The Daily Telegraph

The curious tale of a Broadway disaster

As a new staging of Fellini’s ‘La Strada’ opens, Tristram Fane Saunders explains why Lionel Bart’s 1969 version folded after just one night

- La Strada, with original music by Benji Bower, is at The Other Palace, London SW1, until July 8. Tickets: 0844 264 2121; otherpalac­e.co.uk

Andrew Lloyd Webber must be feeling lucky. This week, a new musical adaptation of La Strada opens at his theatre in central London. It’s a brave move. The last time Federico Fellini’s 1954 film was turned into a musical, it was one of the most catastroph­ic flops in the history of showbusine­ss.

The original La Strada opened at the Lunt-fontanne Theatre on Broadway on December 15 1969, and closed after a single night. The critics, unsurprisi­ngly, tore it to pieces. “The book is weak, and the music and lyrics by Lionel Bart are undistingu­ished to the point of Muzak-like oblivion,” sneered Clive Barnes of The New York

Times. It lost $650,000, the equivalent of almost £4.5 million today.

Yet the production had everything going for it. It was based on an Oscarwinni­ng masterpiec­e, a tragic tale that begins with a girl being taken away from her home by a circus strongman to be trained as a clown, and ends with her and her sweetheart dead. The stage version was directed by the great Alan Schneider. It had dances created by the visionary choreograp­her Alvin Ailey and, best of all, songs by Bart who was responsibl­e for the greatest British musical of the decade, Oliver!

So why was it such a monumental failure? One problem was the subject matter. Fellini’s dark drama – all murder, abandonmen­t and weeping clowns – was a world away from the gentle comedies such as She Loves

Me and My Fair Lady that were filling Broadway theatres at the time.

“La Strada is certainly not a musical in the usual sense of the word, which is an abbreviati­on for musical comedy,” said Barnes. To him, it seemed more like a particular­ly grim opera by Benjamin Britten.

If La Strada was too bleak for Broadway, that sadness came partly from Bart, whose fragile state was the real reason for its failure. It was written at the composer’s lowest ebb. The success of Oliver! in the West End in 1960 had made him famous, but critics were whispering that the painter’s son from Stepney was a one-hit wonder.

He was determined to prove them wrong. Two follow-ups, Blitz! and Maggie May, performed respectabl­y, but the great success he was hoping for eluded him. In 1965, despite the advice of friends, Bart sold the rights for Oliver! to fund a new musical about Robin Hood. Sadly, Twang!!, starring Ronnie Corbett and Barbara Windsor, met with critical derision, closed early and lost Bart his fortune.

By the time he began work on

La Strada, he was a shadow of his former self. “It came at a very difficult time in his life,” says Elliot Davis, the screenwrit­er of Consider Yourself, a forthcomin­g film about the composer starring Geoffrey Rush as Bart.

“It’s very difficult to focus if you’re in the depths of creative oblivion, especially with the problems Lionel had, which are very well documented – the drink, and drugs, too, at that point. He would just disappear. He called it ‘doing an ostrich’. You know? Sticking his head in the sand.”

Bart certainly did an ostrich in the run-up to La Strada. He was absent during rehearsals, having fled New York for London. Just a few weeks after the show opened, Bart was arrested for driving his Bentley around Piccadilly Circus the wrong way, while drunk.

“Do you know what they found in the car that day? A black doctor’s bag,” his friend, the musician and comedian Jon Gorman, would later recall. “And on the side in gold lettering it says ‘Bart’s Hospital’. It was full of drugs: thousands of pills, half [an] ounce of coke, [the] whole variety.”

With the composer out of the country, La Strada’s producers began making radical changes. The actor playing Zampanò the strongman was changed. The score was also radically reshaped. On October 20, Bart sent a cable complainin­g that the second act had been rewritten without his knowledge. “Have received no reports last three weeks,” he wrote. He asked for “daily communicat­ion giving progress” and threatened “retaliatio­n” if they failed to comply. By the time the critics arrived for opening night, only three of Bart’s songs were left.

To be fair, he hadn’t made things easy for his colleagues. “I like to leave holes in my songs,” he once said, but La Strada was more hole than song. He had failed to produce a finished “book” (the spoken dialogue), so extra writers were brought in, credited with “additional music and lyrics” on a slip coyly tucked into the programme.

Bart’s writing style meant he couldn’t work alone. “Songs might not have been written down yet, because Lionel never wrote music

– he couldn’t read music at all,” says Davis. The composer would dictate to others, either playing the piano or just singing the different parts. “Some days there might just be a few snippets, because he wasn’t in the mood. He’d say, ‘We’ll finish it tomorrow, love!’ And then he’d disappear off on a bender.”

Davis worked with Bart in the Nineties, by which time the composer was sober and happy, but no less unreliable. “I never saw anything but total love and joy working with him,” says Davis. “He would walk around Hyde Park and sing. I’d follow him with a tape recorder, write down what I heard, and play it back to him. Then he’d say, ‘Not that chord, the other one – make it darker!’” In this more cautious age, with the West End and Broadway more concerned about “safe” proposals than ever, it’s hard to imagine them taking a risk on a volatile figure like Bart.

La Strada may have been a flop, but one cast member went on to brighter things. “In a different show, the birdlike and croaky Bernadette Peters would have become a star overnight,” wrote Clive Barnes. He was right. Peters would go on to win two Tony Awards and a Golden Globe, as well as starring in musical films including

Annie and Disney’s Anastasia. Gelsomina, La Strada’s childish clown, was her first major Broadway role. “People [would] say, ‘You really should go into a Broadway show. This should be good and it has all these people.’ I didn’t know a lot at that time,” she said in 2015. “I learnt certain things – like, if the pages are blank, they usually stay blank. Don’t go in the show when the script’s pages are blank – because the words may not show up. And then you find out Lionel Bart, oh God, Lionel Bart has a heroin addiction! ‘Poor thing, he’s not going to be here.’ You learn things.”

At the time of his death in 1999, Bart was planning a revival of La

Strada. Something about this tale of a sad, hopeless circus act resonated with Bart. To his biographer­s David and Caroline Stafford, “The enduring image [of La Strada] is that of the strongman and the idiot girl and their dogged compulsion to make a show.” Five decades on, that dogged compulsion is what remains: the drive of a broken man trying to create the best show he can.

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 ??  ?? Lionel Bart in the Fifties, left, and with Georgia Brown, who played Nancy in Oliver!, below. The theatre on Broadway, right, where the original La Strada opened and closed in 1969
Lionel Bart in the Fifties, left, and with Georgia Brown, who played Nancy in Oliver!, below. The theatre on Broadway, right, where the original La Strada opened and closed in 1969

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