80. We Died in Philadelphia

Transcript

Hello and welcome back to Adventures in Theater History - this is the second part of our two-part episode entitled “We Died in Philadelphia,” about commercial theatrical productions that came through the City of Brotherly Love in the 1960s and 70s. Now this was a difficult time for Philadelphia to say the least - just as it was a challenging time for America, with an endless and bloody war abroad and new social mores challenging people at home - and sometimes literally challenging, as different groups stood up to be counted and respected - civil rights, gay rights, women’s rights - and also the rights of Asian American actors to portray Asian roles onstage, and to end the long standing theatrical we know know as “yellow face”

August 19, 1970: Lovely Ladies, Kind Gentlemen was a musical adaptation of the successful 1953 John Patrick comedy Teahouse of the August Moon, which was set on the island of Okinawa. The play was made into a movie in 1956, with actor Marlon Brando playing the role of the narrator, Sakini. Now the playwright, John Patrick, had fulfilled his long standing ambition of making a musical out of his play, working with the songwriting team of Stan Freeman and Frank Underwood. It was widely anticipated by Broadway insiders as being a potential smash hit of the coming season. After several weeks of rehearsals in New York, it was making its initial “try out" in Philadelphia.

But as the audience members made their way to the theater, out in front of it, on the sidewalk, one man stood with long, flowing hair, quietly handing out leaflets. Other protestors marched in a small circle, carrying signs saying that Asian roles should have Asian actors in them. "We Believe Tokenism is Not Equality," read one sign. "Oriental Actors for Oriental Roles," read another. Raymond F. Stubblebine, a staff photographer for the Evening Bulletin, snapped photos of the protests, while a colleague of his, Wayne Robinson, went inside to review the evening's performance.

True, there were a few Asian performers in the cast of Lovely Ladies Kind Gentlemen, and the Filipina/Canadian actress Eleanor Calbes performed the role of the Geisha in the show, who was given the name Lotus Blossom. But the role of Sakini, the narrator, was played by a white actor, Kenneth Nelson (perhaps best known for being in the original cast of the groundbreaking play about gay life, The Boys in the Band). Ron Husman played the role of Captain Fisby, and Remak Ramsay was a goofy Army psychologist.

The next day, Wayne Robinson’s Bulletin review decreed the show looked like a hit to him. In the Inquirer, William Collins mostly agreed - although he praised the show, he did feel the music was only “serviceable.” However, he added: “The opening night audience was treated to a bit of street theater on their way in. A group representing the Oriental Actors of America picketed on the sidewalk in front of the Shubert with a dragon dance and placards alleging discrimination in the casting of the show, a charge producer Herman Levin emphatically denies.”

After an initial run in Philadelphia, the production went to both LA and San Francisco, before opening at the Majestic Theatre in New York on December 28th, 1970. Demonstrators again protested in front of the theater on its opening night. The show was not a success, and closed in three weeks.

March 12, 1971: Now, there are times in this episode when the title becomes literal, and not metaphorical at all - do any of you remember from our episode about the novel 42nd Street - when an elderly member of the cast - of the fictional show - died on the stage? Well that happened in Philadelphia - and unfortunately it happened to the actor David Burns, on a stage in Philadelphia, where Burns had just fourteen years earlier appeared as Mayor Shinn in the world premiere of The Music Man. Here’s the story by journalist Barbara Wilson, as it appeared in the next day’s Inquirer:

“70, Girls, 70, [the musical about a group of senior citizens who enter into a life of crime,] closed here Saturday night and unexpectedly headed early for Broadway, minus one of its stars, David Burns, who collapsed and died during a performance on Friday. The show will go into rehearsal at 1 pm on Monday [at] New York’s Majestic Theatre.

“Burns . . . collapsed at the end of the second act of the new show Friday night at the Forrest. He had just finished a rather strenuous dance step during a number called “Go Visit Your Grandmother.” [He had just gotten the biggest laugh of the evening.] The Audience was applauding the number when Burns fell to the stage. He was carried into the wings by two stagehands. Oxygen was administered, then mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Actress Lillian Roth took Burns’ lines for the remaining 10 minutes of the two-act play.”

“[Producer Arthur Whitelaw was quoted as saying ‘David Burns died the way he would have wanted’, and]. . .described [him] as being in perfect health before the performance. . .[‘We’ve lost a good friend and a major asset to the theater.]’”

“The musical [70, Girls, 70 . . thus abruptly pulled the curtain on a Philadelphia tryout at the Forrest Theater which began March 2nd. The show will be given previews beginning March 29 until its April 15 opening . . .”

January 28, 1975: Odyssey, a new musical starring Yul Brynner and Joan Diener, opened at the Erlanger Theatre, after an initial stop in Cleveland, Ohio.

The show Odyssey was based on the adventures of Odysseus in Homer's ancient epic poem. The author of the modern book of the show was Erich Segal, professor of Classics at Yale University - perhaps better known as the author of the best-selling novel Love Story, which was then made into a popular movie. Erich Segal also wrote the lyrics to the songs.

The music for Odyssey was by the composer Mitch Leigh, who once again was teaming up with director Albert Marre, hoping to recreate the success that they and Joan Diener had with Man of La Mancha in the previous decade. (This despite the disaster of their musical Cry for Us All which had closed on Broadway after seven performances in 1970.)

Despite deeply discouraging reviews in Philadelphia, the show was wildly successful with Philadelphia audiences. 60,000 people saw the show at the Erlanger over the course of a four–week run.

The production itself was on an epic journey. After leaving Philadelphia it toured the country from coast to coast. Numbers were added and dropped. Costumes were changed. Cast members were fired. The number we’re listening to in the background now is Diener singing a song from the show called “He Will Come Home Again.” There was no official recording of the score - this is from a bootleg tape that was made by a member of the audience

Brynner had cleared his schedule for 20 months to take on this project, which he hoped would re-establish his theater credentials. Amazingly, he had not really appeared onstage since his success with The King and I in 1951.

In an interview as the show was playing San Francisco, Brynner vented to a journalist about the experience. Audiences in every city, he claimed, had loved the show, but critics hated it. He attributed the shows critical failures to two things:

"One, you're always in trouble when you try to adapt a classic. The critics don't bother to read the classic, and they attack you for reasons that aren't valid."

"Two, the fact that Erich Segal wrote the script causes an automatic adverse reaction. Why? Because he made such an ass of himself after 'Love Story.'"

After that failed run of Odyssey in Los Angeles, Professor Erich Segal asked that his name be taken off the show. All his lyrics were replaced. It also got a new title. As Home Sweet Homer, I’m sorry to say. The production finally reached the Palace Theatre in New York in January of 1976.

It had only one performance. The closing notice went up on the call board before the final curtain fell. It turned out that the show’s high point had been back in Philadelphia the year before.

March 1974: Sometimes what happens in Philadelphia, stays in Philadelphia. In March of 1974, a new Michael Legrand/Hal David musical entitled Brainchild had a tryout run at the Forrest Theatre. Previews were March 22 and 23rd. Its opening was March 25th, and it ran through April 6th. It was just a developmental run - it never went much further than that.

The literal brainchild of the Boston writer and director Maxine Klein, Brainchild was about a woman who is a songwriter and is waiting for a date to show up. As she waits, she composes songs in her mind. She waits six hours, so she has time to write sixteen songs. The entire show takes place in her head, while an enthusiastic multiracial cast acted and sang the songs she thought up to pass the time.

There were no stars in this show, though the cast did include a young Dorian Harewood and Tovah Feldshuh. Philadelphia Inquirer reviewer William Collins was kind to the actors in his writeup, but he dumped cold water all over the creators' hopes for the show's future. He didn't even like the set (which was this huge head which mimicked the inside of a human brain), stating that it was "less interesting than the Walk-Through Heart at the Franklin Institute."

French composer Michel Legrand had never written a stage musical, but was famous for the movie The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Hal David, the lyricist, was well-known, for his part, for his long collaboration with composer Burt Bacharach, and had even had some success on Broadway, having written the lyrics for the 1968 musical Promises Promises, for example. But this particular venture is not listed in either man's Wikipedia biography, I will note, nor did it ever make it to its tentatively booked destination, the Ambassador Theatre on Broadway.

But some shows that tried out in Philly during that era, did just fine, in the long run. For instance:

April 8, 1975: Chicago began a four-week long shakedown stint at the Forrest Theatre in Philadelphia. During the run there was as much drama offstage as there was on it.

The Kander and Ebb musical version of the 1926 Maurine Watkins play (which had performed down the street, at the Walnut St. Theatre, almost fifty years previously) had already been in the news before it arrived in Philly. The previous year the entire production had been suspended when director and choreographer Bob Fosse had suffered a (long-predicted) heart attack.

Fosse's ex-wife Gwen Verdon - who had wanted to develop the original play into a project for herself since first reading it in 1956 - and the producers Robert Fryer and James Cresson kept the project alive. The sets by Tony Walton and Patricia Zipprodt's costumes were ready to go - but it was agreed by all that the book, largely penned by Ebb and Fosse, would need a lot of work during the Philadelphia tryout. Numbers were cut and added, lines were altered. Fosse barely left the theater, and slept on a cot backstage. The show was different every night. The initial reviews by Philadelphia critics were not entirely encouraging, but the audience for the show kept growing, and as the run went on more seats at the Forrest were filled.

Then, early during a Wednesday evening show, Gwen Verdon's character Roxie Hart had just shot her lover Fred Cassely, whose body now lay on stage. But Verdon did not re-appear for the next number. In the audience, Don Paul Shannon later recalled: “I remember hearing a scream in the blackout. Then the ambulance sirens…”

The action stopped, the orchestra was quiet, and for a few minutes the audience wondered if the actor (who remained motionless, sprawled on the floor) was really dead. Finally Fosse himself appeared, and announced that Verdon was injured, and that her understudy was being readied to go on. He looked down at the actor playing the corpse and told him it was okay to get up and leave the stage. The 'corpse' sprang to life again and made his exit, to a standing ovation from the Philadelphia audience.

Fifteen minutes later, a new and younger Roxie Hart, the Pittsburgh actress Lenora Nemetz, took over the role for the rest of the show and received another standing ovation from the admiring crowd after the finale. She played the role for the rest of the week until Verdon was able to return.

However, sometimes people fall down and they don’t get up.

September 8, 1977: In yet another all-too-true echo of that scene we talked about before from the novel 42nd Street, the famous stage and movie actor Zero Mostel died in Philadelphia just before the opening of a new play he was rehearsing at the Forrest Theatre - the same place where Judy Holiday had never gotten to open her play back in 1960, and where . The play was The Merchant, by British author Arnold Wesker - a re-telling and re-examination of Shakespeare’s play about Shylock. Now, I’m afraid I’m going to have to pass over a lot of this sad story on this episode, because I plan to cover it extensively in my upcoming book, and I don’t want to repeat myself or give away what I’m gonna share with you in print - it’s going to be published later this year by the good people at Brookline Books - I’ll talk more about it a subsequent episode!

However, I gotta tell you, it turns out that one of the most frustratingly inevitable parts of writing a book is that as soon as you send in the final edits to the publisher - no more changes from this point on, I promise - immediately you find another source, with another story, that you should have included. And folks, guess what, that just happened to me. I just today discovered that Mostel’s wife Kate - the Philadelphia born and raised dancer and actress Kathryn Harkin - had written a book in which she described Zero’s last moments on the stage. Since I completely missed using this obvious source ofr the book, I’ll try to make up for it by quoting her account here:

“Zero deeply believed in The Merchant. He loved the part, and he thought the story was important because it addressed some deep-seated issue of anti-Semitism that the Shakespeare version had perpetuated. He was looking forward to opening in Philadelphia.”

“The first run-through in Philadelphia lasted three hours and twenty minutes, and after weeks of rehearsal and the general aggravation that accompanies any play in that phase, Zero was very tired. Just before the first Saturday matinee, he was in the dressing room with Howard Rodney. In full make-up, his beard and wig in place, wearing the long robe and skullcap of Shylock, he suddenly turned to Howard and said that he didn’t feel well, that his throat felt strange, that he felt dizzy. Howard assumed that it was nerves, the usual pre-curtain tension that can make your throat tighten up. He told Zero to lie down for a while, since they still had ten minutes before the curtain went up. Zero lay down on the couch and Howard sat next to him, holding his hand, putting ice on his head–because he didn’t know what else to do.”

“The stage manager decided that a doctor should be called. He came within a few minutes and after examining Zero decided that for safety’s sake he should be checked into a hospital. There was one right across from the theater.”

And, as Kathryn Harkin goes on to tell us, Zero Mostel died a few days later, in Jefferson Hospital, of an aortic aneurysm. It was a great calamity, for him, for his family, and for the show. The remainder of the Philly tryout run of The Merchant was understandably canceled, though the producers tried to revive the project, it did not prosper later on Broadway with Mostel’s understudy in the role.

March 9, 1979: Richard Rodgers' last musical, I Remember Mama, had its first performance, in a tryout run at Philadelphia's Shubert Theatre on Broad Street. Now Rodgers was one of the most storied composers of the golden age of American musicals, and though he had outlived his former writing partners Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Rodgers had been bringing tryout shows through Philadelphia for over fifty years by this point, an amazing track record.

The original John Van Druten play that the show was based on (itself based on a memoir called "Mama's Bank Account" by Kathryn Forbes) had been a hit on Broadway in the 1940s and had come through Philadelphia on tour many times. A series of heartwarming vignettes about a Norwegian family in San Francisco, It had already been made into a movie and a TV show.

Besides Rodgers, there was a formidable creative team for this production. Thomas Meehan wrote the book, Martin Charnin supplied the lyrics, Theoni Aldredge did the costumes, and David Mitchell the spectacular sets. Graciela Daniele was the choreographer.

Most of all there was the appeal of Norwegian actress Liv Ullman in the title role. Famous for the nine films she had done with the Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, Liv Ullmann was an accomplished stage actress in Scandinavia. Also in the cast were George Hearn and George S. Irving.

Nevertheless, the show met with brutal reviews in Philadelphia, with most local critics calling its dramatic techniques trite and old-fashioned. Even Richard Rodgers' music was dismissed as "schmaltzy." Liv Ullman's singing voice was derided as woefully inadequate, and the amplification needed to boost Liv Ullman’s voice evidently did not help.

The producer Alexander Cohen tried what he called "radical surgery" to overhaul the show. Scenes were re-written, songs were re-ordered. Charnin was replaced as director by Cy Feuer, and the all-new lyrics were done by Raymond Jessel. Danny Daniels replaced Graciela Daniele as the choreographer.

So Philly critics were asked to come back again and review the show in its new form, but those who did were not mollified. In the world of A Chorus Line and Sweeney Todd and other more high-energy musicals were incorporating new musical techniques, I Remember Mama was stuck in a Broadway that had long vanished, they wrote. "'Mama' just can't get the apron off," was the headline of a review in the Inquirer.

Nonetheless, the production forged on to Majestic Theatre, where after giving 40 previews, it opened at the end of May, 1979. But New York critics were no kinder than their colleagues in Philly, however. Wrote the New York Times: "At the end of its much-postponed and choppy progress...this big and expensive musical has buried most of the strengths it possesses under a mass of cliches and a pervading, forced cuteness.... Miss Ullman is unsuited to it." In fact, in one of the cruelest three-word reviews ever delivered, show business insiders began calling it "I Dismembered Mama."

Only the massive audience pre-sale, based on the prospect of seeing Liv Ullman on stage (!) kept the show open throughout the summer, and it closed on September 2nd.

So as the decade of the 1970s ended, the number of tryout shows coming through Philadelphia were getting fewer and fewer. - HOWEVER! There was good news

One of the few exceptions to that overall trend was African American musicals and shows, which frequently came through Philadelphia because of its large population of Black theatergoers. One of these was Bubbling Brown Sugar, choreographed by North Philadelphia’s own Billy Wilson, which came through the Walnut Street Theatre in 1975. You may remember, if you’ve heard our Episode 26, that we discussed the show The Last Minstrel Show with Della Reese that came to the Locust Street Theatre in 1978, and in our Episode 65 we talked about the December 1977 holiday season world premiere of Timbuktu! The Geofrrey Holder extravaganza at the Shubert Theatre, starring Eartha Kitt. But most particularly we should acknowledge the shows that came through Philadelphia of the director and author Vinette Carrol and collaborations with the composer Micki Grant - such as this show we’re hearing now, Your Arms Too Short to Box with God - and tis rouser of a fine old gospel number, “Can’t No Grave Hold My Body Down.” But guess what - I am going to be discussing the work of Vinette Caroll in an extended conversation with the good friend of the podcast Jerrell Henderson later in July 2024. We’re both going to be busy the next couple of weeks, studying up on the subject, and we’ll be here to talk about all that we’ve learned. Vinette Carrol is one of Jerrell’s favorite topics in American Musical theater history. So look out for that episode, coming up soon, on this podcast feed. But it will be the last full episode of our Season Three, “The Tryout Town.”

And then in a few months I promise I will finally move on to Season Four, when we talk about the great Philadelphia Theatre revival of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, when so many varied and vibrant non-profit theater companies created a whole new landscape for live performance in the city. Because though, as we’ve seen over the two parts of this show, many commercial and Broadway-bound shows had died in Philadelphia - and even some great actors had literally met their ends on its stages over the years, there was an inescapable cultural and - dare I say - spiritual energy deep in the fabric of the city. It would rise again.

80. We Died in Philadelphia - Part Two

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