Happy New Year (musical)
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| Happy New Year | |
| Music | Cole Porter |
|---|---|
| Lyrics | Cole Porter |
| Book | Burt Shevelove |
| Based upon | Philip Barry's play Holiday |
| Productions | 1980 Broadway |
Happy New Year is a musical with a book by Burt Shevelove and music and lyrics by Cole Porter.
Based on Philip Barry's comic 1928 play Holiday and its subsequent 1930 film adaptation and better known 1938 remake, it focuses on hedonistic young Wall Street attorney Johnny Case who, driven by his passion to live life as a holiday, contemplates abandoning his career for a carefree existence by marrying wealthy upper class Julia Seton, much to his future father-in-law Edward's consternation and her willful sister Linda's fascination.
Porter successfully had transformed Barry's The Philadelphia Story into the musical film High Society, so Shevelove pored through the composer's catalogue in search of tunes that would fit Holiday's plot. When the show previewed at the Stratford Festival in Canada, the score was comprised of lesser-known Porter songs, and Shevelove decided to eliminate most of them in favor of music more familiar to audiences. He also opted to replace much of Barry's original repartee with songs that suited neither the characters nor the situations, and replaced the gaps with a narrator whose purpose was to explain what was missing from the plot, a device that ultimately proved to be clumsy and confusing.
After twenty-seven previews, the Broadway production, directed by Shevelove and choreographed by Donald Saddler, opened on April 27, 1980 at the Morosco Theatre, where it ran for 17 performances. The cast include Michael Scott as Johnny, Kimberly Farr as Julia, William Roerick as Edward, and Leslie Denniston as Linda, with John McMartin as the narrator and Richard Bekins and Lara Teeter in supporting roles.
Denniston won the Theatre World Award for her performance, and Pierre Balmain was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Costume Design and won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Costume Design.
[edit] Song list
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[edit] References
Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops by Ken Mandelbaum, published by St. Martin's Press (1991), pages 220-21 (ISBN 0-312-06428-4)
[edit] External links
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