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'No No Nanette' ... the sequel 'Curse of the Bambino' musical to open Friday in Boston
BOSTON (AP) -- Former Red Sox owner Harry Frazee is fast asleep when Babe Ruth appears to him in a dream -- the start of a recurring nightmare for Boston fans. "With me goes the gaiter that held up your Sox and will leave wrinkles that you'll never ever steam," croons the Babe. Yes, sports fans, "The Curse of the Bambino" is now a musical. Amateur playwright David Kruh and composer Stephen Bergman have set to stage and music the saga of the Boston Red Sox, who have not won a World Series since 1918, just before Frazee sold the Babe to finance a musical of his own, "No, No Nanette." The play opens Friday at the Lyric Stage Co. in Boston. It's a musical told as a Greek tragedy, with four fans as the chorus. "I'm fascinated by the fans," said Kruh, who grew up a New York Mets fan. "They love this team. They will root for this team. They will spend money to watch this team. But they all expect that at some point ... that something will happen that will break their hearts." And it all goes back to the supposed curse of the Bambino. Ruth was sold in 1920 to the New York Yankees for $100,000 cash and a $300,000 mortgage on Fenway Park. The Yankees went on to dominate baseball for decades, winning 26 World Series. The Red Sox, who had won five of the first 15 World Series, have not won since the Babe. They've been in four Series, agonizingly losing each in the seventh and final game. The musical begins and ends in a man's living room as he watches the sixth game of the 1986 World Series between the Red Sox and the Mets. It was in that game that a ground ball went through Bill Buckner's legs with two outs in the bottom of the 10th inning, allowing the Mets to score the winning run. Two days later, the Mets won the series. The musical flashes back to other low points in Red Sox history, all tied to or blamed on the curse. Kruh came up with the idea several years ago, but he envisioned it as a serious work about the meaning of life and the significance of the sports world. Then he read a book about the Greek theatrical device of using a chorus and had a vision. "I swear to God it was like that," Kruh said. "But instead of a Greek chorus, I saw four men in raccoon coats. They were the royal rooters [a cheering section dating to the early 20th century], and I saw them standing behind a couch in which a man in suburban New England, in 1986, lamenting the sixth game of the World Series. And I knew I had a musical." Bergman, who grew up a Yankees fan in Miami, knew that a baseball musical might attract both theatergoers and sports fans. He uses various styles of music to represent the different Red Sox eras, including doo-wop, psychedelia and disco. Once Bergman and Kruh finished the songs and had a working script, they hooked up with Spiro Veloudos, the artistic director of the Lyric Stage. Veloudos changed the script and the music but gave the show a shot. It helped that Veloudos was a big Red Sox fan. "There are three major events that I remember where I was when they happened: the Kennedy assassination, the Challenger explosion and the ball going through Buckner's legs," Veloudos said. "I put my hand through the wall after that." Though the show is a love letter to the team, the real Red Sox haven't shown any desire to be involved, Bergman said. "We made a couple attempts to contact them, but the name [of the show] is a forbidden phrase around their organization," Bergman said. "So they expressed no interest whatsoever."
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