Continuing on a long and winding tangent...

I am obsessed with Welcome to the Club. If you know me at all, you know I've been blathering all about this show for the last week. Maybe sometime I'll shut up about it, but that time seems quite far off from now, so I'll continue to blather on about it for the purposes of creative self-publishing and expression. What Welcome to the Club is, if you're one of the billions of people who have either never heard of it, or barely registered in on your radar sometime around 1991-1992ish, is a flop Broadway musical by Cy Coleman and A.E. Hotchner about four husbands (either divorced or separated) thrown into an alimony jail that played about 12 performances. Because nothing screams "Broadway smash" like the story of a bunch of cuckolds who are thrown into alimony jail. In my mind, Cy Coleman can do no wrong: City of Angels? Hell, yes. Little Me? Gloriously underrated. But he's always going to be remembered for the good stuff, foremost, and this was a blip.

It was this quote from Not Since Carrie that recently got me on the hunt of this elusive flopasauras and pretty much sealed the deal: “The ugly set typified the whole cheesy project, which was incredibly dated in its attitudes toward women and male-female relationships. The show’s hideous logo, with a man’s legs dangling half-devoured from a pair of rouged female lips, said it all.” The cast itself reads like a who's who of musical theatre actors of the 80s who were later recruited by Disney to be known most famously as voices, rather than faces. So, yes, I was pathetic enough to track down some info on it, and what little I found wasn't coasting on the show itself actually going to Broadway...although cast member Terri White does offer a mean recipe for chili con carne. Check it out!

Anyway, here's where it gets kind of cool, I suppose: On the way to class the other night, I stopped off at Academy Records and found this CD on sale for $6.99. Being the cheap Jew that I am, I had to buy it once I realized that it was not only produced as a companion piece to Not Since Carrie but also included not one, but TWO SONGS from Welcome to the Club!

And it was here I found out why this show flopped (I mean, besides the many way obvious clues to its floppage). The songs are both conventional, yes, but they break no new ground in terms of being musical theatre songs. The lyrics in the first one are quite witty, in this vaudeville-ish, Tin Pan Alley meets country style, and, obviously, this show had some potential because apparently Coleman tried to revise it not once, but twice. Yet the second one, a textbook love duet, is pure adult contemporary cheese. I could easily hear Peobo Bryson sing it, too.

And Coleman is jazz. He is wit. He is NOT PEABO.

Was. Of Blessed Memory. We miss you, Mr. Coleman.

(By the way: "Smile" by Harry Groener rules my world.)

IBDB listing

Wikipedia entry

Original NYT Review

NYT: "'Welcome to the Club' Still Open"