BOOTLEG FILES 879: “A Night on the Town” (1983 British television musical starring Ann Reinking, Eartha Kitt and Bobby Short).
LAST SEEN: On YouTube.
AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.
REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: Clearing the music rights is too expensive.
CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Not in the U.S, although there was a U.K. release.
Musical comedy is, arguably, the most difficult genre to create. Not only is there the challenge of having on-screen talent who can sing, dance, and carry off light comic material, but there is the equal challenge of behind-the-camera talent involved in orchestrations, choreography, and the various production duties needed to create a magical world where people break into song and twirl about as if it was part of the daily routine.
The 1983 British television production “A Night on the Town” offers a sterling example of what happens when a musical comedy presentation goes wrong – and the damn thing is that it should have clicked. After all, there is plenty of talent on camera and the musical material that was used – Great American Songbook classics from the likes of George Gershwin, Irving Berlin and Cole Porter – are surefire crowd pleasers. But the failure of “A Night on the Town” is anchored in its mistaken attempt to duplicate the movie musical comedies of the 1930s.
The fragile plot of “A Night on the Town” doesn’t help. In a contemporary London store that sells vintage clothing, an advertising designer (Broadway star Ann Reinking) and a photographer (British TV actor Lewis Collins) are trying on chic styles of the 1930s under the eye of the store’s owner, played by comic Frank Gorshin doing a Bela Lugosi imitation. Almost immediately, the shoppers find themselves whisked back in time to the early 1930s where they take a dizzying tour of nightclubs in Berlin, London, New York, New Orleans and Paris. In each nightclub, they find themselves in the company of charming, sophisticated partygoers and find themselves in musical numbers based on the era’s most popular tunes.
But “A Night on the Town” makes the same mistake that Peter Bogdanovich’s “At Long Last Love” made in trying to recall the essence of the 1930s musicals. The old films represented an effervescent, lightning-in-a-bottle chapter of cinema history that could not be repeated. When Fred Astaire danced or Dick Powell sang or Joan Blondell wisecracked in the early 1930s, it was entertainment magic that captured the cultural spirit of its time. “A Night on the Town” was the creation of a very different era and it was a mistake to believe that it could reanimate the style or substance of yesteryear’s movie musicals. At best, it was a pale imitation that only occasionally bubbled to life. At worst, it was a bore.
It didn’t help that the talent is mostly wasted. Frank Gorshin turns up in multiple guises imitating such diverse big screen icons as Peter Lorre, W.C. Fields, Cary Grant and Clark Gable – none of his imitations are particularly funny and it becomes difficult to understand how he landed this gig. West End star Elaine Paige also offers multiple eccentric characters utilizing different accents, and she is just as tiresome as Gorshin. In each segment, a trio of women turn up to perform different stanzas from “Let’s Fall in Love” while cabaret legend Bobby Short keeps reappearing to tickle the ivories for brief appearances that barely showcase his considerable charisma. And character actor John Moffat does a perfectly dreadful attempt at mimicking Noel Coward.
Lovely Ann Reinking never gets a chance to turn on her charm. She is shoehorned into some underwhelming dance numbers staged on claustrophobic nightclub dance floors, and she joins Hinton Battle for a show-closing choreographed sequence set to “An American in Paris” that will not make anyone forget about Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron.
Among the few high points in this offering was Eartha Kitt doing a version of “Love for Sale” that played up her lack of youth by turning the naughty standard of salacious shenanigans into a woeful anthem of an aging woman trying a bit too hard to generate carnal interest from an indifferent world.
Also of interest is Lewis Collins as the leading man. British audiences mostly knew him as a star of the action series “The Professionals,” and at one point he was considered as a possible replacement for Roger Moore in the James Bond films. In “A Night on the Town,” Collins looks great as a tuxedoed playboy and he has a charming singing voice – with better material, he could have been a Broadway and West End musical headliner.
“A Night on the Town” was broadcast on BBC on May 2, 1983, and later showed up on British DVD. With the strong presence of American talent, one could assume that the producers hoped to sell their work across the Atlantic, but that never happened. The entire show is on YouTube in an unauthorized posting, for those willing to give it a chance.
IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.
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