| Got Tu Go Disco | |
| Music: | Kenny Lehman, John Davis, Ray Chew, Nat Adderley, Jr., Thomas Jones, Wayne Morrison, Steve Boston, Eugene Narmore, Betty Rowland, Jerry Powell |
| Lyrics: | Kenny Lehman, John Davis, Ray Chew, Nat Adderley, Jr., Thomas Jones, Wayne Morrison, Steve Boston, Eugene Narmore, Betty Rowland, Jerry Powell |
| Productions: | 1979 Minskoff Theatre, NYC |
Got Tu Go Disco is a musical with music and lyrics by Kenny Lehman, John Davis, Ray Chew, Nat Adderley, Jr., Thomas Jones, Wayne Morrison, Steve Boston, Eugene Narmore, Betty Rowland, Jerry Powell and a book by John Zodrow. It opened on Broadway at the Minskoff Theatre on June 25, 1979, where it ran for nine previews and eight performances.[1]
The New York Times summed up the story of the musical as, “A young woman named Cassette sells clothes by day and turns into the queen of a nightclub by night — think Cinderella on the dance floor.”[2]
Got Tu Go Disco was the brainchild of promoter and producer Jerry Brandt, who had opened several popular nightclubs and managed musical acts such as Jobriath and Carly Simon. In a New York Times article in 1979, Brandt said, "You don't have to be a genius to know this is the coming thing … And do you know what excites me the most about this? There will be so much happening, the audience will never know what's coming next."[3] Brandt had a reputation for thinking big and not worrying about the details, and the result – as Steven Gaines put it in a New York magazine article about the show – was a production that included "an inexperienced staff, two unknown stars, the real-life doorman and bartender of Studio 54, two directors, three scriptwriters, three choreographers, eleven composers, a cast of 36, and a $500,000 set with a dance floor that fills with 3000 gallons of water and jackknifes toward the audience."[4] One of those unknown stars was Irene Cara, one year before she made a splash in the movie Fame.[5]
The reviews for the show were withering. Clive Barnes in the New York Post called it "memorably unmemorable"; Douglas Watt in the Daily News wrote that it was "pure trash"; and Richard Eder summed it up in The New York Times as "not for a theater audience."[6]