The Donna Summer Musical @ La Jolla Playhouse

[OneFinger]

Just got tickets for this world-premier musical at the La Jolla Playhouse. Looks like it's going to be fantastic. Has anyone else seen it or heard how it is? Looks like a very strong cast.

 

http://www.lajollaplayhouse.org/donna-summer

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

I'd watch LaChanze sing the dictionary and will get a ticket just for her.

 

With this and the Cher documusical attempting to find a Broadway house around the same time, it'll be interesting to see which one survives.

[OneFinger]

I'd watch LaChanze sing the dictionary and will get a ticket just for her... .

Totally agree. So anxious to see this show.

[samhexum]

Has anyone else seen it or heard how it is?

 

 

NY POST: “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical.” It debuts next week...

You can’t rule this one out, if only because the director is Des McAnuff, who staged the smash “Jersey Boys.” Investors who saw a workshop in New York weren’t mad about the script, but said those Summer songs — “She Works Hard for the Money,” “Love To Love You Baby” and “Last Dance” — are as catchy as ever.

The money for this one’s in place, and if it gets good reviews, the Broadway disco ball’s going to spin.

[OneFinger]

Thanks so much for the response and info. Really appreciate it.

[OCClient]

Just got tickets for this world-premier musical at the La Jolla Playhouse. Looks like it's going to be fantastic. Has anyone else seen it or heard how it is? Looks like a very strong cast.

 

http://www.lajollaplayhouse.org/donna-summer

 

I am going on 12-9. Glad to hear these recommendations !

[OneFinger]

Fantastic show!!! Very strong cast with wonderful vocals. Would love to see it again.

 

FYI, I was very surprised at how small this venue is. I'm used to theaters with 2500-3000 seats. I estimate this was less than 1000 seats - all main floor.

[TruthBTold]

How was the script?

[OneFinger]

How was the script?

I really liked it. It went thru her early life and professional life. Appropriate music was linked to her life story. FYI, not sure many remember her "Adam & Steve" comment. But, as I was living in Salt Lake City, the clubs immediately stopped playing her music after that incident. In this play, this comment was explained and it was like an apology was issued to the gay community. Personally, I really appreciated that part of the play.

 

Would I see this play again?? IN A MICRO-MINUTE!!!

[+ Cash4Trash]

A Talkin' Broadway review about the production in La Jolla. https://www.talkinbroadway.com/page/regional/sandiego/sd213.html

[TruthBTold]

A Talkin' Broadway review about the production in La Jolla. https://www.talkinbroadway.com/page/regional/sandiego/sd213.html

 

That is too bad about the book, but it is really hard to write a play that is often meant to do more than be what is between the songs. But as the reviewer notes, it is the music we (or at least) lived for. It was the time (you kids out there) when I was just coming out. It still brings a smile to my face when I think of going to a club with a group of friends and grabbing whatever then boyfriend's hand so that we could dance to the latest Summers hit. When I think about it, it didn't last all that long. But those were great years.

[bostonman]

That is too bad about the book, but it is really hard to write a play that is often meant to do more than be what is between the songs.

 

I tend to call these kind of shows the "Behind The Music: The Musical" musicals. That's because it's much much easier to do this kind of bio approach in a shorter TV format, with archival visuals, interviews, etc. But onstage, indeed, it has to be about the songs and how to get from one to another - and most singer/songwriter's personal/professional lives aren't easily fit into that format, beyond the expected cliches. It seems to me that the books to Jersey Boys and Beautiful rose very well above that banality, but that in general it's not going to be an easy thing to do.

 

However, I'm excited at the prospect that Jeff Whitty of Avenue Q fame will be writing the book to the upcoming Go-Go's jukebox show, which is currently titled Head Over Heels. That could be interesting.

 

But in general, I tend to wish that producers/directors/writers would go for the revue approach instead - where the songs really can showcase themselves without the filler. One of the earliest jukebox shows, Smokey Joe's Cafe, did quite well without one single word of dialogue (and you can always go looking for info on writers Leiber and Stoller afterwards - just the nostalgia for the songs is enough to keep the show cooking along - and it's a great fun musical meal, lol). And the show that I consider to be the king of all Broadway "composer catalogue revues" - Ain't Misbehavin' - has very very little dialogue, and most of what is there is craftily made up of Fats Waller's own bon mots. But still, the songs provided their own contexts - you really didn't need anything else.

[edjames]

NYPost reports the musical will open on Broadway in the spring before the Tony's and to avoid competition next fall with the Cher Show...

 

Donna Summer musical producers are scared of Cher

By Michael Riedel

 

December 14, 2017 | 7:45pm | Updated

 

A giant disco ball called “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical” is headed to Broadway earlier than expected.

 

The $12 million show, produced by music legend Tommy Mottola, will open at the Lunt-Fontanne in April, just before the Tony Award cutoff date, sources tell The Post.

 

“Summer” opened last month at the La Jolla Playhouse to mixed reviews, including a blistering notice in the Los Angeles Times that would have killed disco.

 

“I don’t need this flimsy bio musical and neither do you,” wrote critic Charles McNulty. “In a musical form not known for literary finesse, ‘Summer’ lowers the bar … The lack of playwriting imagination is startling. If the program didn’t state otherwise, I’d be sure the writing was outsourced to Wikipedia.” “Sweeney Todd” it’s not.

 

But Mottola and his co-producers, Dodgers productions, are confident that those killer tunes, coupled with a slick production by director Des McAnuff and choreographer Sergio Trujillo, will overcome stuffy critics who can’t dance.

 

“The show’s a hoot,” says a theater executive who caught it in La Jolla. “I’m not going to make a case for its artistic merits, but everybody’s going to be dancing at the curtain call.”

 

“Summer” is coming in this season to avoid a showdown with “The Cher Show,” which opens in the fall. Both musicals show their diva at three different stages of her life. In “Summer,” Storm Lever plays Duckling Donna, a gawky kid who grew up in Boston in the 1950s, sang in church and landed a role in a German tour of “Hair.”

 

Ariana DeBose takes over as Disco Donna who, under the guidance of record producer Giorgio Moroder, storms the charts with “Love To Love You, Baby,” “Dim All the Lights,” “MacArthur Park,” “Heaven Knows,” “Hot Stuff,” and that song that clears every wedding reception, “Last Dance.”

 

All those hits plus a few lesser-known gems make up the score.

 

LaChanze is Diva Donna, rebuilding her career after alienating her gay fans by saying “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” (Summer died of lung cancer in 2012.)

 

Not all the reviews were as dismissive as the one in the LA Times.

 

“While this version of her life isn’t quite Broadway ready, it has … potential,” wrote a Hollywood Reporter critic. “I feel love.”

 

The San Diego Reader called it “the most dazzling show ever staged at the La Jolla Playhouse.”

 

That may be overstating the case, but with a Broadway audience made up largely of tourists looking for a good time, “Summer” probably has a shot. Not with critics or Tony voters, perhaps, but with the one place that matters most: the box office.

 

Michael Stewart, who died in 1983, wasn’t a flashy Broadway personality, but he co-wrote some of its best-loved shows: “Bye, Bye Birdie,” “Hello, Dolly!” “42nd Street” and “Barnum.” His work will be celebrated at a benefit Monday at the Urban Stages Theater, 259 W. 30th St.

 

Chita Rivera, Lee Roy Reams, Jim Dale and Charles Strouse are set to perform; tickets at UrbanStages.org.

 

FILED UNDER BROADWAY , BROADWAY MUSICALS , CHER , DONNA SUMMER

 

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[bostonman]

Michael Stewart, who died in 1983, wasn’t a flashy Broadway personality, but he co-wrote some of its best-loved shows: “Bye, Bye Birdie,” “Hello, Dolly!” “42nd Street” and “Barnum.” His work will be celebrated at a benefit Monday at the Urban Stages Theater, 259 W. 30th St.

 

I like Stewart's work, and I do like Barnum - but to call it one of Broadway's best-loved shows is a huge stretch, lol. I tend to think most people don't even know it. (The other three shows mentioned are indisputable classics, IMO.)

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

Broadway producers care about one thing: Profit.

 

This show will bring in the crowds, the bus groups and the nostalgic. It's not my kind of show, but it'll keep a lot of talented people employed and that's never a bad thing.

 

Hell, it can't all be Chaucer

[TruthBTold]

Broadway producers care about one thing: Profit.

This show will bring in the crowds, the bus groups and the nostalgic. It's not my kind of show, but it'll keep a lot of talented people employed and that's never a bad thing.

Hell, it can't all be Chaucer

 

Certainly things can't all be Chaucer there should be an attempt to make it a passable musical. If the time isn't put into it it probably will die and kill off any other attempts to use her life as the basis of a similar form of experience. Donna Summers was a phenomenon of the time. She defined an era and a decent book, plus music that pretty much defined an era (for that type of music) could work. But if you don't take the time to develop it you've doomed it.

[bostonman]

Certainly things can't all be Chaucer there should be an attempt to make it a passable musical. If the time isn't put into it it probably will die and kill off any other attempts to use her life as the basis of a similar form of experience. Donna Summers was a phenomenon of the time. She defined an era and a decent book, plus music that pretty much defined an era (for that type of music) could work. But if you don't take the time to develop it you've doomed it.

 

One of the big problems, as I mentioned earlier in the thread, is simply that the lives of these big stars never really lend themselves well to the kind of specificity and theatricality that the book of a musical really needs. It's one thing to present the songs and bank on the nostalgia and energy that that music provides - it's quite another to have to make up something around them that sustains that mood AND (hopefully) gets us from song to song in a credible way, without winding up with rather mundane life details or a deadly formulaic "and then she wrote / and then she sang" kind of thing.

 

In the era that we now consider to be more or less the mature "golden age" of musicals (Rodgers and Hammerstein, and forward), the story tended to come first, and the writers would work together to most effectively figure out where the songs-to-be would land best - what big moments in the story needed to be musicalized, etc. For some of that time, the emphasis would still be on the hopeful "hit songs" that would have a life outside the show, but the songs were still written with an eye on how they progressed the story or highlighted a certain emotional moment. But these jukebox shows work the other way around - the songs operate on their own level, and the book is retrofitted to attempt to give them a context they were never meant to fit. (The general idea that the story of any singer's life can be told specifically and meaningfully around the songs that made them famous is really very flimsy and artificial when you think about it.) So really, these shows have a tough row to hoe from the very beginning. Which is why most of them don't work - the premise of the songs being famous is no guarantee at all that they will help add up to a truly satisfying book musical.

[+ Cash4Trash]

Sounds like it will share the fate of On Your Feet (Gloria Estefan) and Motown, The Musical. A couple of years on Broadway and tour like hell for the next 20.

They've got a couple of months to work on the book. The Temptations musical was just in San Francisco and may be on it's way as well. Escape From Margaritaville

opens in the spring. (Jimmy Buffet) Four hits so far this fall 1) The Band's Visit 2) Once On This Island 3) SpongeBob SquarePants The Musical and 4) The Children.

Frozen and Harry Potter in the spring - it's going to be one helluva year.

[+ BenjaminNicholas]

And in all of this discussion, it doesn't help that society has the attention span of dryer lint. To get an audience to sit still, keep quiet and not sing along loudly to something for 2.5 hours is nearly impossible.

 

I still think Broadway ushers should be allowed to have Tasers

 

Producers are putting things on stage that entertain people- Sometimes using the lowest common denominators. Let's hope the book of this show can be tweaked a bit. It IS possible for a jukebox show to also be incredibly immersive (Jersey Boys).

[bostonman]

It IS possible for a jukebox show to also be incredibly immersive (Jersey Boys).

 

But, I will also say that I feel Jersey Boys is really sui generis. The way that book, music, set, and staging work together is expertly done, in a way that I can't say any other jukebox show has been so far. I would say something similar for Twyla Tharp's unique story-through-dance vignette concept for her revue Movin' Out. Both shows are true theatrical visions of their own - not like anything else I've seen, and so far not able to be replicated. (I didn't see either of Tharp's shows that followed - the ones based on Dylan and Sinatra - but based on their reception they didn't seem to communicate the same kind of theatrical magic that Movin' Out did.)