Touring 'Copacabana' is Manilow's signature
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Along with yellow feathers in her hair and a dress cut down to there, Lola sure has legs.
But who would have guessed they'd take her this far? The heroine of Barry Manilow's "Copacabana (At the Copa)" has managed to dance from the edge of the '70s to barely past the brink of the new millennium, and her song doesn't show any signs of stopping.
Manilow's spicy tale of music and passion was the hook for a 1985 made-for-television musical based on the song, and TV Guide dubbed it one of the year's 10 best. Small-screen success led to "Copacabana" morphing into full-blown Atlantic City revue before transforming into a hit London musical that opened 1994.
Now the legend sambas into Seattle in Barry Manilow's "Copacabana," a touring production Manilow calls an ode to '40s-era MGM Technicolor films. Show times at the 5th Avenue Theatre are 8 tonight and tomorrow, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday and 2 and 7:30 p.m. Sunday.
"This is a tribute, a love letter to those gorgeous movies and those kinds of thin, naïve plots where they fall in love too soon, and the villain kidnaps the heroine and meets Carmen Miranda down in Havana," he said.
Simply saying "Copacabana" out loud sure sounds a little, well, strange. It's a song, after all, a four-minute ditty Liza Minnelli performed as monstrous puppets splintered chairs over each others' heads on "The Muppet Show" in its heyday. Nestled within the lyrics is the line, "Talking Havana, have a banana." Add that certain flavor, that feeling Barry Manilow's name tends to evoke among the cynical, and "Copacabana" reeks of schmaltz.
Which is precisely what Manilow wants you to think. In addition to helping him stretch his wings as a composer of musicals - his first love - "Copacabana" is meant to be feel-good meringue for his most ardent fans. "If you look at all those movies in the '40s, that's exactly what you'd say about them ... what they wrote was feel-good entertainment for the people who were going through WWII. It made you forget your troubles outside.
"That's what we did here," he explained. "We decided we wouldn't concentrate on ("Copacabana's") story because it was too thin. But what we finally came up with was we would concentrate on how we told the story."
To think it all started with these famous words: Her name was Lola. She was a showgirl.
It still manages to enchant. When "Copacabana," was first released in 1978, Manilow and his collaborators Bruce Sussman and Jack Feldman weren't even sure if Lola, her lover Tony and Rico the rake would make the cut for his album, "Even Now."
"It was such an oddball thing to write. It wasn't a pop song. It wasn't a Broadway song or a jazz song. It was a novelty," he recalled. It wasn't even intended to be a single until Miami dance fiends, won over by its exotic charms, pleaded its case to Arista. The label released it and the people, they fell in love.
"As the years have gone by, out of all the Top 40 hits that I've had, that's the one that everybody either waits for in my show or knows me for."
They're mad for it in Germany, he says, and "Copacabana's" always the fashion when he plays Portugal. In the States, we may soon kiss and make up with it again, since Ricky Martin is allegedly planning an updated version.
Even without Martin making Lola live la vida loca, "Copacabana" shows no signs of stopping. Manilow, who doesn't tour with the musical, plans to stage the show all over the country, targeting venues the likes of Branson, Mo., over Broadway.
While he plans to open a second, more somber musical entitled "Harmony" on the Great White Way, "Copacabana" will wisely shy away from the Big Apple. "I think the harsh critics in New York would probably close the thing down before the people who would have a great time with it would get to see it."