20th-century Yale. It looked shoddy, was ineffectively performed in
a campy style, and was ineptly written and composed.
The action concerns young Frank (Larry Ellis) at a
prep school called Fardale, where he undergoes a series of trials demanding
great courage, including the foiling of a plot by a Spanish spy (Bill Hinnant)
to destroy the school science lab because it contains military secrets.
Brendan Gill rapped the show’s “ineptitude” for failing
to place Frank at his famed Yale hunting grounds, and Clive Barnes railed
against this “modestly deplorable venture” for being “a very bad musical . . .
without wit or period feeling or panache."
Among those trapped in this debacle were young actors like Liz Sheridan and Walter Bobbie.
