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Anyone
who's ever met me knows that my biggest
directing credit has been a production of
Damn Yankees which starred Van Johnson
and Bobby Van. (A sad footnote--it was Bobby
Van's last stage appearance. Since then, no one
famous will work with me. A superstitious lot,
actors.)
Try though I did, I couldn't live on that credit
forever. I had worked with Van Johnson once
before in The Music Man and we enjoyed
each other's company, although for the first
half hour of the first rehearsal for Damn
Yankees he called me "Lou" until the
producer corrected him.
So, I figured if I ever wanted to work with Van
again, I'd need to write a show he could star
in. Since he had done Applegate (the devil in
Damn Yankees) all over the country, it
was logical that the new show would involve the
same character.
Again, economy was on my mind, so I decided to
have Applegate return to destroy Broadway. (Hey,
if most of it is set on a stage or in a dance
studio, the sets would be a snap ...)
Also--with the exception of Annie--the
book musical at the time of this writing was all
but dead in contemporary American theater and I
ignorantly and arrogantly felt that I could
single-handedly reverse that trend.
I ran the idea past Van and he really seemed to
like it--but I don't know if he really was
sincere or just saw the chance for more
work.
"You Can't Keep a Bad Man Down" and "Panache"
were written before Van left town. He liked the
music, again I suspect for one of the two
reasons listed above. After finishing the score,
I couldn't locate Van anywhere, so I sent the
script to Ray Walston, the original Applegate on
Broadway and in the movie version. He liked it
and wanted to do it.
Understandably, I was very excited about
marketing the show. But even to this day,
despite the fact that Ray Walston wanted to
re-create his Tony-Award winning role, no one
would even read the script, much less listen to
the music. And, sadly, Ray passed away a few
years ago.
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