The Goodbye Girl Gets Ready for Broadway
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Shortly after the Chicago premiere, Azenberg maintained that he and his cohorts weren’t fazed by a surprisingly sharp slam from Tribune chief critic Richard Christiansen. Even when displeased with a production, the mild-mannered Christiansen often finds a way to put it kindly, but his Goodbye Girl notice was barely mitigated vitriol from start to finish, summing up the show as “a muddle.” Ironically, Azenberg and his coproducers decided to try out their new musical here rather than in Washington, D.C., hoping they would receive a more sympathetic assessment from Christiansen than from Washington Post drama critic Lloyd Rose. Rose panned the pre-Broadway tryout of Azenberg’s last production, Simon’s Lost in Yonkers, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for best play. Meanwhile Sun-Times drama critic Hedy Weiss warmed up to The Goodbye Girl, though she has often skewered Broadway material, such as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, that pushes the pure entertainment value too heavily. Go figure.
Before The Goodbye Girl leaves Chicago, act two could lose two extraneous musical numbers, and Simon has written a new scene that better sets up the budding romantic relationship between Short and his costar Bernadette Peters, who plays his initially antagonistic apartment mate in New York. Azenberg did not rule out the possibility that one or two new musical numbers would also be added to the show before it departs for Broadway. But that would depend in large part on how quickly new music could be orchestrated, rehearsed, and staged.
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