As I mentioned back here, a musical comedy called It's a Bird, It's a Plane It's Superman debuted on Broadway in 1966 and ran for a disappointing 129 performances. Still, the show has had a pretty long afterlife for something that closed so quickly on the Great White Way. The fame of the title character seems to have a lot to do with that…and the fact that it's ideally suited for college and community theater groups. The cast is mostly young. It doesn't require skilled choreography. The sets and costumes can be done on the cheap, especially by making it all very comic-bookish. The biggest challenge in staging comes if you actually try to fly your star around the stage, and there are ingenious ways to avoid that.
Recently, the Dallas Theater Center staged a new, highly-publicized "revisal" with an amended book by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa. I didn't see it but the reviews were generally good and suggest a possible new life for the show. Here's another backstage video from the production, which just closed…
And while we're at it, here's an interview with the show's composer, Charles Strouse…