Flop movie makes successful theater

HeraldTribune.com

By Jay Handelman
Published: Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 1:00 a.m.

Some people in the theater community were convinced that the creative team turning the flop movie “Xanadu” into a Broadway musical were bound for disaster.

How wrong they were. The movie that starred Olivia Newton-John as a Greek demi-goddess who inspires a painter to achieve his dream and open a roller disco turned into a surprise hit.

“Can a musical be simultaneously indefensible and irresistible?” The New York Times wrote in 2007. “Why, yes it can. Witness ‘Xanadu,’ the outlandishly enjoyable stage spoof of the outrageously bad movie from 1980.”

The musical has been roller skating across the country for the last year and arrives in Sarasota for two performances Tuesday and Wednesday at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall.

For Anika Larsen, a fan of Newton-John and the movie when she was young, playing Kira “is a little girl’s dream come true.”

She stars opposite Max Von Essen as Sonny and Larry Marshall as the Greek god, Zeus, and other more earthbound characters.

Larsen said the musical has several things going for it, starting with the Electric Light Orchestra hits by Jeff Lynne and John Farrar, including “Magic,” “Suddenly,” “Have You Never Been Mellow?” and “All Over the World,” among others.

But the music could only take audiences so far, and Larsen said that playwright Douglas Carter Beane “did an extraordinary job of taking the movie and making it into such a smart and clever and hilarious piece of theater. It’s a joy to say these lines every night.”

The show is played with tongue in cheek on some levels and with earnest seriousness on others.

“You would expect it in a roller disco musical that I could be playing a part with such a strong journey,” Larsen said in a telephone interview from Dallas. “She starts as a demi-goddess and by the end she’s gone through an incredible roller coaster and become in touch with her humanity.”

There’s also something of a serious message within all the silliness.

“The show says gorgeous things about the importance of art in society. One of the most beautiful lines that Kira says at the end is that she wants to ‘remind mankind that there’s something greater than wealth or fame and that is the human experience rendered comprehensible through art.’ Every night when I say that, I am almost moved to tears.”

She shed some tears during rehearsals for the Broadway production, trying to learn the choreography on skates.

“I had Rollerbladed for years before I did the Broadway company, and I thought I was good to go,” she said. “But when I got to rehearsals I realized it is very different than roller skating, and no one had ever asked me to dance on Rollerblades.”

She came to “Xanadu” after learning how to be a puppeteer for “Avenue Q.”

After the “Xanadu” tour ends in a few weeks, she said friends have suggested that her next show will have her “playing a puppeteer on skates.”