Dream Girl The Musical.

[Luvsbway]

Last week in a book on Broadway I learned that the 1960s musical Skyscraper was a very loose adaptation of the play Dream Girl. Here is some more information. It stared Julie Harris.

 

Skyscraper, written by Peter Stone, is credited as "suggested by Elmer Rice’s play Dream Girl," and that’s a pretty accurate description. Dream Girlfocused on the heroine’s attempts to get through life and love while constantly checking out for involved day dreams.

 

Skyscraper did retain that day-dream element from the original play, as well as the basic plot set-up of Georgina (Harris) living with her parents and running an unprofitable business with the brother-in law, who she has a massive crush on, until she meets another man who she instantly hates but ultimately ends up in love with.

 

In Rice’s play, this man is a blunt journalist who tells Georgina that a novel she’s written stinks. In Stone’s book, the love interest is a visionary young architect, Timothy Bushman (played by Peter Marshall, a comedian who’d recently displayed his musical theater chops in the London production of Bye Bye, Birdie).

 

Marshall and HarrisGeorgina owns a 19th century brownstone in the east 50s, which has historical value to her but a different value to Bushman, who wants the building so he can tear it down and build a skyscraper, which will symbolize a promise of the future for him. The argument of whether the old should be preserved or torn down to make way for the new is the central conflict, intensified by sexual tension between Georgina and Bushman. That in itself was enough for one show, and Stone might as well have tossed Rice’s daydream concept as it's a totally different story. To hear the introductory number for Georgina, "Occasional Flight of Fancy," you'd think the show is about her day dreaming, but it's just a mildly distracting side line in the musical! Once you get over this problem, Stone’s script has plenty of fun dialogue to enjoy.

[C L A U D E]

And Lucy could have done the movie version of the musical, LOL!