As I've mentioned before on this site (here and here and here) a group called the Musical Theatre Guild does staged readings of great old musicals several times a year and does a very fine job with them. These are not easy to do. There are no sets, a bit of basic costuming and very little time for rehearsals…all to present a show that was designed to be presented with vastly more budget and prep time. That they can do it at all is impressive…and sometimes, the results are just as entertaining as a more elaborate, polished version would have been.
Last night, MTG presented one of my favorite shows, Li'l Abner. The Alex Theater was packed with my friends and we all seemed to enjoy the show tremendously. They did it without sets (not even a statue of Jubilation T. Cornpone) and a cast of 21, which is about twelve actors shy of the Broadway configuration. Still, it worked just fine. Damon Kirsche was great in the title role, Melissa Fahn was an adorable Daisy Mae, Joe Hart stopped the show as Marryin' Sam and then Michael Kostroff stopped it again as General Bullmoose. Eydie Alyson was a terrific Mammy Yokum and…well, take it from me: Everyone was good. It's really a funny show and the cast got darn near every laugh in the script by Norman Panama and Melvin Frank. (If you'd like to read up on the history of the show, I wrote about it here and about the movie version here.)
This is a show that needs to be revived for Broadway. A few years ago, I was talking about this with Elliott Caplin, who was Al Capp's brother and the manager of his estate. There was a deal looming to bring the show back — it's never had a real revival — and I was going to be involved in revamping the material. Elliott warned me that the deal might fall through and he knew this because it was about the eleventh deal in twenty years to revive the show and they'd all fallen through. I don't recall if this one fell apart before or after Elliott died but it definitely fell apart. Some day though, someone will do it and I sure hope they do it right. They could have learned a lot about how to do that by seeing what the Musical Theater Guild did last night.
There are two more performances, by the way. One is April 30 at the Scherr Forum in Thousand Oaks. The other is May 8 at the Carpenter Center in Long Beach. I'm almost tempted to go again.