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Swados’ sound was no more ingratiating in the more commercial Doonesbury (1983), which Swados wrote with Garry Trudeau, the creator of the familiar comic strip. The comics have been singing on The Street for a century—Victor Herbert and Harry B. Smith turned Winsor McKay’s Little Nemo into a musical in 1908, and Maggie and Jiggs of George McManus’ Bringing Up Father provisioned a series of shows in the following decade and into the 1920s, though few were seen in New York. George Herriman’s Krazy Kat went not to Broadway but Town Hall, as a ballet-pantomime, with scenery by Herriman, in 1922. More recently, Li’l Abner, Peanuts, and Little Orphan Annie have had notable success as musical theatre. Doonesbury, which lasted three months, was seldom theatre and never musical. This pop material might have worked as a television series or a comedy disc; nothing of what made the strip amusing was transformed into what makes musicals amusing. Li’l Abner came to Broadway in 1956 in the form of a fifties musical with fifties musical-comedy talent, the whole made on Al Capp’s characters and attitudes. Doonesbury played Broadway but never came to it in any real sense.
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Ethan Mordden (The Happiest Corpse I've Ever Seen: The Last Twenty-Five Years of the Broadway Musical (The History of the Broadway Musical Book 7))