Adapt This: Why 'The Capeman' Could Go From Broadway Bomb to TV Spectacular

With more networks and streaming services getting into original programming everyday, the demand for televised content is greater than ever. In Adapt This! we spotlight a piece of previously unadapted material we’d love to see become a TV series and even suggest a potential network and creative team.  

The Capeman

Source Material: A lavish Broadway musical about a vintage Big Apple crime story, dramatized and scored by New York’s only living boy, Paul Simon.

Thumbnail Synopsis: In 1959, 16-year-old Puerto Rican immigrant and Brooklyn gang member Salvador Agron makes headlines when he stabs two teenagers in a Hell’s Kitchen playground. Dubbed “The Capeman” by a rabidly sensationalist press corps for his choice of attire — a black cape lined with a splash of crimson red — the unrepentant Agron is convicted and receives a death sentence, but undergoes a spiritual and emotional conversion while behind bars and regains his freedom two decades later in 1979.  

The real Salvador Agron (left) and fellow gang member Tony Hernandez

Why It Would Make Great TV: The Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark of its day, The Capeman arrived on Broadway in 1998 with the kind of advance buzz that producers both hope for and dread. “Hope for” because the title of the show is on everybody’s lips; “dread” because the title is always followed by “…is in big trouble.” An $11 million gamble, The Capeman was a passion project for Simon, who had spent roughly a decade shaping and honing the material, taking several key departures from standard operating Broadway procedure in the process, which didn’t exactly endear him to the industry at large. The show’s various travails and setbacks — a revolving cast of directors, last-minute rewrites — were gobbled up by the gossip-happy New York media, which meant that its premiere was going to be a more closely watched event than your average Broadway opening. Perhaps not surprisingly, when the reviews came in, they weren’t good. At all. And so the curtain came down on The Capeman a mere two months after opening night, ten years’ worth of work instantly consigned to the dustbin of history.

Simon and his Capeman cast receiving flowers after a performance

Or was it? I didn’t see The Capeman in its original run, but I did listen — frequently, in fact — to its companion album, Songs From The Capeman, and thought the 11 tracks included on that record were mostly terrific. Then, in 2008, I attended a concert production that was part of Simon’s residency at the Brooklyn Academy of Music that was a revelation, with the show’s mixture of old-school doo-wop and salsa-laced songs galvanizing the crowd. Two years later, another extensively rehabbed version played three shows at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park — the site of several past Simon concerts, both solo and with his old friend and partner, Art Garfunkel. In both stagings, the show had been trimmed back from its plus-sized Broadway version, which was one of the primary things critics at the time complained about. Whatever Simon hoped to achieve in that production, it wound up being just too big for the stage.

That’s where television enters the picture. Simon’s original conception was a two-act, three-hour musical that would span the full breadth of Agron’s life, opening in Puerto Rico, continuing through his early years in New York (when he was played by salsa superstar Marc Anthony), spanning his prison sentence that included a brief escape attempt (with Latin music icon Rueben Blades taking over the part), and ending after his release. Going by most first-hand accounts, the sheer length of the production simply didn’t work within the context of a Broadway show. Simon’s scope would be better served by the comfortable expanse of a limited event 10-episode series, where he can neatly divide the eras of Young and Old Sal into five episodes apiece. That also gives the music itself — the Original Cast Album features a whopping 39 tracks — plenty of room to breathe. Certainly, there are several numbers that demand the full-scale, West Side Story song-and-dance treatment, most notably the velvety “Satin Summer Nights” and percussive “The Vampires,” where Sal makes the leap to gang member. With musicals banished from the big screen (occasional revivals like Into the Woods, Hairspray, and Chicago notwithstanding), it would be terrific to see television pick up the slack and display a higher level of musical showmanship than what viewers currently experience via stunt productions like NBC’s live versions of The Sound of Music and Peter Pan.

The big challenge facing Simon and any potential TV collaborators would be how to reconfigure The Capeman’s second act — a quieter, more introspective piece than the first half, which has the benefit of taking place against the energetic backdrop of ‘50s-era New York. The elder Sal cuts a less flamboyant figure, and much of the dramatic action involves his (fictionalized) correspondence with a Native American woman who he temporarily absconds from prison to be with. The music is similarly muted, with fewer opportunities for big production numbers. At the same time though, the songs in this part of the show feature some of Simon’s strongest lyrical wordplay, including “Trailways Bus,” a jangly folk tune that chronicles Sal’s trip West to meet his pen pal. It’s the most Paul Simon-esque song in the entire show (so much so that Simon himself performed it on both the Cast Album and at the BAM performance) and is also key to The Capeman’s ultimate message: You can’t escape your past, but you can change your present.    

Creative Dream Team: One of the things that distinguished The Capeman at the time and still today is its large cast of Latino characters, a market that’s still underserved by Broadway. (In fact, Simon’s statement after the show’s initial closing explicitly thanked Latino audiences for their positive reactions.) At least one musical theater wunderkind working to change that is Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose exuberant modern-day New York musical In the Heights won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2008. Simon is well known for being a difficult collaborator, but hopefully he would recognize the benefit of having a younger voice like Miranda in the mix, who would bring a fresh energy to this slice of New York history. (A descendent of Puerto Rican immigrants, Miranda would likely have an interesting perspective on Agron’s experience as well.)

And while it would be great to stack the cast with stage-trained unknowns, you need at least one A-list ringer to pull in eyeballs and ad dollars. So here’s my potentially controversial pick: Jennifer Lopez for the role of Salvador’s mother, Esmeralda. Yeah, yeah, her dramatic performances have been largely terrible of late, but if you go back to her early work — Out of Sight, U-Turn and, of course, Selena — it’s apparent that she can act when given the proper motivation. Esmeralda is a key role in the show, one that could revitalize Lopez’s acting career if she fully commits to the rigors of the part, which would include scaling back the glam. It’s not like she’s got American Idol to fall back on anymore…

Ideal Network: Netflix’s genre palette has grown to encompass political dramas (House of Cards), sci-fi serials (Sense8), and comedies (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt). It’s time for them to try their hand at a musical, especially if it means adding Paul Simon to their list of prestige collaborators alongside David Fincher, Tina Fey, and Jenji Kohan.

Songs From the Capeman is available on Amazon and iTunes. The Original Broadway Cast Recording is available on iTunes.