Craig Carnelia Re-works the Musical “Sweet Smell of Success”

When composer/lyricist Craig Carnelia agreed to try his hand at musical version of Sweet Smell of Success, he stepped into a small, bruising world: the movie’s New York — where gossip columns, nightclub jazz and the machinery of show business conspire to reward cruelty and manufacture celebrity. Carnelia (lyrics) and Marvin Hamlisch (music), paired with a book by John Guare, created a muscular score that has lived unevenly onstage but insistently in the ear of theatre-lovers. 

MasterVoices revives the piece in concert this weekend at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater — a stripped-down staging that restores material the Broadway run trimmed and lets the music and words speak plainly to an audience suddenly conversant enough in modern media to hear new echoes. 

Raúl Esparza stars as J.J. Hunsecker. Ali Louis Bourzgui plays Sidney Falco. Noah J. Rickets plays Dallas and Lizzy McAlpine plays Susan. Ted Sperling directs and conducts.

I recently spoke with Carnelia about the collaboration, what was lost and regained, and why the show — despite its early Broadway struggles — still matters. What follows are excerpts from our conversation that have been edited for length and clarity. To see the full interview, please go to Cultural Attaché’s YouTube channel.

Q. How did you first become involved with Sweet Smell of Success?

The short version is that Livent had a treatment and they’d brought John Guare on for the book; Marty Bell suggested me and Marvin was attached. We were asked to write four songs as a collaboration test; that’s how it began. The first meeting with Marvin was in the summer of 1997 and we just clicked. 

What did Marvin tell you about his goals for this musical?

He said he wanted to write another serious score – the first of them being A Chorus Line. It is something we definitely both felt we achieved. Marvin was so proud of the score. As am I. At the first meeting he said that he liked to work music first. I loved that suggestion, because it’s basically how I work with myself when I’m a composer and lyricist.

What’s your clearest memory of those early sessions with Marvin Hamlisch?

I would give Marvin a line or a title or more commonly a verse and he would sit at the piano with a cassette tape recorder running and he worked for about 45 minutes and simply play based on the material I had given him and what it caused him to feel and think. Those times with Marvin were vivid and brilliant. He was an incredibly fertile composer. 

Take me back to that first demonstration of those four songs for Nicholas Hytner, the director of the musical. I read Hytner called it “dazzling, but skeptical.” What was that room like?

Nick was skeptical because the show is dark and twisted — even hints of incestuous tension, complicated sexual dynamics. But meeting him was a pleasure; he’s literate and analytical about language and that suited how we wanted to work. 

Marvin did an interview with Playbill around the opening of the show. He said, “Often when you see a cagey person on the stage, you find yourself admiring the way the cagey person pulls off whatever he’s doing.” What did you admire about J.J. Hunsecker that allowed you to write the lyrics that let him keep pulling off the things he does?

What we do as writers, this is not a new notion, is that we inhabit the characters that we write. Marvin’s comment is really interesting. I hadn’t heard that and hadn’t read it at the time. He’s certainly right. You can be impressed by the machinations and the mind that comes up with the endless string of ways of getting what you want. Sidney and JJ, it was actually quite easy to inhabit them. Villains don’t know they’re villains. 

In the same article that Hytner wrote for the New York Times, he said “Power and showbiz have long been bedfellows, particularly in America. Out of their union, as crooked as it is, comes our new musical.” Since we live in a time like no other where power and showbiz have led us to this moment, do you think there is more resonance to Sweet Smell of Success today than at any other time?

Certainly timely. I think that it wasn’t timely in 2002. We had just all been through 9/11. The climate, at least in what was being embraced on Broadway in musicals, was that lighter things were faring better than things that were dark. But I do think it’s timely. 

We don’t have gossip columnists, the Walter Winchell types, like we did. His type has been replaced by millions of anonymous people on social media. Perhaps we haven’t learned our lessons from Winchell or a fictional character like Hunsekcer. Was there any attempt to add any sense of right or wrong into the musical?

In that same article that Nick wrote, he spoke of it being a Faust tale or hinted at it being that and indeed it is. You’re making a deal with the devil and whether or not one believes in the devil and hell is irrelevant. You’re making a deal with something that you know could be your downfall; could kill your soul in some way. 

I think that what we do as writers is we write each character without the judgement that we might have as individuals about who’s doing something good to other people and who’s something bad. I will say, however, that we had a really good version of the show going into Chicago and a lot was lost on the way to New York. One of the things that was lost was the end of the show which used to end the way the film ends with Susan escaping. All versions of our show have had Susan removing herself from the clutches of J.J. The last moment in the show was replaced by Sidney getting beat up and killed and then J.J. reporting about it. 

John Guare and I both felt that we wanted to go back to the ending of the film. So what we’re doing with Ted Sperling and MasterVoices is we’re going back to that. We’ve also restored a number of things that we felt were lost along the way that would make for a better show. 

Before you opened on Broadway there were songs like A Different World, That’s How I Say Goodbye, Us and Them that were cut. Are some of these songs going to find their way into what MasterVoices will be presenting?

That’s How I Say Goodbye and A Different World are two songs that were written for the same spot. That’s How I Say Goodbye we’re restoring that as well as the end of act two. We had a version of the opening number that we all preferred and we improved the motor of the show with some rewriting of the opening number. So what I’ve done is I’ve made yet another version of the opening that continues the best of each thing. So have the sinew that was provided by the Broadway opening, but we have what I think of as the insinuating quality that was in the original opening.

The Broadway production opened in 2002 and didn’t find a wide audience. How has time treated Sweet Smell of Success?

Time has treated it very well. I always had the feeling that at the 20-year mark we would be ripe for something happening again with the show. And here we are at 24 years.

It doesn’t hurt that you have someone like Raúl Esparza in the lead role. I love John Lithgow (who originated the role of J.J. Hunsecker), but he comes with a certain kindness and warmth that audiences all know and love. Might that have gotten in the way of audience’s embracing this musical?

I don’t think that there was anything deficient in John’s performance. He was brilliant and he won the Tony Award for it. But I do think the audience’s expectations of who John is might have also been an issue because they bought tickets to the show because they’d seen John on television where he was charming. It might have been hard for those audiences members to make the leap, but not in any way hard for this brilliant actor to make this leap.

You have published conversations with other creators in musical theatre. I particularly enjoyed your conversation with Sheldon Harnick. You discussed the musical Tenderloin, which both of you love. Sheldon said to you, “I think it’s a wonderful score, too. I wish that the book was better for that show.” And you asked, “What was it? Was it the story? The way the story was told? What was wrong?” If Sheldon asked you those same questions about the original run of Sweet Smell of Success, how would you answer?

I would say people loving the film and expecting the show to maybe be a straight-up musical version of the film – which it isn’t. The novella on which it’s based, written by Ernest Lehman, is very different from the film. Guare took his cue from that and provided a good deal of backstory before what is essentially the plot of the film begins. It’s possible it would have irked me as an audience because I was so in love with the film.

The other thing I would say is it was bad timing. We couldn’t have known that. None of us could have known what we’d all be feeling collectively and individually after 9/11. The musicals that were successful, all of them deservedly so, were Mamma Mia!, Thoroughly Modern Millie and Urinetown. I’m not suggesting that some other dark musical might have found favor that season, but I do think that darkness was not welcome after being attacked like that.

Let’s go way back: if your teenage self, who co-wrote a musical with his brother Jimmy called The Weekend, were able to jump forward in time and see that a musical you wrote is being re-presented in 2025, what do you think he’d have to say?

Good for you. He’d be thrilled that I’d reached Broadway four times and that I have been true to my own artistic ambition and integrity for a lifetime, as both a teacher and a writer. 

The flip side of that question is if you could go back in time and give that young man advice about what’s the best way to live the life that he wants, what would you say having presumably lived a lot of the life you wanted to live?

I have lived a lot of the life that I wanted. The thing I would say to him is you can do a lot of different things at once. You can be an actor and also be a writer. I stopped acting to commit to writing. I’d tell him work on a number of things at once. Don’t ever be caught for a year, two, three years, putting eggs in one basket. The basket’s big enough to hold a bunch of eggs. 

To watch the full interview with Craig Carnelia, please go HERE.

Main Photo: MasterVoices artwork for Sweet Smell of Success (Courtesy MasterVoices)