Lone Star Lost

Lone Star Love is over and the fat man hasn't even sung yet.

The would-have-been Broadway opening in December of this Texas-style musical of Merry Wives of Windsor with Randy Quaid as Falstaff seemed another case of misguided producers with apparently a ton of money to waste.

Not only had the show piffled Off Broadway at the old Houseman theatre three seasons ago (with the estimable and more stage-seasoned Jay O. Sanders starring) but it goes way, way back:

An adaptation of the Bard's "Merry Wives of Windsor" that updates the setting to post-Civil War Texas, "Lone Star Love" started out as a play in the 1970s, was turned into a musical in 1988 at Houston's Alley Theater, and was retooled for an Off Broadway run in 2004.

Not to discourage anyone out there from still working on that script you started forty years ago, but... Seems to me nothing ever good comes to a show that takes this long to gestate.

And as if that wasn't enough warning, there was also Randy Quaid's wife to deal with!