A little piece of my New York is coming to Tameside. 42nd Street, the 1980 Tony Award winner for Best Musical as well as 1984 Olivier Award winner for Best Musical, will be playing at the Tameside Hippodrome from Tuesday, March 11th through Saturday, March 15th.
42nd Street, for those of you who have not been to New York, is a major crosstown street in New York City, known for its theatres, especially where it intersects with Broadway at Times Square.
The Broadway musical adapted from the 1933 movie of the same name is the story of a naive young actress named Peggy Sawyer who arrives in New York to audition for the new Julian Marsh extravaganza set to open, ironically, on Broadway, starring aging leading lady Dorothy Brock. Leading lady injures foot, just-off-the-bus chorus girl takes over role after pep talk from director Marsh telling her "You're going out there a youngster, but you've got to come back a star!" And of course she does. Set in the Depression and about the Depression, it's the classic, fast-paced backstage musical chockablock with wonderful tunes, "Lullaby of Broadway", "Shuffle Off to Buffalo", "We're in the Money", and "42nd Street" to name just a few. It's been a long time since I've seen either the movie or the Broadway production but I remember thinking that the stage adaptation was a little more light-hearted than the movie which went more into depth about the unglamorized tough realities of backstage life and the hardships of the Depression. Both are wonderful in their own way. What I loved is that Gower Champion, who choreographed the original Broadway production, filled the stage with spectacular dance routines a la Busby Berkeley. 42nd Street (the movie) had been choreographer Berkeley's first major movie work. He later went on to choreograph three other films dealing with staging musicals during the Depression, Footlight Parade, Gold Diggers of 1933 and Gold Diggers of 1934, becoming famous for his innovative kaleidoscope of dancing girls forming abstract designs and his use of overhead camera shots, all of which went far beyond conventional boundaries of the time. Of course, this could not be literally recreated on stage, however, if I remember correctly, Champion was able to recreate the essence of the overhead camera shots with the use of mirrors. A sad caveat is that the show ran for 9 years (1980 to 1989), almost 3,500 performances, and Champion never lived to see any of it. During the show's tryouts in Washington, DC and after numerous curtain calls on opening night, producer David Merrick came out and stunned the cast and audience announcing that Champion had died earlier in the day of a rare blood cancer.
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