- Performances: 1,017
- Open / Close: November 12, 1989 – April 25, 1992
- Tony Awards: Five wins out of 12 nominations. Tommy Tune won for both Direction and Choreography. Jules Fisher (production designer for #119, Beatlemania) won for lighting. Lost Best Musical to “City of Angels.”
- Box Office: Approx. $43M (or ~$79M in 2020 dollars).
- Fun Fact: “Grand Hotel” had the longest documented development period of any Broadway show. First titled “At the Grand,” it had a regional run on the West Coast ending in 1958. Thirty years later, Tommy Tune would begin an epic quest to bring it to Broadway.
Podcast
Finally! The perfect person to have on ANY theater-oriented podcast, the inimitable Phil Crosby, joins me in a deep-dive into this wonderful Broadway classic. Watch your toes because Phil drops a dangerous amount of theater history and in-depth stage knowledge!
How can you not love “Grand Hotel?” At times corny, overblown, and maudlin, it is also exuberant, romantic, and fundamentally hopeful. In so many ways, the show is quintessential Broadway.
Many of those theatrical components have to do with the show’s development, including stories of tragedy, uplift and genius. As mentioned above, the show had languished for decades as one of the lesser works of the somewhat celebrated songwriting pair, Robert Wright and George Forrest. Wright and Forrest had been nominated for several Oscars for songs written for movies in the late 1930s and by the 1940s had started developing musicals. Their string of successful shows in the 1950s was capped by “Kismet” in 1953 (583 performances on Broadway).
Tommy Tune would take “At the Grand” and reshape it with an auteur’s vision. The show was already old-fashioned: in pre-WWII Rome, a cast of somewhat random characters arrive at a fancy hotel, find love, suffer ruin, try to con one another, get drunk and celebrate. Tune changed the setting from Rome to Berlin and turned the character of a fading opera star into a failing ballerina. To update the music, he would ultimately bring in his own songsmith, Maury Yeston, who was the originator of the musical “Nine” which had won Tune a Tony in 1982.
- Fun Fact #2: First brought in to add a couple songs, Yeston would ultimately write eleven new songs and jettison most of the original Wright / Forrest lyrics in many compositions.
The original cast also had some amazing life stories. A dazzling young Jane Krakowski had been only 18 when she made her Broadway debut in “Starlight Express” in 1987 and would be nominated for a Tony as the struggling typist with big dreams in “Grand Hotel.” On the other side of her career, former prima ballerina Liliane Montevecchi hadn’t danced en pointe on stage for 30 years before assuming the role of the fading ballerina.
Perhaps most inspiring was Michael Jeter who had dropped out of acting as part of his recovery from years of alcoholism. Jeter’s dynamic performance as the dying accountant in “Grand Hotel” would win him a Tony and boost his career to new heights. He would go on to appear in nearly 30 movies, most memorably in “The Green Mile,” before dying of an epylectic seizure when only 50 years old.
And speaking of tragedy, the dashing David Carroll who plays a Baron who seduces the ballerina and sets up the Krakowski and Jeter characters would die from AIDS-related illness between the end of the show’s run and the recording of the cast album. Carroll had been nominated for a Tony for “Chess” in 1988 and can still be heard in a bonus track of the cast album.
All of these separate stories didn’t necessarily make for a great show and, even as Tune was shaping it in an off-stage run in Boston, the rumor was that it was going to be a massive fail. But Tune’s choreography plus a number of directorial flourishes — e.g., most of the set was evoked by just a bar held by two actors, the orchestra was placed along a catwalk above the stage, etc. — resulted in a generally positive reception.
- Fun Fact #3: “Grand Hotel” would be the first American musical since #120 “Big River” (which opened in 1985) to run for more than 1,000 performances. Though it was recently produced as a special New York City Center Encores! Presentation, it has never been revived on Broadway.
While Frank Rich would say it “impresses the audience without engaging it,” the show reportedly got better as the cast grew into their roles. In addition to its Tony Award recognition, producers juiced audiences later in the run by bringing in cast replacements like Cyd Charisse. Listening to the cast recording today, it definitely has its weaknesses. The silly crow “caw” repeats in The Crooked Path are ridiculous and the peppy “H-A-P-P-Y” just seems silly (though it is thankfully brief). The show’s plot — complete with a hackneyed “they both went for the gun” type moment — is also not exactly its strongest selling point either.
But in the crazy synergy that makes live theater amazing, “Grand Hotel” coalesced into a sum that was clearly much bigger than its parts. Krakowski’s desperation to be “that girl in the mirror,” Jeter’s antic flexibility, Carroll’s soaring final note at the end of “Love Can’t Happen,” and a cast of jubilant dancers doing the Charleston — again I have to ask, how can you not love this show?
Final Grade: A.
NOTE: In the clips below, the first set is much better than the second but neither is perfect. The first gives a good sense of the audience experience. The second is the whole show so you can hear the whole thing if you want but you’ll have to suffer through sometimes lousy sound and image quality.