BROADWAY'S NEW BABIES

By RICHARD CORLISS

IN A PRINT DRESS WHOSE NECKLINE dips well below the level of propriety, Julie Johnson takes a few dainty steps to the front of the stage, sucks a little more oxygen into her grand bosom and singes the audience with I Do What I Can (with What I Got), a torchy tune about the advantages and imperatives of being a knockout babe. Johnson's rendition, in the Larry Grossman musical Paper Moon, is a KO as well; she coos, she beguiles, she does everything but bump it with a trumpet. It's the sort of turn to persuade even a show-biz skeptic that, yes, the Broadway musical is alive and well.

You won't find Johnson on Broadway right now. But last month she and quite a few other seasoned showstoppers were in a theater two blocks from Times Square as part of the seventh annual Festival of New Musicals. Five shows, in 55-minute concert versions, were staged by the National Alliance for Musical Theatre under the deft stewardship of Joseph McConnell. The Alliance serves 83 regional theater and light-opera companies, from mammoth (the 11,059-seat St. Louis Muny) to mini (the 104-seat Village Theatre, in Issaquah, Washington), all of them searching for that vanishing species, the Broadway-style musical.

So are a lot of people. Broadway is still big business; it pumps $2.3 billion annually into the New York City economy. And musicals are still the big ticket ($75 now for some shows). Yet the Great White Way has never been so wan. Last season it had just one new show with new tunes: Sunset Blvd., the sort of megalomusical that is a killer to reproduce in a small theater. The place is a wasteland, and not just for New York visitors. Local theaters hoping to put on a show--with a plot, pretty songs and, please, no helicopters--look to Broadway in vain.

There are a zillion reasons for the collapse of the genre: preposterous production and running costs, the aging or death (often from aids) of top practitioners, the defection of others to Disney movies, the ignoring of a younger generation's pop-musical tastes. Says Michael Price, executive director of the pacesetting Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut: "In the Golden Age of the musical, what you had was a lot of producers who threw a lot of product up into the air and a couple of shows stuck to the ceiling." Now, musicals are so costly that producers are afraid to fail.

For the past 20 years regionals have tried doing it themselves. Goodspeed's launching of Shenandoah and Annie encouraged California's La Jolla Playhouse (Big River, The Who's Tommy, Randy Newman's Faust) and Houston's Theatre Under the Stars (co-producer of Jekyll & Hyde, now on a pre-Broadway tour).

In 1989 the Alliance began its festival as a one-stop showcase for regional reps to view original works. "There are only so many times you can do The Sound of Music," McConnell says. "At the festival we show how to develop a successful musical without the Broadway imprimatur." Last year Alliance theaters mounted 44 productions of new musicals. "The only hope of getting something done on Broadway," says veteran librettist Joe Masteroff (Cabaret, She Loves Me), "is to have it produced first in regional theaters. The festival is a chance to have all the regional people see it at once."

Paper Moon and the four other shows (from 48 submissions) at this year's fest boasted a range of veteran and tyro talent. Masteroff wrote the book for the pensive Paramour, based on Jean Anouilh's The Waltz of the Toreadors. Joseph and Mary, a Nativity musical, had a winning oratorical score by Mark St. Germain and Randy Courts. Two musicals came from less tested showpeople: the clever, intimate Enter the Guardsman, from the Molnar play, and the pop-artful Love Comics--imagine Archie and Veronica in a yuppie Grease.

Makers of musicals still rely on worn material. Three of the five shows were based on plays or novels that became movies, and the musical styles ranged only from Show Boat to Sesame Street, with nary a pass at the rock idiom. These caveats aside, there wasn't a clunker in the carload. Racing to break the 55-minute barrier (hmmm--Why can't every musical say and sing what it has to in under an hour?), the five all had stretches of invention, melodic bounce, emotional gravity. Any one of them, spruced up, could find a home on Broadway or in the 'burbs.

And within days, each show had sunny prospects. Joseph and Mary could be headed to New York's Madison Square Garden; Paper Moon to top venues in Philadelphia, Connecticut and Massachusetts; Love Comics to Fort Worth, Texas; Enter the Guardsman to a workshop at the Manhattan Theatre Club. Paramour could make it to Broadway--the Shubert Organization is interested.

Some of the deals may never pan out, but even these hints of hope are proof that people want more than Lloyd Webber lollapaloozas and astringent Sondheims. And the performers at the festival--Johnson and colleagues like Judy Kaye, Catherine Cox, Liz Larsen, Donna Bullock and J.K. Simmons--displayed a radiance of musical talent that could glorify any modern musical.

Now if only there were some modern musicals. Maybe there can be--if regional producers fill the Broadway vacuum and say, heck, let's put the show on right here.

--Reported by William Tynan/New York

With reporting by William Tynan/New York