We're fans here of the musical based on Al Capp's comic strip Li'l Abner and elsewhere on this site, you'll find articles that I wrote some time ago about that show as it played on Broadway and also as it was turned into a movie. I consider myself a bit of an expert on it, and have briefly been involved in some aborted attempts to revive it. Amazingly, though it was rather successful when it first played The Great White Way, and it's constantly produced around the country, it has yet to have a full-scale Broadway revival. Gypsy is about to have its seven-thousandth (or so it seems) but Abner has been represented on stages only by an endless stream of regional, college and high school productions.
Its popularity in those venues makes sense. It's a very easy show to mount. The costumes are mainly hillbilly garb and you can do most of them just by rummaging through a few closets or thrift shops. The sets can be pretty simple and cartoony. Most of the songs do not require great voices. The dances just have to be energetic. Most of the roles can be filled by college age performers. In fact, with a little make-up (and it doesn't have to be convincing), they can all be filled by college age performers. Also, the cast is very large and can be just about as large as you want it to be.
A large cast is a liability for a professional production where everyone must be paid but, as a director of such shows once explained to me, it's an asset at the Community College level. Since people aren't being paid or aren't being paid much, you might just cram that stage full of as many bodies as you can. It will be impressive and all those performers will get their friends and family to buy tickets.
But it's never been back to Broadway, though there have been talks and even options. One such attempt I know of was some time ago. Elliott Caplin, brother of Al Capp and manager of some of the Capp estate's affairs, helped me with my articles and it led to a casual friendship by telephone. Soon after, he called to see if I'd be interested in helping revise/update the book for a producer who was trying to arrange a new Broadway production. In ways that I did not fully understand and probably never will, Tony Curtis was somehow involved. I'm not sure if he was a producer or what but the effort seemed to revolve around him, which struck me as very odd.
Mr. Curtis was great in many movies but his total experience on the legit stage, as far as I know, was confined to one disastrous experience starring briefly in the debut of Neil Simon's play, You Oughta Be in Pictures. As the story is told, Simon cast Curtis, who'd never done a play before and never had to really memorize any more lines than was necessary for one day's filming of a movie or TV show. With enormous effort and insecurity, he learned the role in the new play for an outta-town tryout in Los Angeles and did well on opening night. Then Mr. Simon began rewriting (as playwrights always do on a new play) and Curtis couldn't unlearn the old lines and learn the new, at least not as rapidly as was necessary. He wound up exploding in the middle of one performance, unleashing a torrent of vulgar ad-libs, then getting dressed and going home at intermission, leaving a puzzled audience in the hands of an understudy who didn't know the lines, either. Ron Leibman eventually took over the lead and played it in New York.
Elliott Caplin told me that Curtis, despite the above — and also the fact that he's not exactly a singer and this is a musical — would appear in the proposed revival of Li'l Abner. I asked, of course, "In what part?" "Well," he said, "That's what they haven't figured out yet." I'm not sure of all that it takes to get a show up and running on Broadway, but I would think that deciding what role your star will play is high on the list. Elliott continued, "I think they're figuring that he'd play a lot of non-singing cameo roles, like the Mayor or the Newscaster." It all sounded quite unlikely so I told Elliott that if the deal did proceed, of course I was interested, but I'd bet him a thousand dollars it would never happen. Being a smart guy, Elliott declined the wager and then passed away before I could even call him for an "I told you so." (A few years later, I met Tony Curtis, asked him about it and he did not seem to ever have heard of Li'l Abner or, for that matter, Broadway.)
Later on, another producer — one with some actual credits in this area — contacted me about participating in a revival. Again, I was interested and again, the deal fell through. This guy couldn't even get together enough funding and elements to obtain an option. In 1998, the Encores group that mounts "staged readings" (actually, stripped-down productions) at New York's City Center did a four-performance revival which I attended and which was quite wonderful. There was some brief talk that it might morph into a full-scale production — the City Center version of Chicago did and is still running — but Abner Yokum wasn't so fortunate.
Opening this week in Los Angeles is another stripped-down production. The Reprise! group, which stages wonderful shows up at U.C.L.A., is doing Li'l Abner with a preview performance on February 5 and a grand opening on the sixth. The show runs through February 17 and stars Eric Martsolf as Abner, Brandi Burkhardt as Daisy Mae, Michael Kostroff as Marryin' Sam, Cathy Rigby as Mammy Yokum (which probably means Mammy will be turning backflips), Robert Towers as Pappy Yokum and Fred Willard (!) as General Bullmoose. Fred Willard is an intriguing choice for that role and I'll bet Kostroff will be superb.
I have nothing to do with this production other than helping its publicists with a little history, but I'll be there and all indicators are that it'll do the show justice. Here's a link to an article with a full cast list and some photos. I believe tickets are becoming scarce but if you'd like to try and score a few, this link should do it. If you'd like to wait until I see the show and post a review, that's of course your right but don't be surprised if the entire run is sold out by then.