A SWEET SMELL IS COMING By Peter Filichia
Everything went quiet.
This is what came to mind when the concert version of SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS was announced. It’ll play November 21-22 at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall.
The announcement took me back to a potent silent moment that had occurred in the 2001-02 Tony Awards’ press room.
The upstairs ballroom at Radio City Music Hall had been quite lively as we welcomed the winners. Most of the musicals’ victors came from THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE with four wins and URINETOWN with three.
But there was none for SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS until John Lithgow landed the show its only victory. He won for his portrayal of J.J. Hunsecker, the esteemed yet feared gossip columnist who could make or break you (with an emphasis on the latter).
In his acceptance speech, Lithgow called Hunsecker “a great role in a dazzling and daring piece of musical theater. I love SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS so dearly.”
(So did I, John, so did I.)
When he came up to be interviewed by us journalists, Lithgow answered questions about this, that and the other thing before concluding with, “Well, let me go back down there and see if we can win Best Musical.”
And that’s when we all immediately went somberly quiet. We knew that wasn’t going to happen. Lithgow knew it wasn’t going to happen, either, but it was his way of saying that he believed his show should win.
Some have joked that SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS was doomed because it debuted on the Ides of March. Well, that opening date didn’t hurt MY FAIR LADY.
Frankly, the direction and the set both sunk the show. In 2011, expert director John Simpkins staged a revival at NYU that was substantially better. During intermission and after the show, I overheard attendees admitting that they’d only heard the score during the brief Broadway run and now they were recanting their original opinions.
Yes, the cast album reveals that composer Marvin Hamlisch and lyricist Craig Carnelia wrote magnificently. The score is galvanic, starting with the most eerie “The Column,” where press agents show their desperation in needing favors from Hunsecker, all the way to the finale where they’re still hoping he’ll favor them.
In between, the score evokes the underbelly of New York nightlife in the 1950s. Both the plaintive “I Cannot Hear the City” and danger-filled “Welcome to the Night” somehow manage to let you see Manhattan’s rain-covered avenues under bright streetlights.
After I saw the musical, I read Ernest Lehman’s original 63-page novella and rewatched the 1957 film version. I wound up respecting the musical even more, for Hamlisch, Carnelia and librettist John Guare made the characters much more compelling than they originally were.
The previous properties told of Hunsecker’s aberrant love for his sister Susan. Originally, she was a “late baby” to his father and mother; in the musical, she’s his half-sister, the product of his father’s second marriage. In this era where plenty of children have parents who’ve endured multiple marriages, many half-siblings have been shown to have complicated feelings for their half-brothers and half-sisters. Here’s the only musical to address the subject.
Although all three properties showed Hunsecker much too enraptured with Susan, the collaborators made another improvement: Hunsecker doesn’t solely try to keep her for himself but tries to fix her up with someone else: Senator John F. Kennedy. This does make Hunsecker slightly better, for he wants the best guy for her, which suggests that it’s not necessarily himself.
There’s a nice irony in Hunsecker’s thinking that JFK would be a good husband, given what we’ve learned about him since then. Thus, the musical, in a fascinating and oblique way, showed that Hunsecker wasn’t always right (as he always thought he was).
So, Susan is ultimately smarter in brushing aside Kennedy for pianist-singer Dallas Cochran. He has a terrific signature song in “One Track Mind” and duets with Susan (future star Kelli O’Hara) in “Don’t Know Where You Leave Off (and I Begin).” Here, too, the collaborators upped the stakes; in the film, Dallas seemed like a genuinely nice guy, and Hunsecker’s not liking him seemed misguided. In the musical, Dallas is an already-divorced father, so that gives Hunsecker a good reason to criticize his marriage potential.
In the film, Susan is a shy and retiring type, which does make sense, because many people with powerful siblings often become hopeless introverts. She’d been much stronger in the novella by enacting revenge on an enemy in a creative way. But she nevertheless was not as strong as she is in the musical, where she makes a fierce decision and unapologetically sticks by it. So, while the film pitted strong-versus-weak and the novella offered strong-versus-stronger, the musical went for stronger-versus-strongest, which always provides the best drama.
The musical’s collaborators gave good reason for her strength in “For Susan.” J.J. showed Sidney the letters, postcards and souvenirs that Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart and other celebrities had sent her. Any apple of Hunsecker’s eye would receive rapt and fawning attention from show business royalty, which would make a young woman feel good about herself.
There’s one more significant character: Sidney Falco, a hungry publicist. But if we want to know, “How did you get to be you, Sidney Falco?” the musical was the first to literally answer that question. At the start, he’s Sidney Falcone – until Hunsecker tells him that he should change his name to Falco, which, he says, has that “o” sound that has well served Harlow, Garbo and Monroe.
And Sidney agrees, in the frenetic verse to “At the Fountain” (which Brian D’Arcy James did splendidly). What a mighty way of showing Hunsecker’s all-encompassing influence. He even has the power to change people’s names; all it takes is one off-hand suggestion. There’s nothing in the novella or the film that more strongly suggests that Falco would do a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g to please Hunsecker.
Making J.J. an ex-vaudevillian may seem to be an unconvincing and unnecessary stimulus for a song, but “Don’t Look Now” is a fetching melody with a jaunty lyric. Granted, its ride-out (a term meaning the lyric-less music that ends a song) will make you smile as you’re reminded of an earlier Hamlisch composition.
The collaborators must be commended for making SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS their very own. They didn’t just cut a bit of dialogue and replace it with a song, as many writers of dull musicals have. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall to see the stimulating meetings where they came up with such innovations for their characters. Also impressive is that the work seems to be from one bookwriter-lyricist. Both Guare and Carnelia had the same voice when writing for the characters.
The SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS film was initially dismissed by reviewers and the public. Only after many years did it become highly respected. History may well repeat itself for the musical with this upcoming concert.
Peter Filichia can be heard most weeks of the year on www.broadwayradio.com. His new day-by-day wall calendar – A SHOW TUNE FOR TODAY – 366 Songs to Brighten Your Year – is now available for pre-order on Amazon.
