Onward Victoria
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| Onward Victoria | |
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| Music | Keith Herrmann |
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| Lyrics | Charlotte Anker Irene Rosenberg |
| Book | Charlotte Anker Irene Rosenberg |
| Based upon | Life of Victoria Woodhull |
| Productions | 1980 Broadway |
Onward Victoria is a musical with a book and lyrics by Charlotte Anker and Irene Rosenberg and music by Keith Herrmann.
Its focus is on real-life Victoria Woodhull, who in the 19th century became a millionaire as a New York City stockbroker, then ran for the Presidency as a feminist advocating free love and equality of the sexes. Its cast of characters includes Cornelius Vanderbilt, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, restaurateur Charlie Delmonico, and Henry Ward Beecher, with whom Woodhull is linked in a fictional romance that leads to the minister being tried for alienation of affections.
This was not the first time Woodhull had been considered as the subject of a musical. Lisa Kirk was approached to star in an aborted 1959 production entitled An Amazing Woman. In 1971, Carol Channing was announced as the star of Vicky for President, a project by Burt Shevelove, Arthur Schwartz, and E.Y. Harburg that eventually was abandoned [1]. Patricia Morison and Janet Blair portrayed Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin in Winner Take All, which closed on the road in 1976. Three years later, Unescorted Women was staged off-off-Broadway by the Joseph Jefferson Theatre Company and, with its budget sets and costumes, anachronistic pop score, and camp burlesque-style production numbers (including one in which Woodhull sang the praises of Beecher's physical endowment) intact, headed uptown the following year rechristened Onward Victoria.
After twenty-three previews - and with its closing notice already in place - the Broadway production, directed by Julianne Boyd and choreographed by Michael Shawn, opened on December 14, 1980 at the Martin Beck Theatre, where it ran for one performance. The cast included Jill Eikenberry as Woodhull, Michael Zaslow as Beecher, Ted Thurston as Vanderbilt, Laura Waterbury as Stanton, Dorothy Holland as Anthony, and Lenny Wolpe as Delmonico.
Theoni V. Aldredge was nominated for the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Costume Design. A Broadway cast recording was released by Original Cast Records.
[edit] Song list
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[edit] References
Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops by Ken Mandelbaum, published by St. Martin's Press (1991), pages 240-41 (ISBN 0-312-06428-4)
