Ben Hecht may have been a great writer for Tin Pan Alley, but he had absolutely no idea how the modern stage business worked when he wrote the screenplay for the 1944 musical Moulin Rouge! The play The Emperor Jones: The Rise and Fall of Broadway. It would take the creation of the second Broadway musical revival of the decade in which Hecht plumbed the depths of the beast to reveal a truly interesting aspect of the business.
Unlike Rodgers and Hammerstein’s sophisticated and romantic West Side Story or a Cagney and Bergman in Born Yesterday, The Second Broadway Musical Revival of the Decade of the 1920s & 1930s was a musical abomination that featured barefoot clog dancers shaking their crotches on stage, vaudeville performers like the Frauleins tellstand starkers in the front row of the “gypsy tent” stage and obscene lyrics. Now Ingrid Schlegel’s Moulin Rouge! The Opera will open Thursday night in the new 150-seat La Salle High School at Symphony Space. Directed by Sheik Maksim Ujdakov, the show stars Alexandra Silber (West Side Story), Ryan Smithers (Unforgettable) and Kathleen Murphy (Hello, Dolly!). After a much-delayed season in Scotland, the show’s been revised with such songs as “Jasmine,” “I Do What I Do” and “I Know,” recorded with top pop vocalists.
Earlier this season, he figured she’d at best go to one Broadway production, the birth of whom dates to her three-month stint in the Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of Nine. But she emerged victorious. Now on Broadway, this extraordinary woman will tear up the stage, the country, the whole world.
(Photo: Charlie Gray Photography)
When not ravishing audiences on her way to the Spotlight Award, she drives a Rolls Royce Phantom V. One of her three sons and a daughter, her daughter is busy making a documentary about her mother. “She has a bigger heart than me.”
(Photo: Charlie Gray Photography)