Review - Oh! Calcutta!: Stripped of Its Records or Does The Emperor Have No Clothes?

There's a great moment in Cecil B. DeMille's gloriously overblown epic, The Ten Commandments, when Sir Cedric Hardwicke, playing Pharaoh Sethi, upon discovering that his beloved son Moses is really Hebrew, makes a proclamation that the name of Moses must be stricken from the history books, despite his many heroic accomplishments for Egypt, and that his name never be spoken again. Moses, as far as Egypt was concerned, will have never existed.

I often get the feeling that Broadway has made the same proclamation about Oh! Calcutta!.

Now, Oh! Calcutta! was not exactly a landmark of American musical theatre but it did exist and it existed for quite a long time. Advertised as an "erotic musical," and containing about as much nudity as Naked Boys Singing, the show opened in 1969, around the time when the sexual revolution began moving such entertainments into the mainstream. Devised by British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan as an original musical revue (When was the last time Broadway had one of those?) the show featured contributions from such notables as Samuel Beckett, Jules Feiffer, John Lennon, David Newman & Robert Benton, Joe Orton, Sam Shepard and Peter Schickele, none of whom came up with anything near their best effort. Jacques Levy got the directing assignment after Beckett turned it down and Margo Sappington choreographed a beautiful nude pas de deux, certainly the artistic highlight of the evening. The original production opened at downtown's Eden Theatre before moving to Broadway's Belasco for an impressive total of 1,314 performances and took its final bow in August of 1972. But before you can say, "They're reviving Les Mis already?," a new production of Oh! Calcutta! opened at Broadway's Edison Theatre on September 24, 1976 and, with ticket sales bolstered significantly by foreign tourists from countries which required more modesty from its live entertainments, remained for a record setting 5,959 performances.

Or was it record setting?

Because eventually people began to notice that the original Broadway production of A Chorus Line, which opened 10 months earlier in July of 1975, had logged in fewer performances than the Oh! Calcutta! revival, which frequently played an expanded schedule with as many as 11 performances a week. There was also some controversy concerning whether or not the actual seating capacity of the theatre was at least 500, the minimum to be considered a Broadway house. The fact that Oh! Calcutta! was approaching Grease's record as Broadway's longest running show (3,388 performances) was generally ignored in favor of A Chorus Line's countdown to the same record. The producers of Oh! Calcutta! even put out a regularly updated ad displaying their number of performances, more than A Chorus Line's, followed by, "...but who's counting?"

The current production of Chicago is frequently referred to as Broadway's longest running revival, even though it has only chalked up somewhat more than 4,600 performances. And now we have this recent "New York Times" column where Broadway producer Rocco Landesman answers readers' questions. It's quite an interesting read with Landesman offering his knowledgeable insight on how he sees Broadway's future and the challenges Broadway faces in the present. However, what sticks out for me is how, like many others in the theatre community, he names Smokey Joe's Café (2,036 performances) as Broadway's longest running revue.

But no matter what your feelings on Oh! Calcutta!'s legitimacy in Broadway's record book, one thing is for certain... I seriously doubt this one will be on Encores' short list any time soon.

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