By Jonathan Foerster - Naples Daily News
Garry Marshall always wanted to be in theater.
When he was first starting out, he even tried to write a few plays. But nothing seemed to stick.
“Nobody every offered me a job,” Marshall says from his Los Angeles office. “But the TV people let me in.”
Now, a half-century later Marshall is the person offering the jobs and putting on the musical of his dreams. “Happy Days — The Musical” opens Wednesday at the Naples Philharmonic Center for the Arts and runs through Sunday.
“Twelve or 13 years ago, I opened my own theater, the Falcon Theater in Burbank,” he says. “With my own theater, I could work on my own things. Somebody said something about a ‘Happy Days’ musical. I thought, ‘why not?’”
Marshall’s success story isn’t far off from something one of his characters might have experienced. The New York boy found luck in Hollywood. He wrote for the “Dick Van Dyke Show” and for Danny Thomas and Joey Bishop. He caught his first big break when he adapted Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple” for TV, and the show became a hit.
But Marshall’s career really took off thanks to the success of something he wasn’t even involved in.
“TV was never a ground-breaking medium,” he says. “I had written the pilot for ‘Happy Days’ years earlier before ‘American Graffiti.’ But once that became a hit, people where interested.”
Still the show wasn’t an instant success. The pilot episode ran as a stand alone and it wasn’t picked up as a series for a few years. By then, things had been revamped a bit. Ron Howard’s Richie Cunningham was still the main character, but a crucial addition of one of the most indelible characters in TV history — Arthur “the Fonz” Fonzarelli. Henry Winkler’s motorcyle-riding, leather-jacket-clad tough guy with a heart of gold immediately resonated with audiences looking for something a bit different than “Leave it to Beaver.”
“It was a little edgier than ‘Ozzie and Harriet,’ ” Marshall says. “But it really wasn’t too radical. There is very clear set of characters. A guy, a girl and a cool guy.”
The musical is pretty much the same, except for major roles by a few bit players in the TV show — Fonzie’s true love, Pinky Tuscadero, and the villainous Malachi Brothers, a name Marshall pulled from his old neighborhood in theBronx.
The musical still exploits the same longing for a simpler life that the show brought in the ’70s. But now the nostalgia is even stronger.
“We like to think, ‘that was what the world was like,’” Marshall says. “It was an innocent time. Or at least that’s how we like to remember it.”
Looking back at episodes of “Happy Days,” it’s hard to argue Marshall’s point. But you do have to look past a certain amount of schmaltz that today’s TV shows, even the corniest sitcoms, avoid. The story lines can border on camp, especially the episode that has unfortunately provided the show’s most enduring legacy — Fonzie jumping the shark on water skis.
“That certainly was not our finest hour, but the show ran four more years after that,” Marshall says defiantly.
The plan was to go to Hawaii for an episode, but network executives dramatically cut the budget for the program.
“So instead of Hawaii, with the script we had written, we had to go to the beach and adjust,” he says. “It wasn’t a great thing, but it’s what we did.”
It might not have made for great TV, but it did provide a joke for the musical. When he first started writing the play,Marshall says lots of people talked to him about updating it for modern life, just like they had any time the idea of a “Happy Days” movie came up.
“People talked to me about it and kept throwing around all these ideas, bad ideas,” he says. “Fonzie’s really gay, Joanie gets pregnant, Ralph gets a DUI. None of that felt right.”
In other words, why mess with a hit? “Happy Days” was one of the most successful shows on TV. It spawned sequels (“Mork and Mindy,” after Marshall created an alien character so his son would watch “Happy Days,” and “Joanie loves Chachi”) and launched the careers of not just Marshall and his sister Penny, but of a legion of directors, especially the show’s two big stars Ron Howard and Winkler.
“I see Ron all the time now,” Marshall says. “We give each other plaques. And Henry came by to talk to the guy who is playing Fonzie in the musical. And I see them all whenever someone needs to boost ratings by putting together a reunion show.”
Source: naplesnews.com