A reimagined (and streamlined) ‘Camelot’ opens Starlight Theatre’s season

The non-Equity touring production of “Camelot” that opens Tuesday at Starlight Theatre would appear to have less in common with the pageantry-filled classic that struggled onto Broadway in 1960 than the bone-and-gristle aesthetic of “Game of Thrones.”

According to director Michael McFadden, that’s just as it should be. Our popular notions of the medieval era have changed considerably over the decades, thanks to movie and TV audiences that demand ever more-convincing “realism” (much of which, ironically, is made possible by CGI visual effects) and our increasingly distant cultural memory of the ’60s.

And no Broadway musical was as inextricably tied to the ’60s as “Camelot.” The show featured the larger-than-life film star Richard Burton as King Arthur, the velvet-throated Julie Andrews (who starred earlier in the stage version of “My Fair Lady”) as Guenevere and a new star, Robert Goulet, who was gifted with a crystalline baritone and the arresting good looks of a walking 8-by-10 glossy, as Lancelot.

It was a hit, despite a rough start, but it became more than a popular show. Thanks to journalist Theodore H. White, the show, its music and its themes became permanently linked to the doomed mystique of the dominant political family of the decade. White quoted the newly widowed Jacqueline Kennedy in the wake of JFK’s 1963 assassination — more than 10 months after the show closed on Broadway — that “Camelot” was one of her husband’s favorite pieces of music.

Five years later, when the slain president’s brother, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, was shot in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, a sign on the wall read “The Once and Future King” — another nod to “Camelot” suggesting that Bobby Kennedy would complete the idealistic work begun by his murdered brother.

“Camelot,” in short, was an example of how a work of popular entertainment, when it comes along at the right time, can embed itself in the public imagination and acquire social resonance.

But only people above a certain age — or with an appetite for history books — remember any of that. That’s why McFadden, a partner in Phoenix Entertainment, which is producing this tour, believed it was time for a new take on the show.

“‘Camelot’ was a four-hour musical that was much more of a fairytale … and we really wanted to get back to the core of it, which is the storytelling of that love triangle,” he said.

The triangle, of course, is that between Arthur and his queen, Guenevere, and the virtuous French knight Lancelot. McFadden’s version is reportedly shorter, sexier and grittier than what audiences saw in 1960. He’s cut some characters, eliminated a few numbers and rearranged the order of the remaining songs.

“I use the word ‘realistic,’ but I wanted something grounded and dirtier about this,” McFadden said. “The show starts with a drum beat, like a heart beat. We kind of pulled away the pastel aspect of the show.”

Not everyone has been thrilled with McFadden’s changes because some musical-theater buffs think of the original as a sacrosanct classic. But “Camelot” received less than universal praise when it opened on Broadway.

Author and lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe had already written two major stage hits — “Brigadoon” and “My Fair Lady” — and a smash, Oscar-winning movie — “Gigi” — when they decided to create a show based “The Once and Future King” by British novelist T.H. White (no relation to the American journalist).

The novel is made up of four separate novellas, beginning with the “The Sword and the Stone” (which later became the basis for a Disney animated movie). The story begins with Merlin’s tutelage of Arthur as a boy and progresses through his kingship, the love triangle with Guenevere and Lancelot, and culminates just before his final battle with Mordred.

And although it is now considered one of the finest shows of the “golden age” of musicals, it was plagued with problems during pre-Broadway tryouts. Lerner and Loewe produced the show themselves and Broadway veteran Moss Hart directed. Before opening in New York, Hart had a heart attack and Lerner developed a bleeding ulcer.

“‘Camelot’ limped into town and opened at the Majestic Dec. 3, 1960, to a majority of not-so-hot reviews,” wrote Peter Filichia in his book “Broadway Musicals: The Biggest Hit & the Biggest Flop of the Season, 1959 to 2009.”

But after Burton and Andrews performed “Camelot” numbers on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” the long-running Sunday-night variety hour on CBS, the cast recording became a best-seller. The first out-of-town preview in Toronto did, indeed, reportedly run more than four hours on opening night, but the running time on Broadway was never that long. Even so, it was still lengthy enough that Lerner cut two numbers before opening.

McFadden is betting that audiences are ready for a fresh look at the material.

“If you’re walking in with the the expectation of reliving the ’60s production, you’ll be disappointed,” he said.

He described his artistic goal as “chamber yet epic.” By streamlining the story to 21/2 hours and eliminating much of the pageantry, he hoped to enhance the intimacy of the love story. The show also employs a smaller orchestra, which includes a lute, with new scaled-down arrangements. And scenic designer Kevin Depinet came up with a look that eschews fairy tale castles in favor of a more impressionistic look, according to McFadden.

“There’s a unit piece that sits onstage all night, a kind of abstract interpretation of a tree, and it curves over the space,” he said. “The rest of the space is very open and modular. The lighting is like lighting for a ballet. I’d love to have a dirt floor but touring with a dirt floor is kind of problematic. It’s much more about swords clanging and broadswords and chainmail.”

The tour has been on the road since October, playing mostly medium-sized cities. The reception, McFadden said, “is better than I expected. You walk a fine line when you reinterpret a classic, and we’ve been embraced for what we’ve done by audiences and the press.”

Still, this new take on the material hasn’t sat well with everyone who’s seen it. A critic in Oklahoma City declared that he’d “never seen a more languid or lackluster production” of the show and also criticized the “woefully undernourished” sound produced by the the small orchestra. A writer in Nashville called it “a decent-at-best non-equity tour.”

(Actors Equity Association, for the record, is the union for actors and stage managers. Just because a performer isn’t in the union doesn’t mean he or she lacks talent. But non-Equity tours cost producers considerably less to put on the road.)

A critic in Thousand Oaks, Calif., was more complimentary but lamented McFadden’s streamlining, which cut two of Guenevere’s songs: “It is Lerner and Loewe’s memorable songs that have made ‘Camelot’ a treasure of Broadway, not the story, and it is a crime to take even one song out of this production.”

But a theater blogger in Toledo, Ohio, gave the show an enthusiastic thumbs up and praised McFadden for his casting choices: “McFadden has solved the problem right out of the gate by casting two hunks in the leads and letting Guenevere understandably be conflicted over the two.”

Starlight viewers will, as always, decide for themselves.

This story was originally published June 7, 2015 at 3:00 AM with the headline "A reimagined (and streamlined) ‘Camelot’ opens Starlight Theatre’s season."