Obscure Recordings: Different Times
The show's book, music, lyrics, and direction were by Michael Brown, who was best known for contributing the "Lizzie Borden" number to New Faces of 1952. Brown had continued to write revue material, and had also written the words, to Harold Arlen's music, for "Indoor Girl," a song Pearl Bailey interpolated into the score of House of Flowers during the run.
Different Times, which opened at the ANTA now the Virginia Theatre on May 1, 1972, told the story of four generations of a Boston family, from 1905 to 1970. The family's big secret is that a daughter had been impregnated by a Jewish doughboy during World War I. The musical focused on the illegitimate, half-Jewish son that resulted, a young man who has been brought up by his grandparents because his mother died shortly after giving birth. The son's heritage is kept a secret from him until after he has married a Philadelphia society girl and entered politics. The secret destroys his marriage and career, but, at the end, there's hope for the next generation.
The ensemble cast, billed in alphabetical order in the Playbill and playing multiple roles, included a batch of rising performers who never quite made it to the top. There was Patti Karr, who understudied the stars of everything from Redhead and Bye Bye Birdie to Seesaw in which she replaced Michele Lee and The Rink. Belter Joe Masiell, who had won attention from a long stint in Jacques Brel...., played the Jewish doughboy. Jamie Ross would go on to take over leads in Woman of the Year, La Cage aux Folles, and Gypsy and play Toddy in the Toni Tennille national tour of Victor/Victoria. Mary Jo Catlett had made an impression as Ernestina Money in the original cast of Hello, Dolly!.
Also prominent were Barbara Williams the off-Broadway Streets of New York, a Broadway Aldonza; Ronald Young Tony in the 1970 Broadway revival of The Boy Friend, a Tommy Tune cover in My One and Only; and Mary Bracken Phillips 1992 Tony nominee for writing the English lyrics to the Polish disaster Metro.
As you might expect, the Different Times score was a pastiche of various styles --ragtime, jazz, boogie, rock--- from the periods the show visited. A revue-like piece to begin with, Brown revealed his background in the form with a score that consisted heavily of performance, rather than book, numbers. There was a suffragette march "Forward Into Tomorrow"; a song for the World War I doughboys "Marianne"; two numbers from a '20s speakeasy floor show "Daddy, Daddy," "I Feel Grand"; a '40s sister-act trio "I Miss Him"; and a '40s-vocalist solo "One More Time".
There are several tuneful items, including the ragtime opener, "Seeing the Sights," at the Lewis and Clark Exposition in 1905 Portland; a '40s swing tune, "I Dreamed About Roses"; a '50s Vegas number, "Here's Momma"; and a cheap but catchy, big song for Masiell at the end of Act One, "I'm Not Through," which became the show's sole showstopper. In a show that featured a great many songs, the least interesting ones were, unfortunately, the book or character numbers.
But then Different Times, while ambitious, was mostly inept. Characters were lightly sketched in but left undeveloped. The big secret that was the basis for the entire plot seemed flimsy. And the show was short on charm. Different Times was too harmless to hate. Yet one had to wonder what it was doing on Broadway. The show's financing came largely from Brown's native Texas, and on opening night a contingent of backers whooped and hollered after every bland number.
The reviews contained praise for Masiell and Catlett but not much else. New York Times critic Clive Barnes said that "the book is terrible" and that the show featured "the kind of songs you went into the theater whistling." Douglas Watt in The Daily News called the show "so unassuming that it is in constant danger of not being noticed at all." Variety's critic said, "As a dinner theater revue or in a musical tent, Different Times might be a moderately pleasant little show. As a Broadway production, it's bland, slightly banal and obviously inadequate." In New York Magazine, John Simon called it "a limp impersonation of heterosexuality and of a show."
Hopelessly unequipped to compete with such other Broadway fare as Follies, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Grease, Fiddler on the Roof, Hair, Applause, No No Nanette, Sugar, and Jesus Christ Superstar, Different Times went away quietly after twenty-four performances. In 1987, the cast got together to make a recording that was issued on Ben Bagley's Painted Smiles label. Masiell died shortly before the album was made, so Brown himself sings Masiell's two songs on the recording. But like the Grand Hotel cast album, which features a bonus track of the late David Carroll singing his big solo, the Different Times album includes a demo of Masiell singing some of "I'm Not Through."
Different Times has never made it to CD, so its cast recording is in danger of becoming as forgotten as the show it preserved.
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