Sugar Babies | |
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![]() Cast of first production of Sugar Babies, 1979 musical. Center, top to bottom, are Ann Miller, Mickey Rooney, Ann Jillian. | |
Music | Jimmy McHugh |
Lyrics | Dorothy Fields Al Dubin various |
Book | Ralph G. Allen Harry Rigby |
Productions | 1979 Broadway 1987 Australia 1988 West End |
Sugar Babies is a musical revue conceived by Ralph G. Allen and Harry Rigby, with music by Jimmy McHugh, lyrics by Dorothy Fields and Al Dubin and various others. The show is a tribute to the old burlesque era. (The show's name is taken from one of many shows on the old Mutual Burlesque wheel of the Roaring Twenties.) First produced in 1979 on Broadway and running nearly three years, the revue attracted warm notices and was given subsequent touring productions.
Sugar Babies opened on Broadway at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on October 8, 1979 and closed on August 28, 1982 after 1,208 performances. Staging and choreography was by Ernest Flatt, with sketches directed by Rudy Tronto, musically directed by Glen Roven, scenic and costume design by Raoul Pene Du Bois, lighting design by Gilbert Vaughn Hemsley Jr., vocal arrangements and lyrics by Arthur Malvin, additional vocal arrangements by Hugh Martin, Ralph Blane, and orchestrations by Dick Hyman.
The revue starred Mickey Rooney in his Broadway debut, Ann Miller, and featured Ann Jillian and Peter Leeds. After the original stars left, successors included Juliet Prowse, Anita Morris, Joey Bishop, Eddie Bracken, Jeff Dunham and Rip Taylor.
The revue subsequently had a short-lived National tour which starred Carol Channing and Robert Morse, from August through November 1980. [1] [2] The 1982 Bus and Truck Tour starred Eddie Bracken and Jaye P. Morgan (who was succeeded by Mimi Hines). [3] The 2nd National Tour, in 1984 and 1985, reunited Rooney and Miller. [4] [5]
Norman Abbott, nephew of famed straight man Bud Abbott, inherited his uncle's "treasure trove of burlesque material, including written gags, props, music, and posters." Inspired, the younger Abbott and his wife had an idea:
Norman and his wife conceived of a modern Broadway musical combining all the elements of burlesque. He then came to the conclusion that the only person alive who could pull this off as a headliner was Mickey Rooney.
- Richard Lertzman and William J. Birnes, in "The Life and Times of Mickey Rooney" [6]
After two weeks of rehearsals, however, Rooney clashed with Abbott, who was directing the show. Rooney, who insisted on taking a hand in staging the comedy scenes himself, told Abbott, "This isn't going to work out." Abbott was fired as director, and although he didn't have a contract, he sued producer Harry Rigby and received a six-figure settlement. [6]
(Ralph G. Allen) visited theaters around the country, sitting with elderly comics and taking down their routines. He amassed a collection of some 5,000 comedy sketches. He considered writing a book, but Dr. Allen realized it would be much more fun to put on a show. He wrote a revue, based on the sketches, which was performed at the University of Tennessee. Some time later, Dr. Allen gave a talk in New York at a conference on early-20th-century popular entertainment. As part of his lecture, he read the script of his revue. Afterward, he was approached by a member of the audience, Mr. Rigby, a producer. [7]
In 1977, at a "scholarly four‐day conference [8] [9] [10] [11] to study the History of American Popular Entertainment" at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Ralph G. Allen, a theater professor and historian fascinated with burlesque, presented a lecture, from a prior College of Fellows of the American Theatre [12] Address, with pieces of a revue he wrote, that borrowed material from long-forgotten burlesque routines, "At My Mother's Knee (and Other Low Joints)". [13] [14] Rigby was in the audience and approached Allen about the material, and together they wrote the book for the show. Sugar Babies debuted two years later.
The show consists of old burlesque blackout gags and sketches, interspersed with song and dance numbers, and vaudeville specialty acts. Typical of the risqué jokes was this one in the "Broken Arms Hotel" sketch:
DESK CLERK (on the telephone): Broken Arms Hotel... What's that? You say you got a leak in the bathtub?... Well, go ahead! You paid for the room!
The Sugar Babies score contains standards such as "Don't Blame Me" and "I Feel a Song Comin' On", and newly created musical numbers, including "The Sugar Baby Bounce". [15]
The show had burlesque "tropes" such as the swing number, the sister act, the fan dance, the vaudeville dog act. "It was all fast and funny and it ended with a patriotic number...with the entire company in red, white, and blue with a flag background and Miller as the Statue of Liberty." [16]
Source: Script [17]
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Time wrote that the show is a "happy send-off to burlesque", and "Rarely has so much energy been packed into so small a package. Rooney dances, he sings, he mugs, he dresses in drag." [18]
Year | Award | Category | Nominee | Result |
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1980 | Tony Award | Best Musical | Nominated | |
Best Book of a Musical | Ralph G. Allen and Harry Rigby | Nominated | ||
Best Original Score | Jimmy McHugh, Dorothy Fields and Al Dubin | Nominated | ||
Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical | Mickey Rooney | Nominated | ||
Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical | Ann Miller | Nominated | ||
Best Direction of a Musical | Ernest Flatt and Rudy Tronto | Nominated | ||
Best Choreography | Ernest Flatt | Nominated | ||
Best Costume Design | Raoul Pène Du Bois | Nominated | ||
Drama Desk Award | Outstanding Actor in a Musical | Mickey Rooney | Nominated | |
Outstanding Actress in a Musical | Ann Miller | Nominated |
Vaudeville is a theatrical genre of variety entertainment which began in France at the end of the 19th century. A vaudeville was originally a comedy without psychological or moral intentions, based on a comical situation: a dramatic composition or light poetry, interspersed with songs or ballets. It became popular in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s, while changing over time.
A revue is a type of multi-act popular theatrical entertainment that combines music, dance, and sketches. The revue has its roots in 19th century popular entertainment and melodrama but grew into a substantial cultural presence of its own during its golden years from 1916 to 1932. Though most famous for their visual spectacle, revues frequently satirized contemporary figures, news or literature. Similar to the related subforms of operetta and musical theatre, the revue art form brings together music, dance and sketches to create a compelling show. In contrast to these, however, revue does not have an overarching storyline. Rather, a general theme serves as the motto for a loosely related series of acts that alternate between solo performances and dance ensembles.
Harry Steppe, March 16, 1888 – November 22, 1934 was a Russian Jewish-American actor, musical comedy performer, headliner comedian, writer, librettist, director and producer, who toured North America working in Vaudeville and Burlesque. Steppe performed at several well-known theaters on the Columbia, Mutual and Orpheum circuits. Steppe was one of Bud Abbott's first partners.
Norman Abbott was an American vaudevillian, actor, producer and television director.
George Michael Cohan was an American entertainer, playwright, composer, lyricist, actor, singer, dancer and theatrical producer.
A tab show was a short, or tabloid version, of various popular musical comedies performed in the United States in the early 20th century.
Ralph Gilmore Allen was an American producer, director, writer, lyricist, and professor. He is credited, along with Harry Rigby with having conceived of the Tony Award-winning musical comedy Sugar Babies, a tribute to the burlesque era. In 1965, Allen was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in the category of Humanities.
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American burlesque is a genre of variety show derived from elements of Victorian burlesque, music hall and minstrel shows. Burlesque became popular in the United States in the late 1860s and slowly evolved to feature ribald comedy and female nudity. By the late 1920s, the striptease element overshadowed the comedy and subjected burlesque to extensive local legislation. Burlesque gradually lost popularity beginning in the 1940s. A number of producers sought to capitalize on nostalgia for the entertainment by recreating burlesque on the stage and in Hollywood films from the 1930s to the 1960s. There has been a resurgence of interest in this format since the 1990s.
Willie Howard and Eugene Howard, billed as the Howard Brothers, were Silesian-born American vaudeville performers of the first half of the 20th century. They were two of the earliest openly Jewish performers on the American stage.
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Gus Hill was an American vaudeville performer who juggled Indian clubs. He later became a burlesque and vaudeville entrepreneur. Hill was one of the founders of the Columbia Amusement Company, an association of burlesque shows and theaters, and became president of the American Burlesque Association. He also staged drama and musical comedies. He launched a highly popular series of "cartoon theatricals", musical comedies based on comic strips or cartoons. At one time he was running fourteen different shows.
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Sam T. Jack, a burlesque impresario, was a pioneer of the African-American vaudeville industry in the US with his Creole Burlesque Show. He was also known for staging increasingly risqué shows in Chicago, where young women appeared wearing only skin-colored tights.
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The Columbia Theatre was an American burlesque theater on Seventh Avenue at the north end of Times Square in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Operated by the Columbia Amusement Company between 1910 and 1927, it specialized in "clean", family-oriented burlesque, similar to vaudeville. Many stars of the legitimate theater or of films were discovered at the Columbia. With loss of audiences to cinema and stock burlesque, the owners began to offer slightly more risqué material from 1925. The theater was closed in 1927, renovated and reopened in 1930 as a cinema called the Mayfair Theatre. It went through various subsequent changes and was later renamed the DeMille Theatre. Nothing is left of the theater.
Development of musical theatre refers to the historical development of theatrical performance combined with music that culminated in the integrated form of modern musical theatre that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting and dance. Although music has been a part of dramatic presentations since ancient times, modern Western musical theatre developed from several lines of antecedents that evolved over several centuries through the 18th century when the Ballad Opera and pantomime emerged in England and its colonies as the most popular forms of musical entertainment.
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The Mutual Burlesque Association, also called the Mutual Wheel or the MBA, was an American burlesque circuit active from 1922 until 1931. Controlled by Isidore Herk, it quickly replaced its parent company and competitor, the Columbia Amusement Company, as the preeminent burlesque circuit during the Roaring Twenties. Comedians Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Harry Steppe, Joe Penner, Billy Gilbert, Rags Ragland, and Billy Hagan, as well as stripteasers Ann Corio, Hinda Wausau, Gypsy Rose Lee, and Carrie Finnell, performed in Mutual shows. Mae West appeared in Mutual shows from 1922 to 1925. Mutual collapsed during the Great Depression.
via: James Madison University Libraries
The Conference on the History of American Popular Entertainment (better known by its acronym, CHAPE), held at Lincoln Center in New York on November 17-20, 1977, was the first of its kind in the United States… It opened with an immense two-hour environmental 'happening,' live acts… and an audiovisual pastiche of concurrently performed activities… black and white Minstrel Shows, Burlesque Shows, Vaudeville, Ragtime, Ethnic Theatre, Tent Repertoire Shows, Circus, Wild West Shows, Medicine Shows, Dance, and other entertainments–a potpourri of the various topics covered in the Conference itself… This published version of the Conference events constitutes a unique history of such popular entertainments. Through the scholarly inquiries by academicians and through performances and reminiscences by members of the entertainment profession, it helps to re-create our cultural heritage by presenting an overview of popular entertainment and by sorting out the individual forms of the genre.