It’s a Reading ... It’s a Concert ... It’s Superman!

For years, we’ve heard the rumors that the 1966 musical, “It’s a Bird ... It’s a Plane ... It’s Superman!” would be mounted by Encores! It hasn’t happened, so David-Edward Hughes and Maggie Stenson Pehrson, the co-artistic directors of the Showtunes Theatre Company in Kirkland, Washington, are taking up the slack.

They’re presenting it this weekend, and certainly we know of one other person who’s excited at the prospect: No less than Charles Strouse, who provided the music for the show, to Lee Adams’ lyrics and David Newman and Robert Benton’s book. Says Hughes, with justifiable pride, “Charles is flying out here to see the opening on Saturday, do a talkback afterwards, and play us a song that was dropped from the score.”

Hughes and Pehrson got the idea for Showtunes in the fall of 1999. “We’d both done a lot of theater in the Seattle area,” he says, “and with Encores! doing musicals-in-concert, we just decided to do our version here. There are lots of musicals out there, and we wanted Seattle to know more of them.”

Thus, they debuted with Anyone Can Whistle at the Seattle Town Hall in Jan. 2000, and did Out of This World at the Univ. of Washington in Seattle the following January. They traveled to nearby Bellevue in March 2002 to mount 110 in the Shade, and to Issiquah in Aug. 2003 to do Do I Hear a Waltz?”

“We took off 2004,” admits Hughes, “because we were tired of a peripatetic existence, and decided to refresh our board.” It worked: In 2005, Showtunes Theatre Company was able to do a three-show season at the Kirkland Performance Center, 15 minutes outside Seattle. They did Fiorello! Flora, the Red Menace, and On the 20th Century. Now, in 2006, they’ll do Dear World and Barnum in addition to their season-opener, Superman, as it’s chummily known.

“We mostly use six to eight musicians,” says Hughes, “but for Flora, we only had a piano. On the other hand, for Out of This World, we had 22 in the pit.” For the latter, Hughes put his men in tuxes and women in formal gowns, but he of course didn’t go for that look when he did 110. For this current project, he’s been on the lookout for ‘60s clothes — he won’t update the show — and, of course, a Superman outfit.

Hughes’ interest in musicals began when he was four, when his parents took him to see L’il Abner in a community theater. What’s most interesting is that this production was in his home town of Kailua on the island of Oahu in Hawaii. (Of course, you know I just HAD to ask him about “Kalua Bay,” the John Kander-William Goldman-James Goldman song in A Family Affair. He says he has no idea if there’s such a place, or if the creators actually meant the town where he grew up and just misspelled it.)

Hughes started collecting cast albums, and bought Superman in 1970. (Had he grown up in the Baltimore-Washington area, he would have heard the show’s overture each night as it opened the 11 o’clock news on Channel 9.) Hughes’ interest in the show spurred a production in his high school in 1975, where he portrayed Max Menken, the Jack Cassidy role.

For those of you who know about Superman from his comic book adventures and not from the 1966 musical, you may be scratching your head, saying “Who’s Max Menken?” For better or worse, the four collaborators decided to add some new characters that the writers of DC Comics never envisioned. While Superman, Lois Lane, and Perry White appear, Jimmy Olsen, Bizarro, and Mr. Mxyzptlk, more’s the pity, do not. Also missing-in-action is Lex Luthor, though the show does have a villain: Abner Sedgwick, who’s mad at the world for losing the Nobel Peace Prize nine times, and is going to take it out on the world by destroying Superman.

He sure has an ally in Max, who’s also a reporter at the Daily Planet, but one who lusts for Lois Lane. Thus, he hates Superman. But Lois is always true to you, Superman — in her fashion. The show has her interested in Jim Morgan, who’s neither the lyricist of a song in Naked Boys Singing nor the artistic director of the York Theatre Company. This Morgan is a scientist who cynically believes “We Don’t Matter at All,” which Lois rebuts, and gives him something live for.

It’s a good deal of fun, right from the start, where Superman nonchalantly dresses to become Clark Kent. Adams does use that word that’s got The Fantasticks in trouble over the years, though it’s hard to drop, because “rape” does rhyme with “cape,” an important word where Superman is concerned. But no one can say that Adams didn’t know how to build to his best joke, for in Lois Lane’s first lament about her still-unsuccessful quest of the Man of Steel, she wonders if she should instead opt for “a homey type who’ll stay around; a man with both feet on the ground.” It’s all set to music by Strouse, the master of late ‘50’s-early ‘60s rock ‘n’ roll (as it was known then), and includes a nice amount of it among true Broadway raz-ma-tazz. One song, “You’ve Got Possibilities,” has received pop recordings and TV commercials.

Strouse should have a good time in Seattle for another reason: Also in attendance on Saturday will be Martin Charnin, the man who conceived, lyricized, and directed Strouse’s biggest and most-beloved hit: Annie. “He lives here now,” Hughes explains. And when I ask if Showtunes might do Charnin’s worthy (if always unsuccessful) Mata Hari, he tells me that Charnin has already staged the show for a theater in Seattle. No wonder that George Wallace sang in Jennie that we all should “See Seattle.” And I won’t be surprised if Showtunes (www. showtunestheatre.org) gets around to doing that 1963 Dietz-and-Schwartz show someday, too. To quote one of the least-known song titles in Superman, “Everything’s Easy When You Know How.”