Xanadu’s next stop…Dallas!

Dallas Summer Musicals bring ‘Xanadu’ to town

11:08 AM CDT on Monday, April 5, 2010

By LAWSON TAITTE / The Dallas Morning News
ltaitte@dallasnews.com

One of the big Broadway talking points two seasons ago was how one of the biggest movie flops in history became a modest hit on the Great White Way: Against all odds, Xanadu was the little musical that could.

The stage version ran for 512 performances on Broadway. The national tour arrives at Fair Park Music Hall for the Dallas Summer Musicals on Tuesday.

Although star Olivia Newton-John was a hot property coming off the mega-hit Grease and the score by Jeff Lynne (the Electric Light Orchestra) and John Farrar spawned five top-20 singles, the 1980 film was a career-busting disaster of legendary proportions.

The songs eventually propelled Xanadu into cult status, a kind of scrawny younger sibling to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. In 2001, a live lip-synced version was playing in Los Angeles. The people putting it on hadn’t bothered to obtain the rights, so it quickly got shut down.

But not before Robert Ahrens, a baby-faced young movie producer with off-Broadway management experience, saw the bootleg theatrical version. Ahrens had learned to love the score from the hit album, but had been disappointed when he actually saw the movie on VHS. Now he was seeing unexpected potential in the material.

“I thought, ‘What if we allowed it to be what it wanted to be?’ ” Ahrens says. “There was a spirit to it, although with the original screenplay, you more or less had to infer a plot.”

Ahrens did his due diligence and obtained the theatrical rights from all five rights holders. With those in hand, the next step was to find someone who could actually create an entertaining story and dialogue to support all those songs.

The producer approached Douglas Carter Beane, then known primarily as the author of As Bees in Honey Drown. Since then, he has written The Little Dog Laughed for Broadway and London and the new musical, Give It Up!, that the Dallas Theater Center premiered in January.

It took a certain amount of persuasion, but Beane finally consented. The playwright highlighted the Greek mythological background of this story of a muse who returns to Earth to inspire a young man to open a roller disco. Two more goddesses – emphatically comical – have been added to the roster of characters. Oodles of jokes mask what New York magazine calls the “aggressively self-aware romanticism” of the story.

“I like doing musicals more than plays because it’s much more of a communal effort,” Beane says.

Despite a lot of advance skepticism, the Broadway version of Xanadu did surprisingly well with the critics. “We got beaten up in the industry and in the chat rooms. It was really great to get those reviews – we were pretty shocked,” Ahrens says. “After they came in, we knew we had a fighting chance.”

Finally, the show scored four 2008 Tony Award nominations, including best musical and best book. Lots of insiders were frankly rooting for it against the less-fizzy In the Heights.

In New York, Xanadu played in the smallest house on Broadway. It will be interesting to see whether its slender, witty charm can fill the cavernous Music Hall.