What Could Have Been/Theater


 * W.S. Gilbert wrote an early draft of Patience in which the object of the twenty lovesick maidens' affections was not an aesthete but the mystic Revd Lawn Tennison.
 * And if they'd gone with that, all the modern adaptations of Patience would try to stay "relevant" by updating Bunthorne into a Scientologist rather than a 60s rocker.
 * Three words: Eric Idle's Seussical.
 * Jerome Robbins originally pitched West Side Story as a story about antisemitism and strife between the Italian-American Jets and the Jewish-American Emeralds. The Maria character was to be a holocaust survivor, and the story would have taken place over the Easter-Passover season.
 * Cirque Du Soleil's 20th anniversary book 20 Years Under the Sun (2004) mentions several shows and concepts that didn't come to fruition as originally conceived; there have been more such cases since:
 * Eclipse was planned as Cirque's first tour after their breakthrough Le Cirque Reinvente (1987), reaching the workshop stage. But many Reinvente performers wanted to be in it while Cirque co-founder Guy Laliberte wanted to cast a new lineup. Plus, the company's artistic director Guy Caron objected to Cirque becoming a for-profit organization and parted ways with it (he'd return to direct Dralion in 1999); several performers followed suit, and financing fell through. After some regrouping, ideas developed and performers recruited for Eclipse were incorporated into 1990's Nouvelle Experience, and "Eclipse" is the title of one of its underscore numbers.
 * Cirque's first Las Vegas show, Mystere (1993), was originally pitched to Caesars Palace in 1990 and had a Greco-Roman mythology theme to fit the locale. The show was finally staged at rival hotel-casino Treasure Island, absent the original theme.
 * Casino mogul Steve Wynn wanted Cirque to stage a giant outdoor aquacade stunt show for his new Bellagio Hotel and Casino -- they quickly scaled it down into the show that became O (1998). Initially, it was to have given equal time to both water and fire-based acts. (Notably, the later Vegas production KA (2005) has a fire motif.)
 * Plans for a Variety Show variant to set up residency in Macau, China were scrapped after the "traditional" show ZAIA (2008) opened there to weak ticket sales.
 * Early press releases for Criss Angel Believe (2008) had Criss playing an "enigmatic Victorian noble" and no mention of the All Just a Dream framework of the finished show, which (when it opened) started as a conventional magic show until a stunt "went wrong" and the setting changed to a dream unfolding in his head.
 * Banana Shpeel (2010) was originally going to be a hybrid of the company's house style, Vaudeville, and The Musical. The third style was dropped when the storyline threatened to overshadow the different variety/comedy acts intended as the show's backbone, and among the characters (and performers) dropped were a romantic couple. This happened so late in development that one of the dropped musical numbers, led by the axed couple, had already been featured in a preview on the 2009 season finale of America's Got Talent. Details here. In the wake of the poorly-reviewed Chicago tryout, enough changes were implemented to the point that the New York opening was delayed three-plus months. It wound up closing early and an aborted tour confirmed the show as a Dork Age.
 * While Viva Elvis (2010) made it to the stage of the Aria Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, the plans for a similar European tour based around Elvis Presley's work never panned out, possibly due to the ongoing global recession. This may also have been why a Dubai resident show was cancelled around the same time.
 * After it was decided in 2011 to close Viva Elvis in 2012, Cirque and MGM Mirage Resorts announced they would open another show in the space and considered restaging Tokyo Disneyland's much-acclaimed ZED, which closed after the post-earthquake/tsunami tourism slowdown. But what was fresh to Japanese audiences would be old hat to Las Vegas Cirque fans (the format being similar to Mystere's), and the theater would have to be remodeled for it; instead they moved the tour Zarkana, which had neither of these problems, into the space.
 * Annie Get Your Gun was originally supposed to have a score composed by Jerome Kern, with co-librettist Dorothy Fields providing the lyrics. It was only after Kern died that Irving Berlin was hired to write the score, considered by many his greatest.
 * Andrew Lloyd Webber originally sought Alan Jay Lerner (My Fair Lady, Camelot, etc.) to write the lyrics for The Phantom of the Opera, but Lerner was too ill to do so. Similarly, he also tried to recruit Jim Steinman as the lyricist, but that too came to naught.
 * Lloyd Webber also had an entirely different tone in mind at first for Phantom, conceiving it as a campy rock musical with Steve Harley in the title role. (The remnants of this idea can still be heard in the drum-and-electric-guitar laced title song). After Lloyd Webber read the original novel, the musical's style shifted towards romantic melodrama, and Colm Wilkinson played the part in a "proto-staging" at Sydmonton and was considered for the lead (and would eventually play it in the Toronto cast)--but he was busy with Les Miserables at the time, ultimately leading to the successful against-type casting of Michael Crawford.
 * Phantom has a long and storied production history, which include robotic mice with glowing red eyes, an animatronic horse and live doves. A live elephant was briefly considered.
 * The sequel Love Never Dies originally was to open in London, New York City, and Shanghai at the same time -- an absolutely unprecedented idea that was just too big to pull off.
 * Follies, back when it had the working title The Girls Upstairs, was going to have a murder mystery-like plot.
 * The list of incomplete and planned-but-never-composed operas is huge, but probably no "what could have been" is more intriguing than a King Lear by Giuseppe Verdi.
 * Many musicals have at least one song that got cut during the development stages.
 * Disney insider Jim Hill wrote about a bunch of live theater ventures that were in development in 2002. Tarzan and The Little Mermaid eventually became Broadway realities, but neither were in their originally-planned forms (the former was supposed to be a Cirque Du Soleil-style tour in a tent; the latter was to be directed/choreographed by Matthew Bourne); the revue When You Wish was reworked into the unsuccessful tour On the Record. Of the others, only the Broadway production of Mary Poppins actually made it past the development stage.
 * Lady in the Dark was to have had a fourth Dream Sequence, in which Liza imagines married life with Randy Curtis on a lush San Fernando Valley ranch. The third Dream Sequence originally depicted a minstrel show rather than a circus. Moss Hart originally conceived the scenario as that of a straight play (with one song), with Katharine Cornell as the intended star.
 * Alan Jay Lerner was to have written The Musical of Li'l Abner, to Burton Lane's music (continuing their Royal Wedding partnership). Lerner later wrote that he had been "trying to turn Li'l Abner into a hillbilly 'Good Soldier Schweik' and came up empty handed."
 * The history of Starlight Express is a veritable gold mine of hypothetical possibilities and altered ideas.
 * As noted on its page, the show's original concept was a musical adaptation of The Railway Series. When this idea was scrapped, Lloyd Webber decided to base the stage show on the plot of an aborted animated television movie, a retelling of "Cinderella" starring a steam locomotive oppressed by his (or her; sources conflict on this point) diesel and electric rivals. The show was intended as a children's pantomime, but Trevor Nunn later took over as director and decided to make it into a piece of theatre equally enjoyable to adults.
 * Another inspiration for the original incarnation of Starlight Express was the song "Engine of Love," which Lloyd Webber composed for soul singer Earl Jordan in 1977. Peter Reeves wrote the lyrics; when Richard Stilgoe signed on as lyricist, he expanded on the Double Entendres already present in "Engine of Love" a hundredfold. Although the song was replaced with "Call Me Rusty" when Starlight Express premiered in London, the 1987 Broadway show used a shortened version of it as Rusty's "I Am" Song.
 * Even leaving aside the evolution of the concept, the sheet music for "Belle the Sleeping Car" reveals intriguing hints about the early drafts of Starlight Express. Belle's song initially had an extra verse; hence the incongruity of the line "...And worst of all, turn over and go straight to sleep," which was meant to rhyme with "They weren't the sort of gentlemen who liked it cheap." This verse was cut by the time the show opened in 1984. The song's coda suggests that Belle was intended as a viable race partner who offered herself to the champion engines and may or may not have had any connection to Rusty. Moreover, the electric locomotive was named Elton, not Electra, which raises questions about his character design. The coda also contains a character named Smuts, who remains the most enigmatic element of all. Fans have speculated that Smuts was the prototype for both Rusty and Dustin, with the one character being split into two as the planning stages developed. This hypothesis would explain the phonetic similarities between the names and why Rusty and Dustin race together at the show's climax.
 * Pearl's aerobics instructor-style outfit did not survive beyond the preview periods. By the time the show opened, her costume had been quickly overhauled into a pink tutu-based dress. Electra's original unitard had a white motif rather than a blue one.
 * Studying the multitudinous different versions of Starlight Express is an excellent exercise in "What Once Was." From removed subplots to changed, deleted, and added songs to differing costume designs, no one could list all the alterations made over the years.
 * Anything Goes was originally supposed to have a subplot in which the Victor Moore character helps spreading rumors about a bomb on board (thereby providing a cue for "Blow, Gabriel, Blow") and builds a fake bomb for the William Gaxton character to discover and throw overboard in a feat of Engineered Heroism, but things go awry and they get thrown in the brig for intermission. The details differ, as did the character names: in one surviving draft, Moore's character was a refugee from Horrible Hollywood named Elmer Purkis.
 * One Touch of Venus was originally conceived of as a star vehicle for Marlene Dietrich, and the original librettist, Bella Spewack, apparently was going to keep the Victorian setting of the source story ("The Tinted Venus" by F. Anstey). Ultimately, Dietrich lost interest, Spewack was written out in favor of S. J. Perelman, and the setting was updated.
 * The second act of Gypsy was originally supposed to have Rose's breakdown take the form of a Dream Ballet (as one might expect for a show whose director-choreographer was ostentatiously credited for the "entire production" of both this musical and West Side Story, hit of the previous season). Fortunately, the ballet was never choreographed, and "Rose's Turn" was written instead. Legal threats from June Havoc almost resulted in June being renamed Clare in the show.
 * There was a Batman musical in the works with songs written by Jim Steinman, who is best known for writing many songs for Meat Loaf. Meat Loaf would then cover two of the songs in Bat Out Of Hell III: The Monster Is Loose.
 * In Carousel, originally the judge Billy meets in heaven was not the Starkeeper but a New England minister and his wife.
 * Lost in the Stars was not originally an adaptation of Cry the Beloved Country. Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson began work on the show in 1939, before Paton's novel was even written. It had the Working Title Ulysses Africanus, and was being adapted from Harry Stillwell Edwards' novel Eneas Africanus. The title role was offered to Paul Robeson, who declined it.