| Home Sweet Homer | |
| Music: | Mitch Leigh |
| Lyrics: | Charles Burr Forman Brown |
| Basis: | Homer's Odyssey |
| Productions: | 1976 Broadway |
Home Sweet Homer is a 1976 musical with a book by Roland Kibbee and Albert Marre, lyrics by Charles Burr and Forman Brown, and music by Mitch Leigh.
Originally called Odyssey, it is one of the most notorious flops in Broadway theatre history. Loosely based on Homeric legend, it focuses on Odysseus and Penelope, awaiting his return to Ithaca.
The show was designed as a vehicle for Yul Brynner, who was anxious to duplicate his success in The King and I more than two decades earlier. The original book and lyrics were by author Erich Segal, and a fairly modest production with a small cast began a national tour in December 1974 at the Hanna Theater in Cleveland, Ohio.[1] The musical was titled Odyssey at that time.[2]
The tour was plagued with problems from the start. Both Brynner and co-star Joan Diener frequently were ill and missed performances. In April 1975, the two, together with Diener's husband Marre and Brynner's wife Jacqueline, filed a $7.5 million lawsuit against Trader Vic's in Manhattan, alleging shortribs they ate there shortly before the start of the tour were poisonous and had left them "ill, weak, and infirm."[3]
In each city, the show received consistently bad reviews, and when it reached Los Angeles, Segal asked that his name be removed from the credits.[1] [4] Marre, whose career ranged from hits like Kismet and Man of La Mancha to unsuccessful shows like Cry for Us All and Shangri-La, not only revamped the book and lyrics, but fired choreographer Billy Wilson and took over the musical staging as well.
In August, an unhappy Brynner sued to terminate his contract but backed down when he was threatened with a $1 million countersuit.[3] By November, the producers decided to close the show at the end of the tour and forgo a Broadway opening. Brynner threatened to quit if they did not proceed to New York City as planned.
The musical, now an extravagant production retitled Home Sweet Homer, opened officially at the Sunday matinee on January 4, 1976 at the Palace Theatre after eleven previews. The closing notice was posted as soon as the curtain fell.[1] In addition to Brynner and Diener, the cast included Martin Vidnovic and Russ Thacker.[5]
The producers spent all of the show's capitalization by the time it opened in New York. Because of the postponement of the Broadway opening $250,000 of group sales had been cancelled.[6]
The show was without an intermission.
The musical numbers from the 1976 Broadway production are as follows:
The musical numbers from the 1975 Broadway previews are as follows:
Not Since Carrie: Forty Years of Broadway Musical Flops by Ken Mandelbaum, published by St. Martin's Press (1991), pages 31–33