“Camelot” opened on Broadway 63 years ago, a highly anticipated new musical from the creators of “My Fair Lady.” But luckily forever took a while.
Out of town, while trying to cut the overrunning production, a writer was hospitalized with an ulcer and the director collapsed from a heart attack. In New York, despite leading roles by Julie Andrews and Richard Burton, “Camelot” took months to find its footing, and only did so after a TV segment on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Today the musical, written by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, is known as one of the last shows of Broadway’s Golden Age, but its traditional narrative – the Arthurian legend with all its romance, politics, its swordplay and sorcery – never really clicked.
“Unfortunately, ‘Camelot’ is weighed down by the burden of its book,” New York Times reviewer Howard Taubman wrote of the opening. This assessment a persisted. “It has one of the best scores of all time,” said Theodore S. Chapin, the former president of the Rodgers & Hammerstein organization, “but the plot is starting to go haywire. »
On April 13, a new version of “Camelot” is set to open on Broadway, with its book rewritten by Aaron Sorkin. The Hollywood screenwriter is known to many as the creator of the television series “The West Wing”, and he won an Oscar for writing the film “The Social Network”. He’s also an accomplished playwright, whose first Broadway drama, “A Few Good Men,” became a blockbuster movie, and whose last Broadway outing, an adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” was a hit. critical and commercial.
But musicals were not part of his repertoire until now. He earned a BFA in Musical Theater from Syracuse University, but this, in his slightly exaggerated words, is “the first time I’ve used it.” (He tried to write a musical once before, partnering with Stephen Schwartz on a show about Houdini. It didn’t work out.)
This re-written “Camelot,” starring Phillipa Soo of “Hamilton” fame as Guenevere, alongside Andrew Burnap (“The Inheritance”) as Arthur and Jordan Donica (“My Fair Lady ”) as Lancelot, is now premiering at the Lincoln Center Theater. By contemporary standards, it’s a big production, with a 27-person cast and a 30-piece orchestra.
Sorkin is not the first to revise the musical – even Lerner and Loewe reworked it after the opening, and others have triedtoo – but its deft hand with witty, fast-paced dialogue and audience nostalgia for “Camelot,” which is adapted from TH White’s fantasy novel “The Once and Future King,” made the production the one of the most anticipated on Broadway this year, with theatergoers eager to see how Sorkin puts his stamp on it.
