Interview: John Guare and Craig Carnelia Revisit Sweet Smell of Success, the Musical That Got Away

More than two decades after its brief and turbulent Broadway run, Sweet Smell of Success remains one of musical theater’s most intriguing near-misses.

It had a dream creative team in writers Marvin Hamlisch (score), John Guare (book), and Craig Carnelia (lyrics); a knockout cast led by John Lithgow and rising stars Brian d’Arcy James and Kelli O’Hara; and behind-the-scenes drama that was as intriguing as the Ernest Lehman story and Alexander Mackendrick film that inspired it. Critics and audiences were out-for-blood: despite Lithgow winning a Tony for his performance as venomous gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker, the show closed in 109 performances.

As MasterVoices prepares to present the piece in a newly restored concert version of Sweet Smell of Success (November 21-22), Guare and Carnelia look back on the origins of hte musical, the early days when it felt like a sure-fire hit, and the still-baffling unravelling that followed. Here, they also reflect on their collaboration with the late Hamlisch, whose work on the show they still regard as some of his finest. What emerges is a portrait of a beloved, bruising project—and the creative team determined to give it another life.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Whose idea was it to musicalize Sweet Smell of Success?
John Guare: There’s a guy named Garth Drabinsky. He was behind Ragtime. He had an idea that he wanted to make a musical of Sweet Smell of Success; I’m sure because he identified with J.J. We met and he asked me to do the book.

I forget the order, but he said, “Who should direct this?” and I said Nick Hytner. We call Nick and Nick wasn’t interested. He didn’t want to come to America to do a show. I kept working on it, and then Princess Diana died. Two days after, Nick Hytner called me and said, “I’ve been reading the news and I want to do Sweet Smell of Success.” So, he came on.

Garth asked us to go and meet Marvin and Craig, both of whom I admired a lot. Nick and I went to Marvin’s Park Avenue apartment, and it was very, very formal. It was not a meeting — it was too formal for a meeting. I hope you remember this, Craig. Marvin started playing this terrific vamp and out of one curtain, a chorus girl appeared and sang “Someone started a rumor.” And then from behind another curtain, another girl came out. And a guy came out of another curtain in this big apartment. Suddenly, the room was filled with singers and dancers. It’s the best audition I’ve ever had.

Craig Carnelia: Really, the person who was auditioning was me. We were auditioning as a team, though Marvin was to be the composer. They were looking for a lyricist for Marvin, and Marty Bell, who was Garth’s second-in-command, knew my work and asked if I would write four songs on spec with Marvin, who I had never met. We had a great time writing those four songs and we hit it off immediately.

Was there an inkling when you were putting the show together that there was trouble ahead?
John: No. We had a wonderful, remarkable workshop months before [the Chicago tryout] with John Lithgow. People were hurling money at us to be part of the show. We were turning backers away.

Craig: This workshop John’s speaking of, in the summer of 2000, was truly magical. Then we had to wait a year for Lithgow to finish up his TV commitment. In 2001, we went into rehearsal, and we had, in the years’ time, simply refined the show we had had. What we went into rehearsal with for Chicago was quite wonderful.

John: And as can happen, the curtain went up and the show wasn’t there. It was a nightmare. It was easily one of the most mysterious… The magical time of Sweet Smell was before 2001. Some people said that in 2001, audiences did not want to go to a dark place, and I’ll buy that. But the papers got their teeth in it and didn’t want to let go, and we just became, you know, a handy piece of meat.

Craig: We were all kind of mystified by the response we got. I’d say by the time we opened in New York, the show we had wasn’t the show we intended. The tinkering that we did after Chicago did serious harm to the show. There were huge changes made. I went along with those and I’m sorry we made them. But we were very proud of what we had done, even the version we had in New York.

There must have been a strange push-pull in New York, to have gotten vicious reviews but, at the same time, you were nominated for several Tony Awards and John Lithgow won. As artists, how do you go and lick your wounds?
John: You just go back to work. You go onto the next show.

Craig: Marvin and I were working on something we did with Nora Ephron called Imaginary Friends, which happened the year after. I also had another show that was up at Goodspeed the same year. John is always writing plays. As he said, you go on.

Which Sweet Smell of Success is MasterVoices doing?
Craig: In coming towards this great opportunity with Ted Sperling and MasterVoices, Ted wanted us to take a look at the material, because he had talked to a lot of people who had been in the show, and they all said the show we had was better than the show we ended up with.

John and I have looked at the many different versions and simply restored and refined [the material]. I’m very, very glad to be going back to a show that Marvin, John, and I all thought was better. I know Marvin did, strongly, just as John and I do. We want to see how this version of it plays, and if we like it better, we are going to talk to the folks who license the show and see if we can publish this alternative version.

What was Marvin Hamlisch like as a collaborator?
Craig: He was an incredible man. I recall a time when Nick, Chris Wheeldon, who was our great choreographer, and John and myself were in the back of the house at the Martin Beck, which is now the Hirschfeld, and all of us were facing the stage, but Marvin was facing us. It occurred to me that Marvin is more comfortable facing the audience. It’s sort of who he was; Marvin was a showman.

I was thrilled to have the opportunity to work with him. I love the score of A Chorus Line, and I think he wrote two of the greatest film songs of all time, which are “The Way We Were” and “Nobody Does It Better.” We had fun together. He did a lot of concert work, leading pops orchestras at symphonies around the country, so we did a lot of road trips.

I would bring Marvin an idea or a line or a verse and he would sit at the piano and invent, and we would roll a cassette recorder. He’d go for 45 minutes, and I would catalog the tape and come back and show him where the good stuff was, and then we would start making a song together. Usually, in that second meeting, we would end up with a very good piece of music and I would go and write a lyric to it. That’s pretty much the way we worked together throughout our wonderful collaboration.

It was a very different Marvin when he was creating. In those short spurts, he was totally concentrated and serious. And all the other times, he was effervescent and would turn what would be a work meeting into what felt like a party. He just loved life, and he loved people, and he loved performance.

John: A lovely detail is that his father was a musician who played in clubs around New York City. He would come home late at night and wake Marvin up and tell him about the part that night. Marvin, in a sense, was still that kid looking at the party through his father’s eyes and saying, “This is a whole wonderful world out there.”

He was a remarkable and really darling guy, Marvin. He had a wonderful wife, Terre, who’s been very supportive of this project. Marvin thought it was his best score, so he was very proud of it. I’m glad we’ll hear it again live.