Flora, The Little Red Menace that Couldn't (and the Artistic Institutions that Resurrected Her)
- clairealsto
- Nov 8, 2021
- 4 min read
In Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Show Biz, Collaboration, and All That Jazz, a retrospective of the John Kander and Fred Ebb canon, Hal Prince stated that Flora, The Red Menace, the duo’s first Broadway musical, contained “an evergreen score, which still lives, and a leaden book, long deceased.”
If you have not heard it, it is full of bops and a nineteen-year-old Liza Minnelli inventing the Broadway belt and you must listen to it now.
Some trivia: It was originally conceived as a vehicle for Barbra Streisand, who had burst onto the scene and was almost instantly too big of a star. Eydie Gorme was almost our little menace, but ultimately the role was Liza’s. (We’re on a first name, Liza-with-a-Z basis here.)
Despite Liza’s star turn, Flora was torn apart by political and creative differences and flopped (though its legacy has outlived its short run in kickstarting her career and her longtime partnership with Kander & Ebb.)
Rarely staged, Flora is based on a 1962 Lester Atwell novel that is similarly largely forgotten; I was not able to find a readable, non-antiquarian Love Is Just Around The Corner, but Kander describes it as based on the author’s memories of life in New York in the 1930’s.
The Kirkus Review describes Flora as a “lovable nincompoop” and “loser extraordinaire” whose stint in the Communist Party is cut short because she wakes up too late to join a picket line (and, well, haven’t we all?)
In the musical, Flora flirts with the Communist Party and Greenwich Village bohemians, but leaves them behind to become a fashion designer. (“A Quiet Thing,” which is often sung out of context, is frequently misunderstood to refer to falling in love; in context, it’s about realizing a career dream.)
It’s tempting to imagine what could have been (Babs aside) if circumstances had been different: Prince wanted the rights to the novel because he was interested in directing material that was sympathetic to the kinds of people who had been blacklisted in the McCarthy era. Ten years on, he thought it was time for a Communist musical that would show the idealism and naivete of the people in his life who had been targeted.
Critically, however, he did not direct Flora; instead, against Prince’s instincts, the prolific playwright and much more experienced director George Abbott helmed the project. While Abbott was enthusiastic about the music and Liza Minnelli’s talent, he was also deeply anti-Communist and approached it as a mere farce, reducing leftists to caricatures and conflating ideas. From Colored Lights:
KANDER: Mr. Abbott later said that he thought he was the person responsible for Flora’s not working… The one thing that became very clear to us toward the end was that he couldn’t bear the idea that Flora would be seriously in love with a Communist, because of his own political feelings.
EBB: He didn’t relate to the material in that show because it was a world he never knew.
KANDER: He was rich when all these people were starving in the thirties.
Liza won a Tony, but the show closed without recouping its investment.
However, that was only chapter one in the life of a young musical. In 1978, a condensed version was featured in Camera Three, an arts anthology television program, reuniting most of the Broadway cast, with Lenora Nemetz as the titular character.
Camera Three was a long-running CBS cultural institution that was edged out by CBS News Sunday Morning and eventually moved to PBS for its final year, in 1979, right after Flora. Notably, it included performances of such revolutionary material as The Cradle Will Rock and a trailblazing Earle Hyman as Othello.
(I could not find the Othello episode but here is Earle Hyman rehearsing Othello again, this time with Alfred Drake as Iago.)
The 1980s brought us a new book for Flora by David Thompson, rewritten for a 1987 off-Broadway revival directed by Susan Stroman, with the wonderful Veanne Cox in the lead. (You should know Veanne Cox from the first Company revival, where she played Amy opposite Danny Burstein as Paul, or as a stepsister in the Wonderful World of Disney’s Cinderella, or perhaps as the original Rose Stopnick Gellman on Broadway.) I really wish I could speak to this a bit more but I haven’t seen it, although I understand this version is the one that gets licensed now.
Thompson introduced a framing device that contextualizes Flora as a play-within-a-play staged by the Federal Theatre Project; I’m curious as to how that works with original source material that was only half sympathetic to left-wing ideals. Susan Stroman has written about this earliest of Stro shows here: https://www.susanstroman.com/productions/flora-the-red-menace
Founded in 1934, the Federal Theatre Project was an initiative from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to put theatre professionals back to work and provide access to the arts. Funding was cut in 1935, but in its short life, it had provided work to 13,000 artists, many of whom toured rural areas with educational and socially relevant theatre pieces. While the project disbanded prematurely, we still see its impact to the form in devised and documentary theatre today -- not to mention through the careers and influences of directors and writers like Orson Welles and Arthur Miller or the groups (such as the American Negro Theatre and its alumna like Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, and Alice Childress) that formed in its wake.
It’s easy for me to get a bit wistful about the Federal Theatre Project, wishing the country had continued subsidizing some kind of “free, adult, uncensored” theatre (as Hallie Flanagan called it) but I think it’s more helpful to focus my energy on today’s artists and how we can help each other and advance the conversation about our future, so I’ll end by referencing some pieces that connect our past with our present:
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