By Charles Runnells - news-press.com
Garry Marshall is famous for his Midas touch in the TV biz.
In live theater?
Not so much.
The sit-com producer’s first attempt at writing a play, “The Roast,” debuted on Broadway in 1980. The show didn’t just bomb - it got burned alive.
“I’m a trivia question!” the excitable Marshall says in a phone interview from his theater in Burbank,Calif. “‘What play was at the Winter Garden before ‘Cats?’”
Marshall, 74, chuckles.
“‘The Roast’ lasted for three nights,” he says. “And ‘Cats’ lasted for 18 years.”
Never a quitter, Marshall dusted himself off and trotted out another, more successful play (”Wrong Turn at Lungfish”). Now his musical based on his TV megahit “Happy Days” is traveling the country. It is at The Phil next week.
Marshall says he feels more positive these days about his future in live theater. In other words: Goodbye gray skies, hello blue.
That hopeful message from “Happy Days” seems particularly meaningful in these dreary times, he says. People want something to take their minds off the economy’s depressing spiral down the toilet.
“Our motto is this,” he says. “Forget about Ponzi. Go see Fonzie!”
Marshall is best known for creating, writing and producing runaway TV hits such as “Happy Days,” “Mork and Mindy,” “The Odd Couple” and “Laverne and Shirley” (starring sister Penny Marshall). He later directed a string of hit movies including “The Princess Diaries,” “Pretty Woman” and “Beaches.”
It wasn’t easy turning “Happy Days” into a musical, Marshall admits. There was a lot of trial and error.
“We workshopped it and workshopped it and workshopped it, and we feel like now we got it right.”
Some advisers wanted him to push the Milwaukee gang into the 21st century - making Fonzie gay and Potsie bipolar.
Marshall quickly rejected those ideas.
“Everybody wanted to modernize it, but that wasn’t my intention,” he says. “It’s supposed to be a feel-good, family show.”
Marshall ended up concocting an original story set to music by Academy Award-winning composer Paul Williams: Developers plan to knock down Arnold’s malt shop to make way for a shopping mall. So the gang decides to raise money through a dance contest and a wrestling match.
Marshall admits he worried about people not buying into these new versions of such familiar characters. They’re used to Henry Winkler as the super-cool biker Fonzie and redheaded Ron Howard as the squeaky-clean Richie Cunningham.
Still, people seem to eventually go with it, he says. “You’ll have a little trouble at first,” he says. “You’ll say, ‘Well, he looks a little like Ralph Malph, and that doesn’t look exactly like Potsie, and this and that. And then you get involved, and it’s fine.
“The audiences go with it after the initial shock.”
Marshall hopes his brand of peppy, feel-good sentimentality wins over audiences. At least better than “The Roast” did.
The world needs some positive vibes, he says. Not to mention more tap-dancing and singing.
Source: news-press.com