Marilyn- An American Fable

Posted: 11/12/15 at 8:02pm

Look what I just found... I never thought this stuff would ever see the light of day.... WOW!  Allyson Reed and Scott Bakula

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cM_vAbQsUoA

Posted: 11/12/15 at 8:08pm

Did anyone ever see this show?  I wanted to see it so badly when I was in high school but it closed before I could get down to NYC

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 11/12/15 at 8:29pm

I doubt we will ever see videos from the London musical about Marilyn

Posted: 11/12/15 at 8:33pm

Ah, with Stephanie Lawrence... I have looked.  You can find the songs. She recorded a few from the show.. they are strange but she nails them.  here's one... you can find more on youtube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRJSNDUNvlI

[JoseLee_]

Posted: 11/12/15 at 8:39pm

I love that song "Marilyn  You Are Beyond". Who is singing that? Blown away! It looked like a fun show. I wish someone can make a studio cast recording since there is no recording of this show.

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 11/12/15 at 8:41pm

Interesting. Have to take a look

 

Chris Jones who did Rockabye Hamlet did an all sung thru musical of her life called Hello Marilyn. A CD was released I have it but I cannot remember how or where I got it.

 

Updated On: 11/12/15 at 08:41 PM

[Mike Costa]

Posted: 11/12/15 at 8:52pm

Thanks for posting this Deena!  I saw the production and it was good. (Edit: ArtC3 does remind me that it was a little boring though and he is correct.)  Allyson Reed knocked it out of the ballpark along with Scott Bakula and the great Willy Falk singing You Are So Beyond.  

 

The designs were eye popping and, as you can hear, these were the days before the League of Broadway Producers broke The Musicians Union and Broadway Orchestras sounded like, well, BROADWAY.  The larger musical houses had a minimum of 26 in the pit (Hamilton has 11 in a theater that used to have a minimum of 26).

 

The current tour of Ragtime has 2 musicians.  Yes, the National Tour of Ragtime performs with 2 musicians and tracks playing a show that was originally scored for 26.  Greed.  Simple greed by the producers.

Updated On: 11/12/15 at 08:52 PM

[gleek4114]

Posted: 11/12/15 at 9:13pm

I've always known this existed, and I'd always been interested, but there was never any quality recording (video or otherwise) that could help me sink my teeth into it. That 13 minutes is a GEM. It looked fabulous. The only thing that seemed weird was the champagne number with the kick line of plumbers (WTF). In addition to the wonderful Alison Reed, I had forgotten that Mary Testa was in this as Hedda Hopper. I have an audio bootleg if anyone wants to indulge themselves, it's very muddy though. A question for those who saw it: What went wrong? Bad reviews? No advance on ticket sales? Bad word of mouth? What made it so short lived?

[ARTc3]

Posted: 11/12/15 at 10:18pm

It was dreadful. Boring. I respect Mike Costa's opinion, but I am quite surprised by it. I thought pretty much everything about Marilyn: An American Fable dull. I remember struggling to keep awake. Honest. The video makes it look far more interesting than it was.

[gleek4114]

Posted: 11/12/15 at 10:28pm

Found the Times review... sounds like a train wreck...

STAGE: 'MARILYN,' MUSICAL ABOUT MONROE'S MAGIC

By FRANK RICH 
Published: November 21, 1983, Monday

IF you read all the fine print in the Playbill for ''Marilyn: An American Fable,'' you'll discover that the new musical at the Minskoff has 16 producers and 10 songwriters. If you mistakenly look up from the Playbill to watch the show itself, you may wonder whether those 26 persons were ever in the same rehearsal room - or even the same city - at the same time. On top of its many other failings, ''Marilyn'' is incoherent to the point of being loony. I defy anyone to explain - just for starters - why 10 chorus boys dressed in pink plumbers' costumes sing a song about bubble baths at the climax of Act II.

The woman who summons the plumbers is supposed to be Marilyn Monroe, and it can be said without fear of contradiction that ''Marilyn'' is meant to be the story of the ill- starred actress's life. But even this fact is occasionally in doubt. Patricia Michaels's libretto makes only scant mention of Monroe's movies (no mention at all of ''Some Like It Hot'' or ''The Misfits'' and vastly abridges the story of the actress's tempestuous personal life. If ''Marilyn'' is to be believed, Monroe's biggest problem was insomnia - an ailment soon rectified when she takes to tap dancing through the streets of New York with fellow classmates from the Actors Studio.

We do, however, hear about Marilyn's various husbands. Husband No. 1, Jim Dougherty, pops up in a high- school jitterbug number, then pops up again in a World War II soldiers' number, then disappears without a trace. Husband No. 2, Joe DiMaggio, is a moony juvenile who is first seen carrying a baseball bat and later discovered daintily clutching a red rose. He and Marilyn break up when she refuses to eat every meal at his restaurant on San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. Husband No. 3 is Arthur Miller, who lives in a New York penthouse and always speaks with a pipe in his mouth. Marilyn leaves him shortly after delivering the line, ''But you're Arthur Miller - how can you be so boring?''

Still, most of ''Marilyn'' is not about Marilyn or her famous husbands. This show has more symbolic figures and narrators than it does characters with recognizable proper names. A fey trio of singers known collectively as Destiny forever weaves in and out of the action, tossing glittery stardust on one and all. Two of Marilyn's fans periodically wander on to declare their devotion with lyrics like, ''My knees are weak/And I can't even speak.'' A pair of chorus girls campily outfitted as ''Hedda'' and ''Louella'' are dragged in at intervals to dish the ''gossip'' about Monroe - but their gossip is so bowdlerized that they might as well be describing the private life of Shirley Temple.

Alyson Reed, the professional and hard-working performer cast in the title role, has precious little to do under the circumstances. In Act I, she must deliver most of her characterization with her chest and derri ere. Monroe she's not, but, when she's stuffed into the famous costumes, you can squint your eyes and accept her as a Madame Tussaud's replica. Miss Reed also mimics Monroe's voice effectively - until she takes to delivering her Act II songs in a standard Broadway belt.

The production surrounding the star looks as if it suffered a bombing raid during previews. Tom H. John's gloomy scenery, built around a sound-stage motif, is a gutted retread of Robin Wagner's design for Jerry Herman's Hollywood musical, ''Mack and Mabel.'' Joseph G. Aulisi's costumes, Marilyn's excepted, look as if they were picked up at a fire sale. The dance numbers are often thinly populated, and the pit band sounds decimated. The disposable songs, some of them joltingly out of period, also seem to have been radically cut: A few mercifully give up the ghost in less than a minute.

The amateur direction and choreography are attributed to Kenny Ortega; the Playbill also thanks another director, Thommie Walsh. Perhaps someday one of these men or their several dozen collaborators will reveal what they had in mind. ''Marilyn: An American Fable'' is so confused that it never gets around to its heroine's death. If nothing else, it must be the first exploitation of the Monroe legend that even denies necrophiliacs a good time.

[undercoveractor]

Posted: 11/12/15 at 10:46pm

Wow. I'd always wondered. 2 thoughts.

She looks very much like Amanda Lepore. 

This reminds me of STREETCAR! and PLANET OF THE APES from THE SIMPSONS. SONGBIRD! from DEATH BECOMES HER....ETC. ETC.

[BroadwayBryce]

Posted: 11/13/15 at 12:16am

Im sure its a long shot, but does anyone have any connection to where I could find a copy of the script for this? I know it was floating around eBay for some time and have been dying to read it

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 11/13/15 at 2:23am

FInally some sanity in this thread!  LOL  I don't mean to be rude, but I was shocked that so many people were commenting on how great this looked--maybe because I had already read about it in Not Since Carrie, etc.  I am so glad that people linked to this footage, as I've always wanted to see it, and I was not disappointed!  What an amazingly wrong headed awful mess!

Posted: 11/13/15 at 9:09am

Would love to find out what MaryTesta thought about the show!  What a body on Allyson Reed.

It seems the person that posted this on YouTube was one of the many original investors.  So glad he did! Looks like he also posted all the songs from the show too.

[fashionguru_23]

Posted: 11/13/15 at 10:09am

Does anyone have a recording of the audio of the show? I saw one a few years ago, but the track titles weren't matched properly to the tracks themselves.

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 11/13/15 at 10:19am

A poster above said "awful mess". When I hear those 2 words the title "Rachel Lily Rosenbloom" comes to mind. I saw it and to this day I still have no idea what went on during that show. If you were drunk you might have made sense out of it. Anyone who wasn't - good luck.

Posted: 11/13/15 at 10:28am

fashionguru_23 said: "Does anyone have a recording of the audio of the show? I saw one a few years ago, but the track titles weren't matched properly to the tracks themselves.

 

Most of it is on youtube....

 

"

 

[PalJoey]

Posted: 11/13/15 at 10:41am

 

I forgot about the Pink Plumbers.

 

This show was eminently forgettable. 

 

Posted: 11/13/15 at 11:34am

The plumber number was terrible.... I have to pull out Not Since Carrie and see what Mendelbaum has to say about Marilyn!

[madlibrarian]

Posted: 11/13/15 at 12:47pm

After several strangely inert production numbers, they really lost me with that label saying Hollywood oppressed Marilyn with lousy scripts.

Yeah, by those hacks Inge, Miller, Wilder and Diamond.

[songanddanceman2]

Posted: 11/13/15 at 3:23pm

Had this video for a good few years, quite a dull show that also manages to be bonkers.

 

to the person saying about the Marilyn Musical in London, I have that also, cheap and very dull. 

[evic]

Posted: 11/13/15 at 3:34pm

Looked and sounded like a classic FLOP.that must have been painful to sit through.  Alyson always had a nice figure-until she got fat.  She was also a terrific dancer-before she got fat.  Willy's number was a groaner.  Mary was always fat.

[CarlosAlberto]

Posted: 11/13/15 at 4:56pm

evic said: "Looked and sounded like a classic FLOP.that must have been painful to sit through.  Alyson always had a nice figure-until she got fat.  She was also a terrific dancer-before she got fat.  Willy's number was a groaner.  Mary was always fat."

 

Body shaming? Really? How very classy of you.

 

 

[EricMontreal22]

Posted: 11/13/15 at 5:01pm

^  Yeah, charming!

Back to the show, it's also charming that the 11 O'Clock number (the Champagne Bubble Bath) according to that clip was inspired by how much Marilyn loved her booze.  Which is great since her substance abuse is (partly anyway,) what led to her early death.  But of course, in An American Fable she doesn't die, instead walking off with her younger self, happy.

[songanddanceman2]

Posted: 11/13/15 at 5:03pm

evic said: "Looked and sounded like a classic FLOP.that must have been painful to sit through.  Alyson always had a nice figure-until she got fat.  She was also a terrific dancer-before she got fat.  Willy's number was a groaner.  Mary was always fat"

 

Wow real classy