Q & A: 6/1/04
A: No, Bye Bye Birdie is not among the titles that TER has recorded but not released. I have the "Shriner's Ballet" music on that "Best of Broadway" TV special I mentioned in my last Q&A column, which features Chita Rivera in a recreation of the original Gower Champion choreography.
Among the complete recordings that TER still has in the vaults and has yet to release in full: One Touch of Venus Melissa Errico, Brent Barrett, Kim Criswell, Ron Raines; Anyone Can Whistle Maria Friedman, John Barrowman, Julia McKenzie; Fiddler on the Roof Len Cariou; Brigadoon George Dvorsky; Annie Ruthie Henshall, Raines, Criswell; 42nd Street Criswell; and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers Rebecca Luker.
Q: Seeing as this season's City Center Encores! series recently finished with Bye Bye Birdie, I was wondering what musicals you feel should be presented at Encores! next year, and which out of all the concerts you have enjoyed the most?---Alastair Knights
A: It appears that one of next season's shows will be the Stephen Sondheim-Arthur Laurents musical Anyone Can Whistle. I have two perennial Encores! requests, The Golden Apple 1954 and the Kurt Weill-Alan Jay Lerner Love Life 1948. Beyond those, Plain and Fancy and Silk Stockings come immediately to mind, although I acknowledge that the latter might be tricky to cast.
As for my favorite Encores! concerts, I'd have to select Call Me Madam, a show I love that had the perfect star, Tyne Daly; One Touch of Venus, an ideal Encores! show with a sparkling performance by Melissa Errico; St. Louis Woman, handsomely staged by Jack O'Brien and very much worth doing; Li'l Abner, another show I love, in a less-than-perfect mounting that was enjoyable for its casting; Do Re Mi, with a very apt Nathan Lane; Ziegfeld Follies of 1936 most people were disappointed in this one, but I found it very enjoyable; Carnival; and The New Moon.
Of course, two Encores! productions went on to Broadway, with Chicago finding gigantic success and Wonderful Town having a hard time. I didn't rate either quite as highly as everyone else. In the case of Chicago, I was slightly put off by the acclaim the Encores! version won from many who had dismissed the superior original production. Wonderful Town is a favorite of mine, but I didn't think Donna Murphy as ideal as two or three other Ruth Sherwoods I've seen Rosalind Russell, Elaine Stritch, Maureen Lipman.
Q: I saw Wicked last month and it got me wondering about other musicals that feature two women in leading roles of approximately equal size. I came up with Side Show, Chicago, The Rink, Anyone Can Whistle, Ankles Aweigh, and Over Here! I didn't include shows where there are two equally-sized supporting roles for women Les Miz, City of Angels or shows where there's an ensemble of leading roles for men and women Ragtime, Titanic. Any obvious or not-so-obvious titles I'm missing?---David Podulka, Dearborn, Michigan
A: I think that's an excellent list. Astute reader Alan Gomberg adds Guys and Dolls and Flower Drum Song. In the case of High Spirits, there were two ladies starred Bea Lillie, Tammy Grimes, but I'd argue that the show contained three leading female roles, with below-the-title Louise Troy's part just as important as those of Lillie and Grimes. So High Spirits might almost rank with The Witches of Eastwick as a show with three leading female roles of equal size.
Q: If I remember correctly, the original Broadway productions of Gigi and The Who's Tommy both won the Tony for best original score, and The Lion King was nominated for best original score. How were these pre-existing scores deemed eligible if they were not originally written for the stage?---JC
A: A number of Tony rules have changed over the years. In the days of Gigi, that score was eligible simply because it hadn't been heard on Broadway before. In the case of Tommy, I believe the argument was that the piece had, in fact, been written for the stage, an argument based on the fact that The Who had offered live performances of Tommy. With The Lion King, the stage score was an assemblage of film songs, pre-existing themes from a related album, and new material, so it must have been judged "new" enough to qualify.
Q: What can you tell us about Children! Children!, a thriller starring Gwen Verdon? It played only a single night in 1972. I think Verdon played a babysitter terrorized by some children. It sounds like a campy hoot!---Mark Lee Booher
A: I saw Children! Children! when it reopened the Ritz Theatre now the Walter Kerr in 1972. It was quite dreadful but, yes, in retrospect, a hoot, and certainly a collector's item, as Verdon's only non-musical and her only Broadway disaster.
Jack Horrigan's would-be thriller was a seventy-five-minute one-act, and, in fact, Verdon's second work of suspense, if one wants to count the murder-mystery musical Redhead. Children! Children! used the notion of evil children seen in earlier works like The Turn of the Screw and The Bad Seed. The play took place on New Year's Eve, and Verdon was a babysitter named Helen Giles who had only recently recovered from a nervous breakdown. When the parents go off to a party, Helen is left alone in a chic Gramercy Park duplex apartment with three sadistic children, two boys and a girl, who are out to terrorize her.
First, Helen gets an obscene phone call. Then the children tell her about a previous sitter who seems to have fallen down the stairs to her death while watching them. Soon, the eleven-year-old girl is making sexual advances to Helen, and the older boy eventually does likewise. They pretend to kill Helen's cat, then prepare to kill her. When the parents return home, they don't believe Helen's story, attributing her hysteria to her recent mental problems. But when we see the behavior of the parents, we get an inkling of how the kids turned out the way they did.
As I recall, Children! Children! was clanky, unconvincing, and lacking in a satisfying conclusion. It was quite obvious from the preview I attended that the play would never make it and that Verdon had gotten about as trapped as her character. Demonstrating that even the greatest stars can make big mistakes, Children! Children! opened to unanimous pans and closed on opening night.
Q: A question that came up after I attended Diana Rigg's magnificent performance in the current London version of Suddenly, Last Summer. I know she starred as Phyllis in Follies in London. Did she also star in Putting It Together in London?---Robert in London
A: Diana Rigg sang in the original London production of Jumpers, but her full-scale musicals include Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt's Colette, which folded on the road in the U.S. in the early '80s; the London premiere of Follies in 1987; and another Sondheim show, the revue Putting It Together. But the latter wasn't done in the West End. Rigg, along with Clive Carter, Kit Hesketh-Harvey, Claire Moore, and Clarke Peters, starred in the world premiere of Putting It Together at the Old Fire Station studio theatre in Oxford, England in 1992. The production was directed by Rigg's Follies co-star, Julia McKenzie, and produced by Cameron Mackintosh, who also presented the London Follies.
Q: I gather that Jule Styne once worked on a musical version of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. Did it ever get produced?---Dennis Chamberlain
A: The most successful musical version of Treasure Island was one adapted by and starring Sir Bernard Miles, at London's Mermaid Theatre. But Styne's version did get produced, under the title Pieces of Eight, in 1986 at the Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, Canada. That's not to be confused with a Julius Monk-produced, New York cabaret revue and a West End revue that were also called Pieces of Eight. Writing the lyrics to Styne's music for Pieces of Eight was Susan Birkenhead Jelly's Last Jam, Triumph of Love, and, like 42nd Street, Pieces of Eight had a book by Michael Stewart and Mark Bramble. George Hearn starred as Long John Silver, and the cast included Robert Fitch, Graeme Campbell, and George Lee Andrews. The production was directed and choreographed by Joe Layton, who had staged the Stewart-Bramble Barnum. As far as I know, Pieces of Eight has never been seen since Edmonton.
Q: Who was in the original London production of Candide, and were any recordings made?---Roger S.
A: Because Candide had flopped on Broadway in 1956, the New York staging was not repeated in London. The director became Robert Lewis, and there was new choreography by Jack Cole and new design by Osbert Lancaster. The book was still credited to Lillian Hellman, but she was now "assisted by Michael Stewart." Candide opened at the Saville Theatre in 1959. Denis Quilley had the title role, and glamorous American soprano Mary Costa was Cunegonde. Laurence Naismith Here's Love and A Time for Singing on Broadway was Dr. Pangloss. Oliver!'s original Fagin, Ron Moody, played the Governor of Buenos Aires.
No recording was made of the first London Candide, which lasted only 60 performances, compared to the original Broadway run of 73 performances.
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Finally, reader Jeff Winslow provided some informtation about the reason why Kitty Carlisle appears on Decca's Song of Norway cast album in place of Irra Petina. In an article in The American Record Guide in September, 1965, musical-theatre historian Miles Kreuger wrote: "Kitty Carlisle replaced Irra Petina in Song of Norway simply because [producer Jack] Kapp disliked making records with singers who had foreign accents.....Contractually, Kapp was simply making an album of published show tunes. If he chose to use cast members instead of standard recording stars, that was entirely his concern. This is the reason why, on seven albums of this period, there is occasionally a strange mixture of cast and non-cast members."
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