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Chapter Nine

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Finally came opening night and, to say the least, it was a grand opening worthy of a Broadway production. Not only did local and Broadway celebrities and the crew and crew turn out to parade in front of the press and cameras (some of which were on skates), but two more notable figureheads were added to the excitement that Xanadu Live sadly didn’t have: Olivia Newton-John and John Farrar in the flesh for support.

Olivia said later that night: “I haven’t watched it in years, so for me it was like memories and just terribly funny, like seeing a part of myself that was long ago.”As for the slight ribbing the show gave the movie…and to her original performance? “You have to have a sense of humor about yourself, otherwise what is life about?” Farrar was so impressed with the show that he bought tickets for the next day’s performance before the night was over.

Once the dust settled from this sold-out opening night performance, the press was all over it…for the good. New York Times critic 
Charles Isherwood opened his review with, “Can a musical be simultaneously indefensible and irresistible? Why yes it can. Witness 
Xanadu…” While he balances the show’s “ironic” stance, he gives praise to Beane’s script and more to Kerry Butler’s performance. 
He notes that the script “trumps such hectoring queries by acknowledging the insanity of the enterprise himself” and further 
describes “with such sharp good humor and magnetic high spirits that you don’t have much time to weep for the cultural blight that 
too much of Broadway has become. And in fact, there’s enough first-rate stage talent rolling around in Xanadu to power a season of 
wholly new, old-school, non-jukebox musicals, if someone would get around to writing a few good ones.”

As for Butler’s performance: “[she] is simply heaven on eight little polyurethane wheels. Or heaven in leg warmers.” Later he adds, “Ms. Butler is a rare Broadway ingénue who is as funny as she is pretty and she sings gloriously, too, both in her tangy Broadway belt and in a devastatingly funny impersonation of Ms. Newton-John’s sweetly sighing soprano.”

Variety critic David Rooney took a similar more thorough route. “Beane has taken the unpromising clay of [Danus/Rubel’s] 
screenplay and molded it not only into a engaging goofy spoof of the film itself but also a witty takedown of the Broadway creative culture. With a complicitous wink at the audience that’s never overplayed, the creative’s and cast at every turn cheekily point up the irony of charging Rialto prices for recycled trash.”

Other newspapers from around the country like the Hollywood Reporter and the Washington Post gave similar reviews which gave the show a strong boost as, according to Playbill, it broke house records. On the day after the official première, the show took in $150,000 on that day! Not a record breaking sum in much larger NYC theaters, but it was for the 579 seat Hayes theater.

Another boast for the show was the fans and their use of the internet! Through sites like YouTube and MySpace, postings and videos circulated wildly and positivity, though this wasn’t nothing new within Xanadu’s faithful circles as such appreciation and devotion followed the movie into another medium with a bunch of new blood mixed in.

NY Times and CBS had articles that chronicled fans driving and flying from far away places like California and seeing the show up to 10 times, though this is not to count out the lucky locals either. “It’s infectious” said a NYC stock broker, “I sat there with a smile on my face from beginning to end.” One couple from Brooklyn had seen the 40 times.

One of the more active fans goes by the name of WonderRobbie (aka Robbie Tursi). Armed with his accounts from the above mentioned sites, he had posted videos of various XoB events he had attended; celebrities arriving for the opening, Broadway Cares street fare that took place in front of the Helen Hayes Theater and the occasional return performances.

His first XoB video was so popular through internet circulation and comments that he received a thank you note from the cast. “The cast is probably the warmest and nicest cast that I ever met on Broadway. That’s the main reason why I think a lot of people have gone back.” 
(#13)

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Even the producers were taking advantage of internet 
videos, mainly through YouTube, as they were posting video’
s of commercials, behind the scenes, mini-documentaries 
and brief show excerpts. They also put a large web site 
crammed with reviews, interactive pages, a ‘Kira’s Skate 
Shop’ where fans can purchase XoB souvenirs and, for a 
time, a guestbook where fans and crew can post their 
‘Fanadu Notes’.

For the rest of the show’s run, it was a blur of publicity and 
activity; appearances on TV shows like The View and Live 
With Regis & Kelly and a spot on the Macy’s Thanksgiving 
Parade. Serendipity 3, NYC’s most famous and expensive 
ice cream parlor, named a dish for the show, Strange Magic 
Sundae. It was even recorded for posterity for the Lincoln 
Center Archives. Another round of posterity preservation was 
the recording and the release of the soundtrack from the 
show on the PS Classics label. The CD’s booklet is loaded 
with photos and Beane’s elaborate notes explaining his 
side of the story….but they wasn’t finished just yet.

Thanks to the show’s continuing success, the producers 
published, not a program, but a 84-page, full color, 12 x 12 
book entitled ‘XANADU THE BOOK! Seriously’. Similar to 
this very site detailing the movie, it was pretty much 
everything you wanted to know about this stage 
production…and I do mean everything: the neck-breaking 
amounts of pictures, outtakes and interviews with the crew, 
producers and, as an added bonus, from the film, John 
Farrar, Xanadu screenwriters Marc Rubel and Richard 
Danus and, representing ELO side of things, the band’s 
archivist Rob Craiger.

There were some movie tidbits included in the Farrar and 
Danus pieces, but the most telling was with Rubel and his 
reaction with the Broadway show. After briefly describing the 
frustrations with and surviving the after-effects from the 
movie, Rubel ended the upbeat interview with a happy 
ending: “To have it be this [XoB] success feels great. Finally. 
It is redemption. Very rare. You just don’t get that with this 
business.”

The show created a ripple effect that went far beyond it’s Broadway borders. All avenues of pop culture, be it’s blogs and newspapers and their critics, were trying to size up this latest incarnation of the Xanadu. While many of them were positive, 
one of the more interesting ones came from Robert P. Pela for the Phoenix New Times. After discussing his disbelief over this incarnation for many paragraphs, he finally throws up his hands and surrenders: “….I don’t want to see this show, but somehow I think I better. I’m afraid that if I don’t see Xanadu, Xanadu will track me down and force me to watch it.” It’s as if Kira is quoting Bill Hicks from over his shoulder: “hurr…hurr…hurr…..”

With all the ripple and noise the show was creating, there was one that even the fans weren’t excepting. Universal Home Entertainment had announced a two-disc ‘Magical Musical Edition’ re-issue of Xanadu for release on June 2008 containing 
a CD of the soundtrack and a DVD with bonus features that included a photo gallery, trailer, a 5.1 surround sound audio track and, what caught a lot of fan’s attention, a documentary, ‘Going Back To Xanadu’.

The documentary was 27 minutes long and it featured many interviews with director Robert Greenwald, producer Lawrence Gordon, the Xanadu screenwriters, Bobbie Mannix, Kenny Ortega, Gene Kelly’s widow Patricia Kelly, Don Bluth, Jerry Trent, muses Sandahl Bergman and Marylyn Tokuda, two members of the The Tubes, some of the Xanadu dancers and fans Kenneth Anderson and Heather Hoben. Unfortunately, Olivia couldn’t participate due to schedule conflicts while Joel Silver and Beck just plain turned them down.

Between the tales of the raise and fall and raise of the film, the doc largely focused on the sub-culture of the dancers that were hired for the project and their involvement in some of the numbers 
(#14), especially the complex ‘Dancin’ where they were split in two and rehearsed separately until the day of shooting while The Tubes were surviving in those bright orange jump suits. BTW, don’t even talk to The Tubes about performing Dancin’ ever again as, even after 30 years, they still won’t play the song live on stage.

Many interesting highlights included Patricia Kelly going into detail about many of the shooting locations and expressing more of Gene’s frustrations, Greenwald describing a unique vision of Los Angeles they were looking for and how the movie was doing in ‘St. Louis’, the surviving muses going on about the progressive racial mix of the muses, Kenny Ortega’s stories about working with Kelly and the film rushed production schedule, Don Bluth’s frantic animated involvement and some of the dancer’s stores.

According to one of the interviewees, the producers behind this DVD package and the doc found a large amount of rare and archival Xanadu material (commercials, promo footage, deleted scenes, etc.,) during their research but expressed frustration with Universal and the tight clearance budget they had to work with. 
(#15) A good hint of this can seen during the doc as none of the Xanadu music wasn’t used and was replaced with generic BGM. Hell, it didn’t even have a opening title card! Plus, it was reported that they didn’t even used the footage they shot of XoB, though there was a XoB coupon enclosed in each copy. 

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