79. We Died in Philadelphia

Transcript

[AITH OPENING MUSIC]

Welcome once again to Adventures in Theater History! Here on this show we bring you the best stories from the deep and fascinating history of theater in the city of Philadelphia. I’m your host Peter Schmitz. Our original opening and closing theme music is composed by Christopher Mark Colucci. This is the last big narrative of our Season Three, so let me play, for the last time, Chris’ theme music for “The Tryout Town.”

[TRYOUT TOWN THEME MUSIC]

In this particular story arc, as I promised, I’m going to cover the commercial theater productions that came through Philadelphia in the years 1960 to 1979, and I’ll try to connect their story to that of the city itself, as well as larger trends in American theater history. Now, let me say, right at the top, that in order to keep this show from becoming a daunting marathon for our listeners, I’m going to divide this topic into two parts - so this is Episode 79, Part One, which covers mostly the 1960s, and almost immediately afterwards I’m going to release Episode 80 Part Two, about the 1970s. So when we get to the end of Part One just keep listening to the feed and if you want to keep going - but if you need to take a break from all this info - and believe me, I get it, come back when you’re ready, and we’ll wrap up the whole story in Part Two.

Throughout both parts, I am going to talk about some fun and happy and commercially successful shows that came through Philadelphia during those two decades - but, as we’ve mentioned before, during the final episodes of our Season Two, this was not really a great couple of decades for Philadelphia.

And looking through all the stories that I have collected about tryout shows in the 60s and 70s, the stories that often stuck out to me were those involving fatalities - the death of either people or shows. So that’s our theme for today - you know, there was a 1967 play by the novelist Joseph Heller called We Bombed in New Haven - it was sort of a thematic continuation of his novel Catch-22, except with the added dimension that the military pilots in the show were in a play, who did end up actually bombing the city of New Haven - along with other tryout towns famous for hosting hopeful Broadway shows.

So thinking about the shows that often ‘bombed’ here in Philly - in the usual show-biz meaning of the word - and about other catastrophes that happened during those years, I’m calling these episodes “We Died in Philadelphia.” And although matters during those years, like today, were sometimes quite serious indeed, I promise that sometimes, I’ll try to make you happy.

November 7, 1960: During what was proving to be one of the most jam-packed Philadelphia Tryout seasons ever, the Jule Styne musical Do-Re-Mi, starring the comedian Phil Silvers, rolled into town for a three-week pre-Broadway shakedown run.

It was not just a collection of sketches - the book for the show was by no less than playwright Garson Kanin. Silvers was portraying a small-time con man who tries to make it big in the music business by beginning a jukebox scam. Nancy Walker played the character of his long-suffering wife. The talented young actors John Reardon and Nancy Dussault were the ingenues.

Moreover, producer David Merrick had also signed on the lyricists Betty Comden and Adolf Green, while the sets were by the great Boris Aronson - assisted by his young protege Ming Cho Lee. Every critic remarked upon the splashy and colorful huge jukebox-themed backgrounds, as well as a "fireworks" number in which blacklight explosions lit up the stage. A nightclub number in which cutout life-size drawings of patrons helped to fill out the stage was also appreciated, especially as the actors interacted with the cutouts in conversation.

The Philadelphia critics all lauded the show - though they noted it could still use a bit of trimming. After making a few adjustments during the tryout run at the Shubert Theatre, "Do-Re-Mi" was a hit when it reached Broadway, running for 400 performances. It went on to have success in a West End production in London, too.

Today Do-Re-Mi is little remembered except as part of the slew of early 60s musicals that would soon be bypassed in style and form, as that turbulent decade continued. A 1999 semi-staged revival by the "Encores!" series failed to convince anyone of its lasting value, despite Kanin's great book.

"Make Someone Happy," at least, would go on to be a big hit for Jule Styne. The song would be covered in recordings by singers Perry Como, Jimmy Durante, Dinah Washington, Sammy Davis Jr., Barbra Streisand and Audra McDonald - as well as instrumentalists and groups like Bill Evans, The Supremes, The Four Tops - and of course Coleman Hawkins. . .

October 4, 1960: The first preview of the play Laurette at the Forrest Theatre was canceled, much to the disappointment of the many Philadelphia 'first-nighters' who had planned to see it. The star of the show, Judy Holliday, was ill, said producer Alan Pakula. But she would surely be ready to perform the next night.

There had been a lot of buzz about Laurette for months. The popular comedienne Judy Holliday, star of the hit shows (and movies) Born Yesterday and Bells Are Ringing was making her first foray into serious drama, after all. The playwright Stanley Young had adapted his script expressly for Miss Holliday. The show was about the life of the late actress Laurette Taylor - who was a big Broadway star in the 19-teens and 1920s and was best known in her day for the show Peg O’ My Heart, but who is nowadays recalled chiefly for her late-in-life success as the original Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie. For the play Laurette, the rising young director Jose Quintero had been booked to direct.

So when it was announced the opening performance was canceled, many ticket holders for Laurette looked for other shows to go to instead that Tuesday evening. But Meredith Willson’s second big show, The Unsinkable Molly Brown, over at the Shubert Theatre, was already sold out. So was Five Finger Exercise, a platy starring Jessica Tandy, down the street at the Walnut. So most people just asked for their money back, or exchanged for tickets for another night, when surely the popular and talented Judy Holliday would return to the stage to everyone’s delight.

But the performance of Laurette the next night, October 5th, was canceled as well. Was it some internal backstage dispute? After all, it had been reported that Holliday had been fighting with Jose Quintero - the director had walked out of rehearsals for a few days. The previous week the show had been in New Haven, and multiple scenes had been hastily cut. Was Judy Holliday refusing to perform in protest? Some news reports said she had checked out of her Philadelphia hotel She had gone to New York, reported other national gossip columnists.

But it turned out that Judy Holliday was, in fact, not angry but quite ill. She had a persistent cough and her delightful voice was getting, well, quite raspy. "Bronchitis," read the first newspaper stories about her troubles - perhaps the 39 year-old star would be able to recover soon. Then subsequent articles revealed that Holliday - who was, admittedly, a heavy smoker - had a small tumor in her throat, which had been removed in a hastily arranged operation in a New York hospital. The growth was benign, said the initial reports, relieved. But the actress never returned to the stage. And the Forrest Theatre was dark for the next three weeks, and the cast and crew of Laurette were let go to find other work.

The production never played in Philadelphia, or anywhere else. The producers collected on the $100,000 insurance policy they had taken out on the star, and closed the show down completely. Because they had collected the insurance money, the producers could not continue the project as "Laurette" after that. Eventually, however, they took the same source material - the biography of Taylor written by her daughter Margaret Courtney - and turned it instead into a fictionalized musical based on her, with a book by Arnold Schulman, music by Arthur Schwartz and lyrics by Howard Dietz. It was called Jennie and was crafted as a vehicle for the actress Mary Martin. Jennie had a rocky out-of-town tryout, too, but at least made it to New York. However, it got bad reviews, and only ran about two months in late 1963 - it is considered Mary Martin's worst flop, ever, in fact.

Judy Holliday, for her part, continued to battle throat cancer for the next five years, before succumbing to the disease in June of 1965, two weeks short of her 44th birthday.

February 3, 1961: In the morning, it seemed that Neil Simon, writer for the TV hit Your Show of Shows had the first success of his playwriting career playing at the Walnut Street Theatre, despite rather tepid reviews of the previous night’s opening - and a fatality during the first act.

Simon's Come Blow Your Horn had its first tryout at the Bucks County Playhouse north of Philadelphia in August of 1960. It was the story of a New York single man in his 30s who is still living a swinging social life, much to the annoyance of his father, a manufacturer of waxed fruit. “You can be a bachelor up to 27, 28, even 29. But after 30 if you’re not married, you’re a bum!”

Audience and critical reception was encouraging, so by November of 1960 Michael Ellis, the director of the Bucks County Playhouse and William Hammerstein, Jr. planned to take the show to Broadway. An 'angel's audition' for potential backers was held at the Philadelphia Art Alliance on S. 18th St on December 16th, with Ellis and director Stanley Prager reading all the parts.

By January, though, the cast of actors had been assembled, including Hal March and Warren Berlinger as the two brothers Buddy and Alan Baker, and Sarah Marshall as Connie Dayton. Character actors Lou Jacobi, Arlene Golonka, and Pert Kelton rounded out the company. The Walnut Street Theatre was booked from the Shuberts for a pre-Broadway tryout run. A cartoon in the Philadelphia Inquirer by Doug Anderson shows the cast, with Marshall’s pearls swinging and March ogling her.

The first preview performance at the Walnut on Wednesday was almost derailed by a tragedy in the audience, Simon later recalled. "Twenty minutes into the play, we heard a woman scream from upstairs, 'Harry!! Harry!! Oh my God, help me someone!!' Then came the hustle and bustle of feet running upstairs and downstairs, ushers scattering everywhere. Most people, not knowing the seriousness of the screams, looked up into the balcony annoyed, thinking it was a family squabble or the misbehavior of an out of control drunk. Poor Harry died of a heart attack in the upstairs lounge, despite the efforts of the paramedics, who soon whisked Harry and his bereaved wife into a waiting ambulance. Somehow the play carried on, missing only a few beats before laughter replaced tragedy." (Thus, Neil Simon. But judging from local obituary notices, when I went to see who this “Harry” could be, I believe the unfortunate Philadelphia theatergoer that night was a man named Harry C. Denner. May he rest in peace)

Well, despite this inauspicious beginning, during the preview week and on its opening night on Thursday, audiences in Philadelphia loved the play, and on the whole Philly critics praised it. "In the three and a half weeks we played Philadelphia, we were a virtual sellout," recalled Simon, gratefully. "We had a hit. A huge hit. In Philadelphia, that is."

Because when the show moved on to the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in New York, Simon was bruised by the reception of all the New York critics such as, for example, Walter Kerr, who disliked it - despite acknowledging the gales of laughter all around him in the audience. Nevertheless, Come Blow Your Horn ran for nearly two years on Broadway, and launched the young Neil Simon’s theatrical career. And producers were further confirmed in their view that Philadelphia audiences remained the best predictor of any show's long-term success.

October 2, 1961: A Shot in the Dark, a comic mystery play, began its pre-Broadway tryout run at the Walnut Street Theatre. It was to be a star vehicle for Julie Harris. In fact, as advertised on all the posters, there were a lot of notable names involved in the project. Harold Clurman was the director, and the producer was Leland Hayward. Donald Cook, a distinguished Hollywood and Broadway actor, was featured in the role of "Benjamin Beaurevere.” William Shatner, Louise Troy and Gene Saks were also in the cast.

Based on the French mystery/farce L'Idiote by Marcel Achard, it had been adapted into an American setting by one of the most experienced writers in the business in those days, Philadelphia native Harry Kurnitz.

A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Harry Kurnitz was a former book critic for the Philadelphia Record and a mystery novelist - who wrote under the name “Marco Page.” By 1961, of course, Kurnitz had long ago left Philadelphia behind for Hollywood, where he worked turning out dozens of MGM screenplays for stars such as Errol Flynn, William Powell, Myrna Loy and Keenan Wynn. (Most of these screenplays had either a mystery or a comedy plot, or both.) Kurnitz was famous in Los Angeles as a wit and raconteur - the sort of guy who hung out late at night with Humphrey Bogart, Laruen Bacall and Frank Sinatra in the original group who called themselves "The Rat Pack".

A Shot in the Dark had first tried out at the Shubert Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, and all was going well for the experienced cast of actors. But just before the Saturday matinee in New Haven, Donald Cook had suddenly died of a heart attack. Amazingly, the show still went on in Philadelphia with his understudy, Joel Thomas, now picking up the role. Though Cook's name was still on the posters and all the publicity material, Joel Thomas stayed in that role for the first few shows in Philadelphia, and received strong notices from the critics.

However, on the opening night of the show, the Philadelphia Daily News reported Walter Matthau was sitting in the front row at the Walnut Street Theatre, watching the show and taking notes. He would in fact take over the leading role by the end of the week. And when the production got to New York, the role would win Matthau a Tony Award for Featured Actor in a Play.

January 20, 1962: The Umbrella, a play by the French writer Bertrand Castelli, had its opening night at the Locust Street Theatre.

The Umbrella took place in a post-nuclear dystopia, the production's stunning set design, by Rouben Ten-Arutunian, had a translucent plastic curtain, and a raked stage with a bathtub on one side, a harmonium on the other, a smashed taxicab in the middle, a 40-foot telephone pole, slanting away to one side and slanting catwalks above that, and a huge sewer pipe gaping upstage. The lighting and sound equipment were all visible too, and openly operated by the stage crew.

It was an innovative project stylistically for Philadelphia audiences. The Umbrella was staged in the new Absurdist/Brechtian manner. It was a presage of the method of European-style staging that would soon become widespread in American theater, and that would seem quite familiar to all of us today. However, this type of staging did not go over well with the 1962 Philadelphia crowd on opening night, or with the critics.

“There are many puzzling elements in this drama of unlimited time,” wrote Henry Murdock in the Inquirer. “We are not sure whether they contain cryptic messages or are merely loose ends.” He also felt that stage hands visibly climbing the flies, and pulling curtain ropes, and walking light bridges and manipulating the sound equipment in a kind of Constructivist ballet d’action were “intriguing at first, [but] the idea later becomes obstructive”

And according to a review - again by Jerry Gaghan in the Daily News, the whole show "left a sizable proportion of the audience mystified." Gaghan allowed that it was excellently designed and acted, but that "it was one of those anti-form projects that manages to be so formless that the customers do not know whether the show has ended."

The production did not move, as originally planned, to New York, and died in Philadelphia.

January 21, 1963: At the Erlanger Theatre in Philadelphia, the celebrated English actress Vivien Leigh - famous for her film roles as Scarlett O’Hara and Blanche Dubois - made an appearance in a world premiere debut in the pre-Broadway tryout run of the musical Tovarich, a show set in Paris of the 1920s. Her co-star was the French actor and war hero Jean Pierre Aumont.

The international flavor of these actors’ collaboration suited the project well. Vivien Leigh was portraying the Grand Duchess Tatiana Petrovna and Aumont was her royal consort, Prince Mikail Alexandrovich Ouratieff. The couple supposedly had fled Russia during the Revolution, and had been entrusted with a huge pile of the Czar’s money which they were loyally guarding, with hopes of a Romanoff restoration to the Imperial throne. Refusing, in fact, to spend any of their hoard, they have instead taken the position of domestics in the household of an American oil millionaire, where the charming couple became the objects of romantic fascination for the younger members of the family.

Tovarich had originally been a 1933 French comedy by the playwright Jacques Deval, and it had been successfully adapted for the Broadway stage by the American playwright Robert Sherwood in 1935. But now it had music by Lee Pockriss and lyrics by Anne Croswell (now you’ve never heard of them, and neither have I up till now, their only previous credit was the off-Broadway show called Earnest in Love).

If the casting of two decidedly non-singing European stars seemed a risky decision for an American musical, the producers cited the recent examples of Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, and Robert Preston in The Music Man. Audiences didn’t just want to sit back and wait for the songs to be sung pretty, they wanted Stars That Could Act.

But the producers were publicly mum about the risk they were taking with the health of their big star, Vivien Leigh. Amongst people in the show-business industry, at least, Vivian Leigh’s ongoing battle with manic depression made her a particular risky proposition. Her marriage to Laurence Olivier had recently ended in flames, and many people who had worked with Leigh during the 1950s had seen her in some of her worst moments. But a recent tour of Australia had done much to restore the actress’s reputation.

Now the prospect of seeing Vivien Leigh in a major stage production again had certainly made many of her friends and supporters rally round to see her on the opening night in Philadelphia. Local hotels were hosting such luminaries as Noel Coward, Garson Kanin, Ruth Gordon, and Sir John Gielgud. The Western Union office at 11th and Locust Streets was flooded with hundreds of telegrams from around the world.

The Philadelphia critics went wild for her too after opening night. “Vivien Leigh is one of Nature’s works of art,” enthused Ernest Scheier in the Bulletin - Scheier wrote Leigh was a “vivacious, dancing, singing doll” and the show was a “happy, handsome production.”

In the Inquirer, Henry Murdock was more restrained about the show, declaring that it really might have been better just to do the original play without the interpolated musical numbers. And though he thought as a singer Vivien Leigh was “less than persuasive,” she was “warm and commanding” in the role overall, and the extravagant comedy of her dancing in such numbers as “Wilkes-Barre, PA” were delightful. Murdock also judged that Jean-Phillipe Aumont had “subdued vocals” but at least “he has the grace of portrayal that could carry the show without its music.”

The production made its way to Broadway in March of 1963, right afterwards. Despite the lack of Manhattan press attention, due to the ongoing newspaper strike of that year, a performance by Vivien Leigh and the young actor Byron Mitchell on The Ed Sullivan Show singing an ode to that little Pennsylvania city north of Philly “Wilkes-Barre PA” did much to publicize Tovarich to the general public. It became a hit with audiences and Vivien Leigh won that season’s Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical.

February 24, 1964: Barbra Streisand, Angela Lansbury and Lee Remick were all in town, in two competing shows in Philadelphia’s in Philadelphia’s two largest commercial houses. Streisand's pre-Broadway production of Jule Stein's Funny Girl was at the Erlanger Theatre on Market Street, and Remick and Lansbury were coming to the Forrest Theatre on Walnut Street with Stephen Sondheim’s first musical, Anyone Can Whistle.

Interestingly, Barbra Streisand had been offered the role of Fay Apple in Sondheim’s musical, but she had turned it down to do Funny Girl instead, so the part went to Lee Remick. Both actresses were hoping for long runs and a big success with their respective shows. "I've cleared my schedule so I can stay with Anyone Can Whistle for a year and a half," Remick told the Philadelphia Inquirer in an interview.

Funny Girl’s creators, for their part, kept it in Philadelphia while they made extensive changes to the book and score. Its move to New York was delayed five times. Numbers were added and numerous script changes were made. Barbra Streisand was reportedly unhappy with the director Garson Kanin and wanted choreographer Jerome Robbins (who had quit the project earlier) to come back. Barbra had already recorded and released the song from the show “People,” to raise interest in the musical, and the single was wildly successful on the Billboard charts - but at one point Kanin suggested cutting it from the show anyway, as being inconsistent with her character. Eventually Robbins returned, and the song stayed. Barbra Streisand got what she wanted, as she usually would do, from that point on.

Demand by Philadelphia theatergoers to see Streisand was strong throughout all these evolutions. In fact, as the Philadelphia Daily News joked, if they could just get Eagles quarterback Norm Van Brocklin to star opposite her, the show might never have to leave town. Eventually Funny Girl stayed so long in Philadelphia it had to relocate from the Forrest Theatre to the Erlanger Theatre, in order to make way for the incoming Sondheim show, whose producers had already been promised the house.

Both shows made their expected moves to New York a few weeks later. Anyone Can Whistle, unfortunately, got very tepid reviews from Broadway critics, and it closed after only a brief run.

Perhaps Streisand’s show benefited more from the long pre-Broadway shakedown period in Philadelphia. Though New York critics still had doubts about that book too. That production ran for three years (still selling quite well even after Streisand left the show), and was eventually made into a Hollywood film that would launch Streisand to international stardom.

Speaking of hits . . . On April 4, 1966: The Jerry Herman musical Mame, starring Angela Lansbury, had its world premiere opening performance at the Shubert Theatre in Philadelphia. Along with Sweet Charity, which had premiered in the same house just a few months earlier, It was one of the most successful musicals ever to get its start in Philadelphia, but we are going to pass it by, quickly, for the moment - now don’t worry, it’s gonna come back again, in another episode. But we’re going to move on instead to a show you might not have heard of . . .

October 15, 1966: Holly Golightly, a musical comedy based on Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany’s had its Saturday night press premiere in a pre-Broadway run at the Forrest Theatre. The music and lyrics were by Bob Merrill and the book was by Abe Burrows, who as you may recall has also written Guys and Dolls.. The dances were staged by Michael Kidd and the sets were by Oliver Smith.

Most notably, Holly Golightly had two young TV stars in the leading roles: Mary Tyler Moore as Holly and Richard Chamberlain as Jeff. And Sally Kellerman made her Philadelphia stage debut in the role of "Meg Wildwood."

Philadelphia audiences would have been familiar with the story, of course, because Capote's novella had been freely adapted for the hit 1961 movie starring Audrey Hepburn already. But with such a star-studded cast and creative team, there were many inducements to come to the Forrest Theatre and check out what Holly Golightly was like on the stage.

However, the Philadelphia run was a disaster. Mary Tyler Moore was struggling with a cold and the creative team was struggling with the always mercurial producer David Merrick. At first Merrick refused to let critics even see the show, and when he finally did, he instantly regretted it.

Barbara Wilson, of the Philadelphia Inquirer, opened her review, for instance, with a full-bore blast: "While trying to be attentive to Holly Golightly at Saturday evening's press premiere - after a week of suddenly announced and fully priced previews -- a thought kept re-occurring: What did producer David Merrick hope to gain by bringing this property to the theater? . . The show that lurches about the Forrest stage comes close to being a totally unsatisfactory adaptation of Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. . . This is like having a reunion with a cherished friend and realizing she isn't as you remembered: being disappointed and finally resenting the who and what responsible for the change."

The show would nonetheless lurch on to Boston for a further round of trial runs and rewrites. It even went back to the title Breakfast at Tiffany’s. At one point, amazingly, the young playwright Edward Albee was brought in to replace Burroughs as the book writer.

In the end, nothing worked. Merrick would have been wise to listen to the Philadelphia critics, and close the show out of town. It was scheduled to open at the Majestic Theatre on December 26th, 1966, but didn't make it past its third preview, costing its investors a $400,000 loss - for what at first glance must have seemed like a sure thing.

There are some amazing photographs, taken by the Friedman-Abeles Studio, in the collection of the New York Public Library. I will post them on the blog post for this episode. Ah well, at least that's one thing we've got.

October 14, 1968: The Forrest Theatre, once again, hosted the pre-Broadway world premiere tryout of Jimmy Shine, a play by Murray Schisgal, with music by John Sebastian of The Loving Spoonful.

The star of Jimmy Shine . . . now wait for it . . . was Dustin Hoffman, fresh off his success in the 1967 film The Graduate. Hoffman had earned an Academy Award nomination for his performance in the Graduate, but he hadn’t been paid very well for it. In fact, it had only netted him about $4,000 after taxes. He had just completed filming a movie with Jon Voigt, but that one hadn’t been released yet. Although his name was regularly appearing in Hollywood gossip columns, Hoffman was still struggling financially. He had just filed for unemployment benefits when he got cast in this show, Jimmy Shine.

Moreover, Hoffman didn’t really see himself as a movie star. He was a stage actor Only two years before, he had flown out to Fargo, North Dakota to direct two plays at a community college because he needed the money.

As the actor later recalled: "I was a theater person. That's how my friends were, too,. . . .l. I wasn't going to be a movie star. I wasn't going to sell out. We wanted to be really good actors. I told them, 'I'm going out to make this movie. Don't worry, I'm coming right back.' " True to his word, he was back on stage again - and though he was not noted for his singing voice, by god he was starring in a Broadway musical . . well, “a play with music,” anyway.

Jimmy Shine was about a struggling and confused young artist in Greenwich Village and about how he deals with all the women in his life. (And though the music showed that the basic trend of American pop music was going in a different direction than that of the past two decades, a lot of the staging and themes of Jimmy Shine interestingly were a precursor to the later Sondheim musical Company, in fact.). Also in the cast was Cleavon Little, Rose Gregorio, Pamela Payton-Wright, and Rue McClanahan. Though the reviews in Philadelphia were mixed, the show went on to further previews in Baltimore, and then to New York, where it ran a very respectable four months, and earned Hoffman a Drama Desk Award.

Later that same year, Hoffman’s performance in that film he had previously shot with Jon Voigt, something called Midnight Cowboy, brought him such fame he could not afford to go back to the stage for many years afterwards. However, in 1982 Schisgal and co-author Larry Gelbart would write the screenplay of Hoffman's film Tootsie - which, interestingly, was about a struggling theater actor in New York who couldn’t seem to catch a break.

December 30, 1969: The national touring production of the Kander and Ebb musical Zorba opened at the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia. In the company were John Raitt as Zorba, Barbara Baxley as Hortense, and Chita Rivera in the role of "The Leader" of a circle of bouzouki players.

Adapted from a 1946 novel Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis, the story of an elderly Greek who takes a young American under his wing, as they both look for love on the island of Crete was no doubt familiar to those Philadelphians who had seen the 1964 movie of the same name. That movie had been adapted into a musical by the same creative team that had recently had a hit with Cabaret - including John Kander and Fred Ebb, and designer Boris Aronson, and director/producer Harold Prince.

But this was a somewhat different version of the show than had recently closed after a year on Broadway starring Herschel Bernardi. Unlike many post-Broadway touring productions, the scenery for this show in Philadelphia was even more elaborate than the original one in New York. A new song, "Bouboulina," had been added to showcase John Raitt's famously sumptuous baritone voice. And best of all, perhaps, Chita Rivera had finally joined the cast - as the director had always wanted. (Although she had been asked to be in the Broadway version, she had turned it down at the time to pursue projects nearer to her family, in her new home in California.)

Amazingly, she had learned the part in Zorba in just ten days, right after the closing of that show called 1491 in San Francisco. "Don't ask me how I did it," she said in an interview. "But I tell you, it has been an experience and a half. . . . I must admit that I didn't think I'd be this excited about the role because it had been done before, but now I consider it my own. It really is as exciting to me as West Side Story."

An extra enticement, perhaps, was that Harold Prince has also hired Chita Rivera's 11-year-old daughter Lisa to be in the show. The only child in the company, Lisa got the thrill every performance of riding on a table that was carried around the stage in the teeth of dancer John LaMotta, whirling her around the stage.

The production of Zorba got fine reviews from the Philadelphia critics. Ernest Scheier in the Bulletin called Zorba "one of the best musicals of the decade." Charles Fetzold, writing in the Daily News, called Raitt "lusty and likeable" and termed Barbara Baxley "a delight." While in separate reviews in the Inquirer, Barbara Wilson and William Collins cheered especially for Chita Rivera. Her "sensational performance," wrote Collins, "gives the show the fire [that] it lacked in New York."

"Prince has not stinted on this production," concluded Collins. "But, then, he never does. He seems to have the odd idea that cities like Philadelphia are entitled to standards of staging as high as those which prevail in New York."

Okay, that's a fitting way to end Part One of this topic “We Died in Philadelphia” - with a song about Life and Death. Here’s where I will take a break. Stay tuned for Part Two, which I’ll get on to the podcast feed just as soon as I can. As always, there's a blog post on our website www.aithpodcast.com, that has images and extra information about the plays we’ve covered today. See you soon, as we continue this thrilling and chilling double Adventure in Theater History: Philadelphia!

79. We Died in Philadelphia - Part One

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