Maggie Flynn
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| Maggie Flynn | |
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| Music | Hugo Peretti Luigi Creatore George David Weiss |
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| Lyrics | Hugo Peretti Luigi Creatore George David Weiss |
| Book | Hugo Peretti Luigi Creatore George David Weiss Morton DaCosta |
| Based upon | The New York Draft Riots |
| Productions | 1968 Broadway |
Maggie Flynn is a musical with a book by Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore, and George David Weiss (in collaboration with Morton DaCosta) and music and lyrics by Peretti, Creatore, and Weiss.
Based on an idea by John Flaxman, it was inspired by a true story set in the New York Draft Riots of 1863. The title character, an Irish woman providing asylum for orphaned children of runaway slaves, is on the verge of marrying a Union Army colonel when the vagabond husband who abandoned her to pursue a theatrical career and whom she had presumed was dead returns to the scene. The cast of characters is a mélange of Confederate insurgents, prostitutes and drunks, bigoted socialites, and a passel of cute kids endangered by the local political situation.
After six previews, the Broadway production, directed by DaCosta and choreographed by Brian MacDonald, opened on October 23, 1968 at the ANTA Playhouse, where it ran for 82 performances. The cast included real-life spouses Shirley Jones and Jack Cassidy, who was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical. Among the orphans were newcomers Irene Cara, Giancarlo Esposito, and Stephanie Mills.
Critics found the basic situation of Jones and the children threatened by political unrest to be too similar to The Sound of Music, albeit told in an unrelentingly darker manner, and efforts to equate the New York Draft Riots with contemporary protests against the Vietnam War heavy-handed and counter-productive.
An original cast recording was released by RCA Victor.
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[edit] Nomination
- 1969 Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical - Jack Cassidy
[edit] References
- Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops by Ken Mandelbaum, published by St. Martin's Press (1991), pages 90-91 (ISBN 0-312-06428-4)
- Open a New Window: The Broadway Musical in the 1960s by Ethan Mordden, published by Palgrave (2001), pages 213-15 (ISBN 0-312-23952-1)
