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| Tommy Breslin and the chorus girls of Good News. |
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| Wayne Bryan, Barbara Lail. |
The wave of nostalgia that sloshed over Broadway in the 70s
left several pieces of flotsam in its wake, including this unfortunate revival
of 1927’s hit show about college students and football. Trouble with the show
on its year-long, pre-Broadway, out-of-town tour led to the exit of director
Abe Burrows and choreographer Donald Saddler, and the assumption of their
duties by director/choreographer Michael Kidd. Leading man John Payne, who once
had starred in movies with leading lady Alice Faye, also departed and was
replaced by Gene Nelson.
The production was a flat and uninspired reproduction of the
original. The same set designer from the first production, 50 years earlier,
was on hand, his last show before he died. Oenslager’s scenery was one of the
more cheerful ingredients in this otherwise ill-fated, badly faded musical. Kidd’s
staging had “a sense of period and a few bursts of energy,” wrote Clive Barnes,
but Alice Faye—as the college professor whose astronomy exam may prevent football star Tom Marlow
(Scott Stevenson) from playing in the big game—though still attractive, was
curiously uninteresting and uncharismatic. Thankfully, her low, lovely voice
was still intact. Gene Nelson was his charming, genial self as the football
coach, but the brunt of the show’s memorable talent lay in the hands of less
well-known younger performers, notably Marti Rolph as Connie Lane.
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| Stubby Kaye, Marti Rolph, Scott Stevenson, Alice Faye, John Payne (who would be replaced by Gene Nelson). |
No one pretended that the book was even a notch above awful,
but the score remained pleasant, though five of the original 16 songs had been
replaced by better known ones from the pens of musical theatre icons De Sylva,
Brown, and Henderson. Those were “Button up Your Overcoat,” You’re the Cream in My
Coffee,” and “Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” which joined the 1927 playlist,
among which were “The Varsity Drag, “The Best Things in Life are Free,” and “Good
News.” Even with so many beloved standards, the show came nowhere near the goal
posts.
John Simon’s comments were representative: “Everything about
the show has a ghostly look to it, but one does not even get the feeling of a
real ghost being there, only his laundered sheet.”
