IT SEEMED LIKE A SURE-FIRE IDEA AT THE TIME: REWORKING THE INFECTIOUS '80S MOVIE MUSICAL

'FOOTLOOSE' FOR THE NEW YORK STAGE. BUT A LOT CAN HAPPEN ON THE WAY TO OPENING NIGHT.

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Title:�� Sweating Bullets Over Broadway

Summary:���� Cohen discusses the making of the New York stage production of the 80's hit movie musical "Footloose." Information about where the stars of the movie version are now is presented.mation about where the stars of the movie version are now is presented.

Source:� Us

Date:� 01/01/1999

Citation Information:� ISSN: 0147-510X; No. ; p. 45

Author:� Mark Francis Cohen

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TALK ABOUT YOUR SIX DEGREES OF KEVIN BACON. IT'S 12:30 P.M. ON a September afternoon in Washington, D.C., and throughout the Opera House theater at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, ushers are dressed in black bow tie, black cummerbund, black pants and cranberry red jacket - the very outfit that Bacon wore in the climactic scene of 1984's Footloose, the movie that made him a star. Backstage, actor Jeremy Kushnier is getting into character for the role of Ren McCormack, the cocky teen-ager Bacon played in that wildly successful but undeniably goofy film about a fictional Midwestern town that has outlawed dancing.

Bacon himself, though, is absent from the premises, as are his Footloose co-stars John Lithgow, Dianne Wiest and Lori Singer. This is, after all, Footloose the Broadway-bound musical - the last Sunday-matinee performance before the show leaves the capital for its highly hyped debut in New York.

As the audience streams in, filling the 2,200-seat house to near capacity, the mood is upbeat but tense. Tomorrow morning the show will pack up and move to Broadway, and a considerable amount of theatrical glory - not to mention a few dozen jobs and $6.5 million of the producers' money - hangs in the balance.

At 1:30 p.m., the curtain rises on a scene of a hoppin' Chicago dance club, where Ren announces to the rest of the company that he's moving to Bomont. As soon as he says it, the music stops and everyone onstage cries, "Bomont? Where the hell is Bomont?"

Within minutes, it's obvious that the Kennedy Center audience is having a blast. They guffaw as Kushnier, whose Ren will take him to Broadway for the first time, bumbles around on roller skates. A So-ish man in an orchestra seat stomps his foot as Stacy Francis, playing the rambunctious Rusty, belts out "Let's Hear It for the Boy." After the finale, in which the town that has forbidden dancing finally throws a dance, the audience rises for an ovation. A middle-aged couple are standing in their row wearing smiles.

She: "It was excellent!"

He: "I was very surprised."

She: "It took me back to a time that was fun!Absolute fun!"

He: "Yeah. I think it will do well on Broadway"

So do a lot of other people. The advance ticket sales stand at a substantial $5 million. And with Broadway flourishing, there has rarely been a more propitious time to open a show. Considering that nearly three weeks of previews are scheduled to start at the Richard Rodgers Theater in just II days, Footloose seems to be peaking at just the right moment.

But of course, things are not always what they seem, especially in the theater. The fact is that the play has problems. The story has been switched from the i98os to the I99os. While the movie focused on Ren's struggle to win over the anti-dancing minister, Reverend Moore, the play hinges on the emotional depth of Moore. Because the script fails to explain fully the minister's stoic nature, his 11thhour transformation into an understanding, pro-dancing dad is hard to believe.

Composer Tom Snow, actors Jennifer Laura Thompson and Jeremy Kushnier, and writer Dean Pitchford in New York (from left)

CUTTING LOOSE: Kevin Bacon, the original Ren, meets with Broadway cast members Tom Plotkin and Stacy Francis backstage at New York's Richard Rodgers Theater in October.

When Footloose began its monthlong run in Washington, the critics responded unkindly "The rousing first number in Footloose explodes like a cork from a shaken champagne bottle," reported The Washington Post. "But after that first fizzy burst, the show goes flat." Said Variety: "The thin production needs some quick-fire manipulation."

"I'm not worried about the critics," says Lawrence J. Wilker, an associate producer of the show and the president of the Kennedy Center. "Critics are looking for deeper meaning, but this is fun and entertaining, and that's what people want."

Perhaps. Yet for the past three weeks those same producers, together with director Walter Bobbie and choreographer A.C. Ciulla, have been ordering up changes. "The criticisms might have been our first wake-up call," says 28-year-old Jennifer Laura Thompson, who plays Ariel, the Reverend's feisty daughter. "It was a little scary to hear it wasn't as great as we thought it was." One week into the Washington run, veteran stage actor Martin Vidnovic, who plays the minister, is dropped from the cast and replaced by Stephen Lee Anderson, an understudy "The official line was that it was mutual," Vidnovic says, "but I didn't see it coming."

As Anderson is learning his part, much of the staging is reconceived to quicken Act 2. The young cast must learn entirely new scenes and dialogue. Many of the shows 16 songs, all but four of which were composed by songwriter Tom Snow, are being rewritten or dropped. Ciulla is working on some new moves for the dancers. Revisions of this sort are business as usual. "The whole reason to do a show out of town is to make those changes," says Broadway producer Margo Lion. But despite the advance sales, the alterations to Footloose are creating not anticipation for a well-honed show but something else entirely: bad buzz. Why, some wonder, are the producers wrenching it from its quaint and comfy '8os setting? "The music is very '8os," says Kenny Loggins, who sang the title song for the movie soundtrack but is not involved in the musical. A '90s Footloose, Loggins adds, is something his two teen-age sons would probably "hate." Meanwhile, Time lists Footloose as one of the Iz things it is most looking forward to making fun of.

As if that weren't enough, Footloose is trying to buck the trend of hit movies' failing to make a successful transition to Broadway.

True, Disney has had success with Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King But Disney cartoons are already formulated as musical theater, and the company's pockets are deep. Meanwhile, live musical adaptations of Carrie, The Goodbye Girl, The Red Shoes, Big High Society and Victor/Victoria have been some of the biggest flops in recent Broadway history (See "Show Business, "page 48.)

For his part, Frank Rich, former chief theater critic for The New York Times and author of Hot Seat. Theater Criticism for "The New York Times,"1980--1993, doesn't think the project's previous life as a movie really matters. "Footloose is going to sink or swim on the basis of the quality of the show," he says. "It's just too long ago and too unimportant a movie. It's not as if it's an adaptation of Gone Eth the Wind."

Time will tell. But time is running short. The morning after Footloose closes in Washington, Ii trucks show up to take the scenery to Broadway However, the scenery does not fit, causing a four-dav lag. When the producers announce a delay in the start of previews, The New York Post insists that Footloose "is in such disarray that sources say the show has been postponed indefinitely"

EXACTLY HOW DID THE FOLKS behind Footloose arrive at this Maalox moment?

In a way the show's journey to Broadway began in 1979, when Dean Pitchford read a newspaper account of a small town in Oklahoma that had made dancing illegal. Pitchford, then a young actor, became intrigued by the story, which in a broad way mirrored his own life. At age 15, he had moved from Hawaii to Kansas City, Mo., and he found the heartland stifling.

Pitchford spun the story of the dancephobic Oklahoma town into a screenplay, and in I984, Paramount released the movie Footloose. Despite mostly tepid reviews, it grossed more than $8o million. What made the movie truly memorable was the music. The Footloose soundtrack, offering such songs as "Holding Out for a Hero," "Dancing in the Sheets," `Almost Paradise" and "Let's Hear It for the Boy," sold more than 8 million copies.

Predictably, Paramount wanted to milk the Footloose phenomenon. It suggested that Pitchford write Footloose II - or a weekly television series based on the movie. Pitchford says he was too burned out to consider a sequel, and he was appalled by the notion of a TV show: "I said, `What, Ren's going to go to a new town every week and throw a dance?"'

But the idea of a second coming for Footloose wouldn't go away. In 1988, Carole Schwartz, the wife of composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz (Godspell, Pippin), suggested that Pitchfordwrite a stage version of his hit movie that could be sold to highschool and amateur theater companies. Pitchford again demurred. "I was on to new projects," he says, "and it was like I'd been there and done that."

Finally, in I994, with Schwartz still nudging him, Pitchford began retooling the Footloose screenplay He finished his stage adaptation in I994, and the Rodgers and Hammerstein Library, which leases musicals to theater groups, added the show to its catalog.

At about the same time, executives at Madison Square Garden in New York - the people who present gaudy, special-effectsdriven stage versions of A Christmas Carol and The Wizard of Oz each year - were trolling for another extravaganza. Footloose seemed a natural choice for the familyoriented audiences the executives wanted, and in the spring of I995, a group of producers assembled a reading of Pitchford's script. The producers liked what they saw and took an option on the script. Their plan was to add sparks, smoke and laser beams - to make Footloose a true "arena show," as opposed to a more story-driven, Broadwaystyle production. Pitchford was delighted. The plan, he says, "seemed to me to skirt the life-or-death issues that beset a Broadway opening - the thought of not having to live or die on the [critics'] reaction."

Still, not everyone shared Pitchford's enthusiasm. Director Bobbie, who in I996 staged the successful Broadway revival of Chicago, hoped to take the show to Broadway where both the prestige and profits were potentially greater. "I thought this was as pure and simple as a great fable," he says. "For me, the story was not about the law in this town or about dancing. It was about genuinely decent people in terrible conflict."

In early 1996, Bobbie and Pitchford spent two months rewriting the script. They made a special effort not to demonize the townspeople who were trying to ban dancing. "We were not about to satirize, put down or make fun of the heartland," Bobbie says. "We treated all people in the town with respect and dignity" In June I997, after Bobbie and Pitchford staged a workshop production, the producers agreed that the show was worthy of Broadway. Pitchford, Bobbie, Ciulla and company were headed for the big time.

SEPT. 22, I998. IT IS NOW TWO DAYS INTO THE 11-day hiatus between the show's Kennedy

Center run and its first Broadway performance. At the 3-G rehearsal studio in Midtown Manhattan, the cast is working through additions to the finale. Originally, the closing dance number, "Footloose," was three minutes long. Now it is a full six minutes, and the town's parents are in the midst of learning a version of the macarena.


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WHERE ARE THEY NOW???

Kushnier is rehearsing "Mama Says," a new song for the stage show. The actor, who has short frosted-blond hair and big blue eyes, is arguably the perfect choice for the role of Ren, though he doesn't resemble Bacon. As a child growing up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Kushnier was so in love with the Footloose soundtrack that he wore his cassette out within a few weeks and asked his mother to buy him a new one. So, in May I997, when the Toronto-based actor received a call from his agent telling him to catch a red-eye bus to New York to audition for the lead in the workshop version of Footloose, Kushnier was thrilled. "I knew I could never be Kevin Bacon," he recalls. "What I wanted to do was go in there and show them what the part should be. And I guess they liked that."

By the time they cast Kushnier, Bobbie and Pitchford had already brought back Snow to write additional songs for the show and recruited Ciulla to do the choreography As a teen-ager growing up in Bricktown, NJ., Ciulla was so inspired by the movie Footloose that he moved to New York to become a dancer. For his choreography audition, he had created an elaborate routine to accompany "Let's Hear It for the Boy" When Bobbie and the producers politely thanked him for his time, Ciulla thought he had blown the audition, and he cried for half an hour. But only a couple of hours later they called him back, and he was hired. "They wanted young, fresh, new moves that hadn't been seen before on the Broadway stage," says Ciulla. "I couldn't believe I got it."

After more than a year together, there is a real feeling of family among the young cast, even though it's perhaps not the type of family that Reverend Moore would endorse. Kushnier and Catherine Cox, who plays Ren's mother, Ethel, have developed a pre-show routine that has been going on since the first preview in Washington. "Just before the curtain goes up," says Kushnier, "Catherine yells, `Son?' I say, `What?' She says, `Don't f--- up.' Then I reply, `Thanks, Mom.' The rest of the cast loves it. It's become a superstition."

OCT. 2,1998. THE MIDTOWN REHEARSAL SPACE is crowded with new faces. The choreography in the first scene of Act 2 is being reworked. But overseeing the changes, surprisingly, is Jeff Calhoun, who directed and choreographed the I994 Broadway revival of Grease. As Bobbie and Ciulla watch from across the room, Calhoun stands on a chair, waving his arms as the dancers waltz to country music. The official word is that Calhoun is here just to "button" a few dance routines - that is, adjust and tighten numbers so they end sharply and earn applause. Yet the changes seem extensive, and the actors appear anxious. "I get nervous I won't remember my lines," says Kushnier. "They've been making a lot of changes, and we have to take them in really quickly We don't have a lot of time, and a couple of changes are really drastic."

OCT. 21, I998. FOOTLOOSE OPENS TOMORROW night, and Kushnier, sporting a fresh haircut and a Ren-like black tank top, looks a lot less relaxed then he did a few weeks ago. Sitting in a Dean & Deluca coffee bar across from the theater, he intermittently raps his knuckles against the back of his chair and says "Knock on wood" as he talks about his first Broadway opening.

"I rented a limousine for my family," Kushnier says. "They're flying in from Winnipeg, and they're excited."The relatively cozy Richard Rodgers Theater, which Footloose now occupies, is much better suited to the production than was the massive Kennedy Center, he says. " `Let's Hear It for the Boy' is a really big dance number," he notes, "and the dancers are working their asses off, and Stacy is singing her ass off In Washington, we got nice applause, but we were like, `We don't get it. The audience should be going crazy at the end of it.' Here they do. As big as our show is, it really needs an intimate atmosphere."

Ciulla agrees - and emphasizes that whatever changes Calhoun made to the production have now been excised. "He left after the first preview," says Ciulla. "All his work is gone now. It's all mine again. He took me in some different directions, but none of it is his choreography When they put his prom on, the audience applauded. When they put mine on, there were standing ovations."

OCT. 23, 1998. THE NEW YORK TIMES REFERS to Footloose as the "flavorless marshmallow of a musical that opened last night at the Richard Rodgers Theater." Its critic goes on to say, "There have certainly been worse musicals on Broadway yet it's hard to think of one so totally unaffecting." Entertainment Weekly gives the show a D+. And the New York Daily News' headline reads, `FOOTLOOSE LANDS WITH A THUD ON BROADWAY.

BUT WHERE THERE IS LIFE, THERE IS HOPE. At the opening-night party at the Marriott Marquis hotel, Kushnier, Bobbie, Pitchford and Ciulla toast one another and smile through the critical jeers. Then, three days later, syndicated columnist Liz Smith weighs in with a comment that gladdens the cast's heart. "The show is magic," she raves, "a colorful bundle of joy" Could things be turning around? An item in the theater section of the Nov. 6 New York Times suggests it is possible. "They're doing fantastic," said Ronald Lee, president of Group Sales Box Office, a ticket service. "It's encouraging."

Sales have been impressive, with nearly full houses every night. But although the holiday season should only help business, there are rumors that the show will close as soon as the annual January slump sets in. If that's true, the show won't come close to breaking even. To earn back its initial investment, the stage version of Footloose would have to run for nearly two years.

Whatever happens, the man who gave birth to Footloose nearly zo years ago claims to be delighted. "I can't say I honestly care about the critics' reactions," Pitchford maintains. "I have enough critics in my head. The show is what I wanted." The whole nerveracking experience, he says, has him "verging on ecstasy"

HITS misses

'THE LION KING' The Film: Disney's 1994 animated feature won two Oscars and became the highest-grossing picture in the company's history, earning $6oo million worldwide. The Broadway Musical: Director Julie Taymor's innovative vision - with African masks and life-size puppets - earned the show a Tony Award for best musical. At $ Ii million, it is the most expensive musical ever staged and is still playing to sold-out houses.

'BIG' The Film: Tom Hanks got his first best-actor nod for his role as an overgrown kid in this I988 surprise hit, which grossed $r3 million. The Broadway Musical: The show ran for six months and lost $io million. "We say it jokingly, but the show just got too big" said director Eric Schaeffer, who restaged the work for a road tour.

`VICTOR/VICTORIA' The Film: This 1982 hit garnered multiple Academy Award nominations and won for best original song score. Cost: $i8.5 million. Gross: $z4 million. The Broadway Musical:Julie Andrews refused her 1996 Tony nomination, saying that she'd rather stand with the "egregiously overlooked" cast and crew of the production than accept the award. Even without the Tony, the show, which cost $8.5 million, ran for 21 months.

'CARRIE' The Film: Sissy Spacek won an Oscar nomination for her role as a troubled teen-ager taunted by her peers in the 1976 Brian De Palma classic. Budget: $3 million. Gross: $36 million. The Broadway Musical: Closed after five performances, losing its entire $8 million investment. Rocco Landesman, president of Jujamcyn Theaters, which invested in and provided a house for the show, declared in I988, "This is the biggest flop in the history of the theater, going all the way back to Aristophanes."

Mark Francis Cohen is a New York-based journalist.

Copyright US Magazine Company Jan 1999