Looking Back: '75-'76
Chicago opened at the 46th Street Theatre on June 1, 1975, to very mixed reviews. Two blocks down, A Chorus Line took over the Shubert on July 25, having already begun its triumphant life downtown at the Public Theatre.
Given the talent involved in Chicago, I eagerly awaited its New York arrival, and made sure to attend the first local preview. When the stage elevator the one that brought Chita Rivera shooting up through the floor at the beginning of the evening jammed during intermission, director Bob Fosse was forced to come out on stage and inform the audience that the performance could not continue. I was obliged to return to the 46th Street Theatre box office the next day to exchange my ticket for another performance, frustrated at having seen only one act of a fascinating show.
I caught two more preview performances, and it wasn't until the final one that the role of theatrical agent Henry Glassman, played by David Rounds, was eliminated and more or less combined with that of Mama Morton, who had gotten a new song during previews, "When You're Good to Mama," replacing Henry's number, "Ten Percent."
Because I realized how potent was the combination of the musical theatre's two premiere dancing comediennes, I attended Chicago that season more than I attended A Chorus Line, which one suspected would be sticking around. True, A Chorus Line also boasted an incomparable original cast. Yet something told me that it was more important to catch the Verdon-Rivera pairing, and I was right---Chicago would be Verdon's last Broadway musical.
'75-'76 also went down in history for a musician's strike which shut down every Broadway musical from September 18 to October 13. While A Chorus Line had resumed performances on Broadway in July, it had chosen to have its official uptown re-opening on September 25. But the strike intervened, and the second opening didn't take place until October 19. By that time, I'd twice purchased $5 standing room at the Shubert. Because the show was always sold out, you could purchase standing room in advance, and it sold rapidly. I had seen A Chorus Line at the Public and been bowled over by it. But the show was just as exciting in a theatre with five times the seating capacity of the Public/Newman.
If the spring and summer of '75 are inextricably linked to A Chorus Line and Chicago, that summer also yielded George C. Scott, superb in a Circle in the Square Death of a Salesman. A much less happy revival was a one-week The Skin of Our Teeth; Elizabeth Ashley's Sabina was all you could ask for, and Alfred Drake played Mr. Antrobus, but Thornton Wilder's play had begun to date, or at least it seemed so in an uncomfortable staging.
Also forced to postpone its Broadway opening because of the strike, the fall season's first new musical was actually an old opera by Scott Joplin, Treemonisha, having its New York premiere at the Uris now the Gershwin Theatre, then moving on to the Palace. I made certain to catch a performance featuring the acclaimed Carmen Balthrop in the title role, thus avoiding her matinee alternate, Kathleen Battle, who, as it turned out, went on to a much bigger career than Balthrop. I failed to catch the musical Truckload, which beat the musician's strike by beginning previews at the Lyceum Theatre on September 6 and closing in previews on September 11.
It was nice to see Follies diva Alexis Smith on Broadway again, ably portraying spinster schoolteacher Rosemary in Summer Brave, an alternate version of William Inge's '50s hit Picnic. Playing the hunky leading role of Hal was Ernest Thompson, author of On Golden Pond. A few days later saw the arrival of the season's most acclaimed and award-winning new play, Travesties. It featured a knockout performance from John Wood, but marked the moment in time when Tom Stoppard's works became somewhat too rarefied for general audiences. What with the failure of the recent Broadway revival of Jumpers, I suspect that Travesties, for all of its original acclaim, would prove a tough sell in revival. A few nights later, Robert Patrick's Kennedy's Children offered haunting monologues by some denizens of a lower East Side bar.
The original production of Hello, Dolly! had left us as recently as late 1970. But a touring revival starring Pearl Bailey stopped at the Minskoff in November 1975. The physical production was inferior to the original, and Bailey, recreating the role she had triumphantly played in the original, couldn't resist dropping out of character here and there for ad-libs, even repeating the whole title number when audience reaction warranted. But Bailey was the sort of performer who could get away with anything; if her performance was shameless, it was also full of showmanship.
A curious musical enterprise arrived later that month. Entitled A Musical Jubilee, the revue was something of a history of American song, wasting a glamorous cast including Tammy Grimes, John Raitt, Larry Kert, Cyril Ritchard, and Patrice Munsel.
I had been so taken with Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests in London that I had attended all three interlocked plays of the trilogy within ten days. While the Broadway cast was filled with skilled farceurs Barry Nelson, Carole Shelley, Ken Howard, Estelle Parsons, Richard Benjamin, Paula Prentiss, the New York company wasn't as comfortable in the material, so I only attended one of the three evenings on Broadway. Another London comedy, Alan Bennett's Habeus Corpus, suffered even more in its Broadway translation, even with Donald Sinden, Celeste Holm, and June Havoc. Rachel Roberts, however, was a scream as a sex-starved wife.
Circle in the Square's The Glass Menagerie starred Maureen Stapleton, whose Amanda in a Broadway revival ten years earlier had been a beauty. This time out, the performance had grown broader and coarser. David Merrick imported from the Goodspeed Opera House a keen little revival of one of the Princess Theatre musicals, Jerome Kern's Very Good Eddie. I can still recall Janet Leigh wishing the audience a merry Christmas at the curtain call of the Christmas eve preview I caught of the mediocre thriller Murder Among Friends, which also boasted Jack Cassidy.
The beginning of the bicentennial year brought in two musicals, one a camp hoot, the other fascinating. The silly item was Yul Brynner in Home Sweet Homer, with Albert Marre, Mitch Leigh, and Joan Diener in high-gear flop mode. As always with Leigh failures, there were some attractive tunes; a cast recording would have been fun, but it was not to be. This was still a time of one-performance musicals, and Homer departed the Palace after a single showing.
The other musical was Pacific Overtures, which remains one of the most rigorously challenging pieces ever presented in a Broadway commercial production. Only Prince and Sondheim would have conceived of a show in which the subject matter was the opening of Japan to Western influence, then related that story employing the techniques of Kabuki theatre.
Given the Sondheim-Prince track record, some friends and I traveled to Boston to attend the first preview, which left us intrigued but bewildered. We couldn't imagine the show turning into a commercial success, and we weren't wrong. The production was sharpened during the Boston run, for at the first Broadway preview, Pacific Overtures was playing a great deal better. Still, the show was obviously not for everyone, and was fortunate to get through almost 200 performances before departing in June. I did not fully appreciate Pacific Overtures until I caught it a third time, at a matinee the day before it closed.
In June 1975, a young man named Christopher Reeve had appeared in a brief off-Broadway engagement of Berkeley Square. He got hired in the winter for a more high-profile assignment, Katharine Hepburn's return to Broadway in the high comedy A Matter of Gravity. The wispy, whimsical play was something of a trial to sit through, but Hepburn was always galvanizing to watch. Her presence got Gravity through a limited engagement of three months.
One of the most singular afternoons I've ever spent in the theatre was at something called Me Jack, You Jill. a four-character, would-be suspense play set on the empty stage of a theatre. Distinguished actresses Sylvia Sidney, Barbara Baxley, and Lisa Kirk co-starred, and the play by one Robes Kossez was so bad that the audience began to talk back to the actors. At one point, when one of the characters announced her threat to close the play-within-a-play, the audience applauded. Me Jack, You Jill shuttered in previews, wisely avoiding perusal by drama critics.
No fan of rock musicals, I skipped Rockabye Hamlet. That was a mistake, especially considering that the Canadian import had been spruced up for Broadway by director-choreographer Gower Champion. March's two big musicals were the entertaining Harlem revue Bubbling Brown Sugar, with choice work from Josephine Premice and Vivian Reed, and the twentieth-anniversary revival of My Fair Lady. The latter managed a year's run, and was distinguished by a terrific Higgins from English actor Ian Richardson, along with a solid if not fully realized Eliza from newcomer Christine Andreas. The results of that year's Tony competition in the male-lead musical category remain odd: Jerry Orbach Chicago, Mako Pacific Overtures, and Richardson somehow lost to George Rose, who was playing the obviously supporting Fair Lady role of Doolittle and would, one suspects, have lost to A Chorus Line's Sammy Williams had he been nominated in the supporting category.
The first revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? co-starred top-notch actors Ben Gazzara and Colleen Dewhurst, but author and director Edward Albee placed too much emphasis on the comic aspects of the piece and lost some of the scalding heat of his text. Reviews were good, but it was perhaps too soon for a Broadway return, the result running only four months. A revival of The Heiress co-starring Jane Alexander and Richard Kiley was not bad but lasted only three weeks; the play would have to wait for its moment until the excellent Lincoln Center Theatre revival with Cherry Jones. But Julie Harris managed to transcend a somewhat ordinary text to make her solo show about poet Emily Dickinson, The Belle of Amherst, into something memorable.
Next was the fascinating, disastrous 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, a colossal bicentennial botch with a gorgeous score Leonard Bernstein's last for Broadway and a glorious performance by Patricia Routledge as a number of U.S. first ladies. 1600 was one of the most collectible flops of all time. I saw it first in Philadelphia, where it was already a muddle but still seemed full of promise. By the time I attended a New York preview, it was obvious that changes of personnel had helped matters not at all, and that things were pretty hopeless. I well recall the profound disappointment of a benefit audience who had arrived at the Mark Hellinger expecting big things from the great Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner.
The fourth musical was a little one, Something's Afoot, a routine spoof of Agatha Christie whodunits that had a life after its two-month Broadway run. Gary Beach was prominent in the cast, but the star was English music-hall rowdy Tessie O'Shea.
And let's not forget to mention Joe Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival productions at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theatre. Meryl Streep was among the company of a charming Trelawny of the Wells. Veteran Ruth Gordon opened to negative reviews in Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, causing Edward Herrmann to pay tribute to her courage in his Tony acceptance speech. And late in the season, there was Richard Foreman's chilly but striking Threepenny Opera, with a well-cast Raul Julia supported by good work from Ellen Greene, Blair Brown, and Elizabeth Wilson. Also presented by the Shakespeare Festival at Lincoln Center was the season's strongest play, David Rabe's Streamers, directed by Mike Nichols. But Streamers remained downstairs, at the Mitzi E. Newhouse, for a year, and did not move to Broadway.