‘TOOTSIE’ POP?
Classic comedy film finally becoming a musical
AFTER years of delays, lawsuits and changes to the creative team, “Tootsie” is back on its high heels.
Producers Scott Sanders and Carol Fineman, whose revival of “The Color Purple” was one of the high points of last season, are holding an invitation-only reading of the show June 8 at the New 42nd Street Studios, as BroadwayWorld.com reported this week.
Scott Ellis is now the director, and David Yazbek has written the score for the show, based on the hit 1982 movie. Yazbek’s musical “The Band’s Visit” won rave reviews off-Broadway, and is expected to reopen on Broadway next season.
Book writer Robert Horn has just a couple of Broadway credits — “13” and one of Dame Edna’s shows — but he’s doctored some scripts, and buzz around Shubert Alley is that he’s done a solid job on “Tootsie.”
No word on casting for the reading, but a Broadway production will probably need a star. Tony nominee Andy
Karl of “Groundhog Day” springs to mind, as do Neil Patrick Harris, Andrew Rannells, Christian Borle and Jonathan Groff. Or maybe Patrick Wilson, who starred in Yazbek’s “The Full Monty.”
Larry Gelbart, who cowrote the movie, tried for years to turn it into a stage musical. But a big stumbling block was Dustin Hoffman, who played Michael Dorsey, the struggling actor who slips on a wig and falsies to boost his career. Hoffman suggested the title because his mother called him “tootsie” when he was a kid. His contract gave him control of the title character.
Hoffman and Gelbart clashed during the making of the movie, prompting Gelbart to quip, “Never work with an Oscar winner shorter than the statue.”
Hoffman blocked Gelbart from using the name Tootsie for the musical. After Gelbart died in 2009, Sanders acquired the stage rights, and he went after everyone from Barry Manilow to
Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (“Dear Evan Hansen”) be- fore hiring Yazbek to write the score. He also nailed down the rights to the title of the show, which at one point was called “Dollface.”
Here’s hoping there’s a scene in which Michael Dorsey has to play a tomato in a TV commercial — “a juicy, sexy, beefsteak tomato” — because, as Dorsey says, “Nobody does vegetables like me.”
And I’m also hoping for a song titled “How Do You Feel About Cleveland?” A FTER
reading my column about the upcoming Broadway revival of Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women,”
Justin Caldwell, the head of books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s, e-mailed to say there will be an auction on June 13 of Albee first editions inscribed to his mother, Frances Cotter Albee.
She was the inspiration for “Three Tall Women.”
Albee had a contentious relationship with her, but he always inscribed his plays with affection.
“For mother, once more with love, to someone who understands,” he wrote on the title page to “A Delicate Balance” in 1966.
The highlight of the collection is an early script of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ?” that Albee probably used during one of its first readings in 1962. It’s not inscribed but has small changes and edits in his hand. The lot is expected to go for $5,000 to $7,000.