It's a Bird…It's a Plane…It's Superman! — a Broadway musical based on you-know-who — opened on March 29, 1966 at the Alvin Theater in New York. As shows go, it seemed to have everything necessary. It was based on a popular property and at the time, America seemed hungry for that kind of thing. The Batman TV show had debuted only two months earlier and it was still an immense fad, with "POW! ZAP! BAM!" appearing everywhere you looked. But there were more reasons beyond that to figure Superman's musical would be as powerful and invulnerable as its title character.
There were songs by Lee Adams and Charles Strouse, who had provided the scores for Golden Boy and Bye Bye Birdie, so they kinda knew what they were doing. Its producer-director, Harold Prince, was one of the top producers in Manhattan and he was beginning to enjoy similar success as a director. The cast was strong — Tony nominations would go to three of its actors, including Jack Cassidy who had top billing and who was a pretty big star at the time, hitting all the talk shows to plug his new gig. All but one of the reviews were positive. Some were raves and the only negative one — from Douglas Watts in The New York Post — sounded pretty elitist. Mr. Watts admitted he had no fondness or even knowledge of Superman in any form…and who's going to listen to someone like that? So all in all, it sounded like a hit.
Not so. The show closed the following June 16 and posted a total loss of its investor's money. At $600,000 it was then one of the most expensive musicals ever produced, and therefore its biggest flop.
I didn't see the show in New York, of course, but was always curious as to wha' happened? How could a show with so much going for it not run longer than it did? Last night, I saw a concert-style production of the show…and while it's not utterly fair to judge the material by a version done with no sets, few costumes and sparse rehearsals, I think I came to the following conclusion: It isn't a very good show.
Which is not to say I didn't have a good time last night. This was another production of the Musical Theater Guild, which is a rep company of gifted performers that puts on these down-'n'-dirty staged readings as they did recently with Li'l Abner and Merrily We Roll Along The cast, toplined by Damon Kirsche (who did such a fine job playing Abner for them), worked wonders with what I came to feel was not particularly bulletproof material.
You ever see a production of this show? You might have, because it's had a much longer life in terms of local groups putting it up than is usual with a play that only lasted 129 performances on Broadway. Usually only something Sondheim can close that quickly and still be seen again…and then there was Mack and Mabel, which keeps coming back because people love the Jerry Herman score. Superman doesn't have a great score. There's only one song — "You've Got Possibilities" — which had any life outside of the show, and the book is quite silly. Like a lot of adaptations of comic books into other forms, the authors seem to have struggled with whether they respected the underlying material or felt they could do naught but mock it. The storyline has something to do with a gossip columnist (the role Cassidy played on Broadway) trying to expose Superman's secret identity…and with a mad scientist who, having been denied a Nobel Peace Prize he thought he'd earned, decides to use psychiatric scheming to bring down Superman's confidence and therefore destroy his powers. In just a minute or so of psychobabble, Superman is convinced he can't fly and he no longer does…until at the end, he has to in order to rescue Lois Lane. It all makes for a pretty campy, unsatisfying Man of Steel.
(Another problem the storyline has: At the end, everything is pretty much the way it was at the beginning, and that's never good. Just looking at the two big hit musicals based on comic strips, you have Li'l Abner, which ends with Abner marrying Daisy Mae, and Annie — also with an Adams/Strouse score — which ends with Annie getting a family and no longer being the Little Orphan. But at the close of Superman, we're right back where we started: No one knows Clark is Superman, Lois is still in a frustrating love affair with the guy in blue, etc. Can you name another hit musical where the lives of the protagonists are unaltered at the final curtain? I can't.)
Seems to me this show is performed occasionally these days because people love the character and a musical based on him looks like it'll be fun to stage, fun to see. The version last night was fun to see but only because the cast was having a good time, playing broad and not worrying too much if they mucked with the material and ad-libbed. I was sitting behind my friend Marv Wolfman, who actually saw the original in '66, and he said he had a very good time last night, but not because of the show itself. That's a pretty good summation of the evening.
One last thing I'll mention. An article I read some time ago said that the original show lost that $600,000 for one investor but didn't say who that investor was. I've always wondered if it was either DC Comics or one of the firm's owners at the time. DC funded some of the adaptations of its properties, such as the George Reeves Superman TV show so it would not have been uncharacteristic for them to put up the bucks. I asked Irwin Donenfeld, whose father founded the company and he said no…but Irwin told me a number of things that I decided were not true, and he might not have known. This isn't an obsessive mystery with me but it's something that arouses my Comic Historian curiosity. DC was sold not long after and maybe the sale was motivated in part by someone's desire to replenish their personal fortune after taking a bath on Broadway. Might have happened that way.