When they subtitled the 2007-08 production of Xanadu "Broadway's Surprise Hit Musical" they were on the mark. It was indeed a hit, and this was not just a surprise, it was a shocker, because its source material, the 1980 film musical Xanadu, was anything but a hit. Blame the movie's leaden screenplay, by Richard Danus and Marc Rubel, which took one wildly unserious subject (the gods and goddesses of Greek mythology), wedded it to another (roller disco), and then tried to sell this risible combination as the stuff of feel-good inspiration. If only you believe in yourself, the screenplay intimated, you could achieve the acme of your artistic dreams: running a roller-disco nightclub. Of course there was plenty of pep and would-be comedy in the movie, but its heart was in deadly earnest, a mistake of tone that no movie about these subjects could survive.
This was a shame, because there were actually a lot of good things in the movie, foremost among them a songbook of great early-Reagan-era pop sung by Olivia Newton-John and Electric Light Orchestra (I'M ALIVE, XANADU, MAGIC, and SUDDENLY among the hits) and quite decent performances by Newton-John and Gene Kelly (in his last role). The songs kept selling for a year, long after the film had gone to its celluloid grave. Still, the world was never full of fans clamoring for the movie to be staged, as there might have been for, say, John Waters' Hairspray.
This made all the more remarkable the inspiration of contemporary playwright Douglas Carter Beane, who figured out how to recast the material, namely as a parody of the preoccupations and tropes of the Big Hair era. He kept some of the plot elements: the Muse Clio still comes to Earth in the form of a skater named Kira to inspire a Sonny, a young artist, and tweak the memory of Danny, a businessman who had been in love with Clio thirty years before in another guise. And Beane kept the entire songbook, adding into the bargain two more songs from the ELO catalogue (EVIL WOMAN and STRANGE MAGIC) and one from the Newton-John repertoire (HAVE YOU NEVER BEEN MELLOW). Almost everything else was new, especially the tone, which was completely parodic.
Thus, for example, the character of Clio/Kira, portrayed by Newton-John in the original, becomes a loving parody of Newton-John, sporting a thick Australian accent, and an exaggerated tendency to Newton-John's occasional nasal screech. (If you go back and check, of course, you'll find that Newton-John's actual speech and singing is almost devoid of the Strine accent, not surprising as she is British-born, although she did much of her growing up in the Antipodes.) And the singing is also altered to call attention to the mannerisms creeping into pop balladry of that era, which came at the moment when melisma was setting down roots in pop, together with tight harmony marked by lots of sudden pauses for emphasis. The Mount Olympus hinted at in the original becomes a full Ray Harryhausen Clash of the Titans takeoff. In short, everything is pumped up to the point of ridiculousness, except for the endless over-the-top grand finale skate-dance number in the movie, which was so pumped-up to begin with that the proper course of action (thankfully followed here) was to take it down several notches. It works wonderfully well.
In fact, even setting aside the parody, the music comes across better onstage because, to be blunt, ELO, which sang most of the songs, wasn't the best vehicle for delivering Jeff Lynne's tunes - even if it was Lynne's band. Spread among a cast, and with female voices substituting for Lynne's weird falsetto, the harmonies just sound better.
This refocused vision of Xanadu as the occasion to laugh at all things 1980 is delightfully embodied in the new revival at Toby's Baltimore. The book and the songs may be surefire, but they require comic verve, lung power guided by that verve and, oh yes, roller skating skills, among other things. In particular, the show needs the right Kira. In the movie, there are three principal roles. In the show, Kira has to predominate.
