- Performances: 1,005
- Open / Close: April 25, 1985 – September 20, 1987
- Tony Awards: Swept all the big ones in 1985, including Best Musical, Best Direction of a Musical, Best Book and Best Score, for a total of 7.
- Box Office: $25,918,125 (or ~$59M in 2020 dollars).
- Fun Fact: Jeff Calhoun, director of “Newsies,” #121 on the list from last week, directed a Broadway revival of “Big River” in 2003 where all dialogue and lyrics were signed as well as spoken or sung, making it equally accessible to hearing and deaf audiences (see below).
Podcast
Listen to chef and all-around good guy, Christopher Haushalter, talk about his experience seeing “Big River” on his first trip to Broadway back when NYC was a scary den of iniquity instead of a glitzy overpriced tourist destination. We rave about Roger Miller’s score, consider whether it’s a show that requires racial recontextualization, and remember when John Goodman was just a curly-haired young lunk railing against the “Guv’ment.”
For a show that was so successful, this musical is now much more interesting for aspects of the production that are auxiliary to the show itself. No member of the creative team had ever worked on a Broadway show before. William Hauptman was more focused on short stories when he wrote the book and director Des McAnuff was busy reviving a west coast theater company. Roger Miller, a big country music star in the 60s, had not only never written a musical, he famously had only seen two of them when he wrote the music and lyrics.
- Fun Fact #2: “Big River” opened on Broadway 150 years after Mark Twain’s birth in 1835 and 100 years after “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the book it is based on, was published in 1885. As far as I can tell, neither of those milestones were used in marketing the musical.
It’s perhaps unexpected to look back and realize that a ‘feel good’ bluegrass-inflected musical would be the launching point for John Goodman, who would join the cast of “Rosanne” in 1988, the year after “Big River” closed. It’s almost charming to read his program bio listing regional credits in Baltimore and Buffalo. He would go on to act in nearly 100 movies and score several dozen TV roles.
- Fun Fact #3: Goodman wouldn’t return to Broadway for 24 years, appearing in a production of “Waiting for Godot” in 2009 that starred Nathan Lane. Seven years later, he’d be back in “The Front Page,” also starring Lane. One of his characters in “Big River” was Sheriff Bell; in “The Front Page” he played Sheriff Hartman.
So what of the show itself? It helps that “Big River” is built on the bones of a true masterpiece, Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” The story was familiar to a generation who’d often read it in high school and it mixed a robust buddy story, a couple of conniving con artists, and some intense dramatics (parental abuse, slavery) into a frothy good time. Whereas last week’s “Newsies” was all about New York, “Big River” was more of an all-American tale, making it a popular regional favorite for years after it closed on Broadway. It was peppy enough to be entertaining but with a persistent patina of seriousness that made audiences think it was also capital “I” important.
Miller’s songs were a great selling point, mixing more twangy country licks with strong spiritual melodies. While Goodman could generate a good many laffs with “Guv’ment,” mid-tempo raves like “Muddy Water” and the uplifting “Waitin’ for the Light to Shine” lifted hearts and tugged at the emotions. Tony Winner Ron Richardson imbued Jim with a nobility that only reinforced his humanity, so that his soaring final song, “Free At Last,” spoke to a universal redemption.
Still, only 35 years after it opened on Broadway, it’s hard to imagine “Big River” getting a high profile revival today without a significant contextual reconsideration. As author Jesse Green notes in his Vox consideration of a 2017 staging, the show (understandably) focuses on entertainment, shunting the realities of slavery and Jim’s challenges to the side. “It is left to a program note to supply the crucial information that Neriam Todd, the character upon whom Twain partly based Jim, never made it to freedom…He was killed by woodsmen on the island where he was hiding.” It’s hard to imagine a show produced today getting away with a pedestrian handling of the experience of enslaved people.
- Fun Fact #4: Ben Fankhauser who played Davey in “Newsies” on Broadway (#121) starred in a Music Circus production of “Big River” that ran in Sacramento in 2015.
Perhaps more interesting for the Broadway historian is the placement of “Big River” in the pantheon of American musicals. The early ‘80s had seen some great blockbuster musicals like Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park with George” and “La Cage Aux Folles” (#45 on the all-time list). But in the years right after “Big River,” the monsters from abroad came in: “Les Miz” in ‘86 and “Phantom” in ‘87. There would be other great American shows in the ‘80s (“Into the Woods” would also debut in ‘87) but the relative paucity of homegrown new shows had some historians calling ‘83-84 “Broadway’s last great season.” The British invasion of Broadway had begun and the Great White Way wouldn’t be the same from that point on.
Random bits:
- For a hilarious comparison of John Goodman’s celebrity status in 1985 versus today, check out the two interviews below.
- 1985 was a big year for Mark Twain. In addition to “Big River” opening, the Hal Holbrook show, “Mark Twain Tonight!” went on a world tour and there was even an after-school special that gender-reversed his most iconic characters called “The Adventures of Con Sawyer and Hucklemary Finn.”
- Winning a Tony for his portrayal of Jim, Ron Richardson would go on to a successful career in touring productions and starring in a couple more Broadway shows. He would die of AIDS at the age of only 43 in 1995. It’s kind of a long watch but you can see him squeeze every ounce of drama possible from Stevie Wonder’s “For Once in My Life” below.
Final Grade: B.