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KING - THE MUSICAL
from Broadway Babies Say Goodnight 

It couldn't have happened to a nicer show. The British composer had been an admirer of Martin Luther King since his schooldays; he went to Detroit to study gospel music; he spent months of Sundays in the Ebenezer Baptist Church; he took a non-violence philosophy course in Atlanta; against the claims of a rival version by the Crossroads actor Martin Smith, he secured the support of King's widow; equally impressive for someone who's never written a musical before, he pulled off a deal with Decca for a pre-production recording of the score.

And then the peace and harmony began to unravel.

It's April 7th 1990 at the Piccadilly Theatre in London. Up on stage, Timothy O'Brien's design concept is a road: the literal road on which the civil rights movement marched, but also the metaphorical road of their lives. It is surprisingly smooth, at least compared to the pot-holed contraflowed tailbacked highway the show itself has taken en route to tonight's first preview. To date, King - The Musical has lost three librettists, two directors, one lyricist and the support of Mrs King and the King Center. At stake for the producers is £3,500,000 plus whatever they blew on A Little Night Music, an unsuccessful transfer they moved into the Piccadilly as a stopgap in order not to lose the theatre during what's proving to be one of the longest booking logjams in West End history. Fellow managers, eyeing the body count, confidently predict King won't hold the Piccadilly for long: 'They'll be out by - oh, mid-June,' I was told by one producer in need of a home for his own musical.

This sort of stuff is meat and potatoes to your average Broadway composer: they expect it and they enjoy it; what's a musical without bloodshed? But at the eye of this storm is a composer as unlike the New York piranhas as you could imagine. Meek mild-mannered Richard Blackford looks like a high school piano teacher, youngish but prematurely greyed. If you were told he was in showbiz, you'd assume from his sweater that he'd once been an extra on The Andy Williams Christmas Show. Yet here he is, a composer of four decently obscure operas, steering a backstage melodrama which lurches across Baz Bamigboye's Daily Mail gossip column every other day.

He glides serenely through the theatre, apparently oblivious to the carnage. If a flustered look occasionally furrows his brow, it's only because he's trying to remember which of the many hands who've worked on King for a day did what: 'That's one of Maya Angelou's lyrics. . . Then in Act One there's a lyric by - er - Alistair Beaton. . . A lot of what we see is Graham Vick's, although he doesn't want to be credited with it. . . and a lot of what's in the book is Richard Nelson's, although I think he's also chosen not to be credited. . .' Pathetic. He should be dismissing his ex-collaborators as useless sonsofbitches the show's well rid of, but instead, with scrupulous, almost painful decency, he's fussing about getting their present billing status right. Only when he recounts Alistair Beaton's contention that King 's traumas put it right up there with the most notorious Broadway bloodbaths, and then beams with pride, do you begin to suspect that lurking within this wimpy highbrow might be a Jule Styne in embryo.

Beaton, just elevated from 'additional lyrics' to equal billing, reckons appearances are deceptive. 'Richard is incredibly warm and gentle, but, when we met, he didn't strike me as the sort of person who could see a major musical through all the Scyllas and Charybdises. But you remember when Gorbachev came to power and everyone said 'What a charming man' and then Gromyko said 'Yes, but he has teeth of steel', well, Richard has got teeth of steel. He had moral and political motivations for doing this show, and he tries to stick to those. But when the show is threatened he can fight very hard indeed. Even then, though, he's a model of good behaviour. I'm a much more bad-tempered bastard.'

On his last first night, Beaton stood on the Palladium balcony waving to the crowds like King Zog of Albania: the show in question was Ziegfeld, which shortly after opening lost its star and director, while most of Beaton and Ned Sherrin's book was dumped or rewritten by distinguished men of letters like Tommy Steele. The show then had a second first night, to which Beaton wasn't invited, though he did 'phone me afterwards to check whether he was still mentioned in the programme. 'I suppose you could say I'm the biter rather than the bitten this time. But, tempting as it would be to see it as some sort of historical revenge on the world, there is a difference. Throughout all the travails of King, I've never stopped thinking that it was worth fighting for, whereas frankly Ziegfeld was a misconceived frivolity from the beginning, and Ned and I were fighting a deep feeling of contempt for the audience from other forces, who thought they didn't need a story, just give them lots of costumes and glitter and the coach parties will be happy. King is a show based upon respect for the audience.'

But, after Ziegfeld, why get involved with another musical in trouble? 'The subject interested me, so I agreed to meet Richard and Graham Vick, who was that week's director. And I thought the music was great! I mean it. Really.' His own appeal to King's producers may have been for more practical reasons. Following Maya Angelou's decision to make herself unavailable for rehearsal, Beaton was one of the few lyricists in town who can work at speed.

After three months of frenzied writing to accomodate the patchwork amendments of passing book-authors, the score now divides 50/50 between his and Angelou's words. But you won't hear that on the record, which, being made some time ago, features mostly Angelou lyrics and only three of Beaton's. Decca are a bit peeved about missing the hot new numbers written since, but they're unlikely to countenance a re-recording. After all, they've already done that once, when Jack Briley, screenwriter of Gandhi and Blackford's first lyricist, pulled out: the cast then had to be re-assembled to sing Angelou's rewrites.

Since her own retreat, Miss Angelou has taken some severe potshots at the show from across the ocean. But, while she was undoubtedly the best known of King's writers, was she any good as a lyricist? There's a long pause before Beaton replies: 'She's written some beautiful ballads.' Blackford regrets her 'unavailability' but insists that 'in the crucial rehearsal period, you can't write lyrics by fax and phone. If we get it right, we'll have the best of both worlds.' As evidence, he offers first a song by Beaton:

Then one by Angelou:

Equal rights and civil rights,
That's supposed to be the plan.
But who can blame me if I say
I want some in my hand?

Or maybe 'in my han'. The dodginess of that rhyme aptly conveys the difference between the professional technician and the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. Others involved cite the same problems which led to James Fenton's removal from Les Miserables: poets write lyrics which look dandy on the page but don't always serve the needs of book and staging or sit on the music terribly well.

But then, whoever writes the lyrics has to suffer comparisons with the man's own words. Blackford has set 'I have a dream' but, eager to avoid the accusations of predictability and opportunism that attend biotuners, he's used it contrapuntally as part of a complex musical scene which owes more to the lay-out of an opera score than Broadway.

'I have a dream,' said King, 'that one day my four little children will be judged not by the colour of their skin but by the quality of their character.' Offstage, Blackford, a white Briton, deploys the speech as a defence against Angelou's and the King Center's complaints about the lack of black Americans on the creative team: 'At the time the estate withdrew their support, Coretta King had not read Richard Nelson's book. It's right that there should be input from black Americans. Whether the book has to be written by a black man, I would dispute.' Nonetheless, Lonne Elder, a black playwright settling for the semi-detached credit of 'Book overseen by. . .', has replaced Richard Nelson, a white playwright who replaced Ron Milner (black), who replaced Jack Briley (white); meanwhile, in the director's seat, Clarke Peters (US, black) has taken over from Graham Vick (UK, white), who took over when Gotz Friedrich (Federal Republic of Germany), creator of the tube-tunnel Ring cycle, withdrew because of ill-health - psychosomatic, some say, and it hasn't prevented him continuing with opera commitments. Peters has never staged a musical, so advisors John (Les Miz) Caird and Terry (Carrie) Hands are 'hovering in the background' - where, presumably, their RSC black garb blends into the shadows and makes it harder for them to be picked off by snipers.

'It's been distressing,' admits Beaton, 'to see arguments between blacks and whites. Martin Luther King dreamed of a time when people would not be judged by their colour, and that ideal has not always informed the spirit we were working in. But I think we're through that now.' As we crossed the stage, Blackford's hailed by his producer, Hans Flury, from Switzerland (presumably another tensely negotiated ethnic compromise): 'Good news from Atlanta!' The King Center can live with the new book and are back on board.

It's sad that a man who believed in universal brotherhood should be the cause of so much factional in-fighting, but Americans have long known what a hornet's nest the King legacy is. Showbusiness, though, operates to its own morality, and one result of the traumas has been that an insignificant box-office advance has begun to swell - proving either that there's no such thing as bad publicity or possibly that there's some truth to stories of customers prefacing their purchases with, 'This is the Elvis musical, right?'

Three months later, that rival producer was proved right: King was out by June.

from Broadway Babies Say Goodnight