Sweet Smell of Success

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While New York City Center Encores! revives the hits of yesteryear, MasterVoices has been annually staging musicals that are less well known but also have glorious scores. Under the direction of Maestro Ted Sperling, the 154 members of the MasterVoices Chorus plus nine additional onstage singers raise their voices in terrific harmony. This year’s stars included Raúl Esparza and up and coming players all of whom made a splash in their recent Broadway appearances: Ali Louis Bourzgui (The Who’s Tommy), Lizzy McAlpine (Floyd Collins) Noah J. Ricketts (The Great Gatsby) and Aline Mayagoitia (Real Women Have Curves).

This year’s rediscovery was the 2002 stage musical version of the film Sweet Smell of Success, which though it only had a three month run on Broadway yet winning John Lithgow the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical, has been in need of reevaluation. The late composer Marvin Hamlisch who passed away suddenly in 2012 (and who had said that this score was equal to his Pulitzer Prize-winning A Chorus Line) is not with us to make tweaks, but both bookwriter John Guare and lyricist Craig Carnelia were available to make revisions based on early versions discarded along the bumpy road to Broadway.

The musical began as a 1950 novella by Ernest Lehman inspired by his former boss Irving Hoffman, a press agent and columnist for The Hollywood Reporter. Hoffman’s endorsement in a newspaper article led to Lehman’s legendary career as the screenwriter/adapter on Billy Wilder’s Sabrina, Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and Family Plot, Walter Lang’s The King and I, Robert Wise’s Executive Suite, West Side Story and The Sound of Music, and Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

By the time the novella was bought for the movies in 1956, Lehman was famous enough to be offered both writing and directing credit, but the studio balked at a first time director on a major project. After writing a draft of the screenplay, Lehman became ill and playwright, now mainly screenwriter Clifford Odets was called in to redraft and polish the script. The scintillating dialogue is credit to Odets’ poison-tipped pen. By the time the musical for Broadway was in the works, Odets was dead and Lehman long since retired.

The film version starring Burt Lancaster as sleazy yet powerful gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker (similar to the notorious Walter Winchell) and Tony Curtis as hungry press agent protégé Sidney Falco was not a success as the ugly underbelly of tabloid journalism was not what filmgoers wanted from some of their favorite box office stars in 1957. Some of the same problems apparently recurred when nice guy John Lithgow took on the role in the stage musical in 2002. The reedited version by Guare and Carnelia (which is closer to what they originally intended) remains faithful to the original plot but gives a more humanizing backstory and a more palatable ending. They have also restored the original opening (“Rumor”) and a duet for Hunsecker’s sister Susan and her boyfriend Dallas (“That’s How I Say Goodbye”), cut on the road.

Sidney Falcone (Bourzgui) desperate to get his clients into Hunsecker’s (Esparza) column read by 60 million Americans finds himself in his orbit when he covers for Hunsecker’s sister Susan (McAlpine) at the Club Voodoo where she has come to hear her secret boyfriend Dallas (Ricketts) at the piano. Hunsecker gives him a new name (Falco) and makes him promise to report back to him on all Susan’s friends and doings. What Falco doesn’t know is that Hunsecker has unacknowledged incestuous feelings towards Susan and doesn’t want anyone to get close to her. He also begins to work as viciously as Hunsecker planting libelous gossip in other columns in order to break them up. When Dallas who has too much integrity insults Hunsecker publicly over his dishonest practices, Hunsecker tells Falco to take care of the problem. In the new ending, Susan comes into her own and turns the tables on all of the sleazy gossipmongers.

Although the MasterVoices’ revival still used the William David Brohn orchestrations, the show no longer sounds like a 1950s story with a 1970s sound track. That may be due to the new vocal arrangements adapted by Maestro Sperling. Now Hamlisch’s score demonstrates sly tributes to Jule Styne and Leonard Bernstein, the typical sound of 1950s Broadway musicals. (Ironically, there is also a quote from Hamlisch’s own “One” from A Chorus Line.) It is surprising that several of the lovely nightclub ballads are not better known as they ought to be, Dallas’ solos, the soulful “I Cannot Hear the City” and the clever “One Track Mind,” and Clyde Voce’s animated “Laughin’ All the Way to the Bank,” heard in the Club Zanzibar sequence.

While Lancaster played Hunsecker as a gangster and Lithgow was more avuncular, Esparza is more devious, insincere and underhanded. He has a lovely ballad number “For Susan” in the first act and a memorable 1920s pastiche vaudeville number “Don’t Look Now” with six members of the ensemble. Bourzgui is somewhat more humanized as we see his rise from the beginning as power seems to come his way. He has a terrific way with the bouncy “I Could Get You in J.J.” and the plaintive “At the Fountain,” a paean to Lana Turner’s sudden success at Schwab’s Drugstore.

As Susan (usually dressed in Tracy Christensen’s glamorous floor length mink coat), McAlpine is a bit stiff, unlike her stellar performance as Nellie in the Lincoln Center revival of Floyd Collins. However, she makes up for it with her memorable duets with the impressive Ricketts in such songs as the bluesy “Don’t Know Where You Leave Off.” As Sidney’s on again, off again girlfriend, Mayagoitia has a showstopper with the torch song “Rita’s Tune,” reminding us of her equally memorable “If I Were Bird” and “Daydream” in Real Women Have Curves last season. The nightclub scenes had sensational ballroom dances choreographed by Andrew Palermo for the onstage ensemble.

As director Ted Sperling kept Sweet Smell of Success swiftly moving along and successfully made the onstage ensemble represent 1950s paparazzi, unlike the original production’s use of them as a Greek Chorus. Though the MasterVoices Chorus did not have a great deal to sing sitting in the boxes and two story bleachers behind the stage, their voices were glorious when they were called upon to join the action. Guare, Carnelia and Sperling may not have entirely solved the problems in Sweet Smell of Success, the musical, but they have gone much of the distance to making it work.

Sweet Smell of Success (November 21 -22, 2025)

MasterVoices

Jazz at Lincoln Center

Frederick P. Rose Hall, Broadway at 60^th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, call 212-721-6500 or visit http://www.Jazz.org

Running time: two hours and 25 minutes including one intermission