Welcome to a new Musical Theatre Monday! This month, in celebration of my recently released book, Great American Sitcoms of the 1950s, which you can order from me here (or on Amazon here) — thank you so much to everyone who’s done so already! — I’m sharing an audio from a musical adaptation of one of the great sitcoms I discuss in that tome: The Honeymooners. 

Premiering at the Paper Mill Playhouse in 2017 with a score by Stephen Weiner & Peter Mills, a book by Dusty Kay & Bill Nuss, and a cast led by Michael McGrath, Michael Mastro, Leslie Kritzer, and Laura Bell Bundy, this musical adaptation of The Honeymooners is no great classic of the form, predicating much of its charm on baked-in nostalgia for the original series while struggling to generate new dramatic substance by fleshing out characters whose elemental simplicities were nevertheless part of their original appeal. But that’s the dilemma faced by all sitcom-to-musical adaptations (like The Addams Family): how to generate real creative value from musically explorable characters in an interesting story when the whole production’s primary raison d’être is, inevitably, to indulge the audience’s feel-good familiarity with a non-musical prior property, which demands a sketch-like and sometimes parodic sensibility of winks and nods to the original and therefore a confining, gimmicky understanding of self. Now, I must say, I don’t automatically sneer at using television sitcoms as source material — musical theatre has always adapted from other mediums, and while its sights used to be set mainly on books and plays, it’s only fitting, given their prominence within our culture now, that movies and TV shows provide a similar inspiration. So, I don’t instinctively view this as crass commercialism with zero creative merit; a good premise with interesting characters can always be persuasive.

It’s just that the formula of a musical is not made for sitcom characters — and this opinion may be surprising, because conventional wisdom is that both genres resort to broad archetypes and clichés, with pat, easy communications of personality (via song or joke), and they therefore might be compatible as similarly contrived templates with bold pursuits. However, great characters in both mediums are more complex than that — and they’re developed differently. For instance, great sitcom characters ideally have the nuance to motivate and exist within a bevy of half-hour plots that confirm but flesh out their depictions, all while maintaining what its form requires: the basic status quo of their situations. This means, sitcom characters can indeed “grow” as a result of their use in story, but not fundamentally, and not regularly. A two-hour musical, in contrast, has no status quo to maintain and instead demands a self-contained two-hour plot and therefore singular, specific arcs for its leading players, taking them from point A to point B… during which they’re, critically, also singing (and dancing) about who they are, what they’re doing, and what they’re thinking and feeling. Even if “point A to point B” is a narrative loop where no big change formally occurs, and a plot is casual with little concern for major arcs, successful musicalization requires punctuating the action with self-expressions in song (and dance) that inherently imply a grandness that is atypical for the routine of a sitcom character, who must, by definition, be more regular. To put it another way: sitcom characters are designed for many little stories, not one big one that uses music to emphasize that it’s big.

Paper Mill’s The Honeymooners is not the worst example of this TV sitcom-to-stage musical tension. Due to the show’s origins as a sketch on a comedy-variety series, its characters are broader and vaguer than most sitcom greats, so they’re a little freer to be applied in different ways, and heck, they’re even familiar to musicals — remembering, notably, a string of hour-long 1957 broadcasts where the foursome went to Europe. Those entries weren’t very good — taking the regular characters out of their regular setting — but this stage show, in needing to be more typical of the series as a whole, actually keeps them closer to their main trappings, with an appropriate get-rich-quick plot for Ralph and Ed, along with a showbiz, and specifically television bent that feels like a fuller appreciation of The Honeymooners, honoring its history, its era, and what it represents within the culture. That’s smart. It’s just, again, built on the gimmick of loving the original, and its efforts to derive new value — by expanding, for instance, the admittedly thin wife roles (especially Trixie) — can feel both try-hard and anachronistic, laboring to deepen characters who will always end up formulaic and contrived because, after all, the piece is foundationally one big wink, crowding out newness and sincerity by design.

Gosh. I’m being too harsh. The truth is, this musical isn’t top-drawer as far as musicals go, but it’s a lot better than most in this TV-to-stage subcategory. And if you’re a fan of The Honeymooners, I think you’ll be charmed by it — which is the whole purpose of its existence anyway. And, as for the score, every song, if not terrific as a piece of theatre, is nevertheless affable and fitting for the ethos of the series and its iconically 1950s charm. In particular, I really like Alice’s big number — “A Woman’s Work.” Its placement in the story is templated and its subject matter is clichéd, trying to contextualize her status as a 1950s housewife for a century that looks back and sees her as constrained and therefore in need of some proof that she’s conscious and self-empowered. But the Alice character deserves, at long last, some figurative meat on her bones, and frankly, it’s the best song in the entire score musically — a jazzy tour de force for Leslie Kritzer, who helps make this a moment where, for once, having a stage version of The Honeymooners is justified beyond its sheer nostalgia. Here it is below.

In addition to that recording, I’m also offering — for interested subscribers — access to eight demo tracks recorded by composer Alan Menken, who was working on his own musical version of The Honeymooners in the late 1980s. They’re so indicative of his style — it’s a Disney-pop version of The Honeymooners, if you will — that they’re, at least, interesting. Here’s one.

Ultimately, I can’t recommend Paper Mill’s musical version of The Honeymooners to musical lovers unless they have a special interest. But for those who love the sitcom as I do, this is a fun thing to add to your collection — with plenty to enjoy for what it is — and I hope that as you listen, you’ll also be reading my new book, where The Honeymooners is a seminal point of discussion as one of the few 1950s shows that’s up there with I Love Lucy in terms of its continued cultural relevance, as evidenced by this musical adaptation, a tribute to the joy it continues to inspire.

Come back next month for another musical rarity! And stay tuned for more fifties sitcom fun!