Theater Memories Part 6: Ushering at the Lortel

After discussing summer stock, national tours, out-of-town tryouts and theatre on TV, the next category would be ushering. For a few years during the late 1980s and into the 1990s, I ushered quite a few Off-Broadway shows (Broadway is unionized, so it was easier to do Off) at the Lucille Lortel Theater, the Promenade and the now defunct Jack Lawrence and the Audrey Wood, its smaller studio theater. It was fascinating watching the same show for several consecutive performances and seeing cast replacements bring different interpretations. Here are the shows I ushered for at the Lortel:

Lucille Lortel: Isn't It Romantic, Wendy Wasserstein's long-running comedy. During the run, Alma Cuervo and Robin Bartlett played the lead and Joan Copeland, Julia Meade, Jay Thomas (Emmy winner for Murphy Brown), James Rebhorn, and Christine Healy were in the cast.

Joan Rivers (center) visits the cast of
Steel Magnolias: (l to r) Mary Fogarty,
Rosemary Prinz, Margo Martindale, 
Constance Schulman, Betsy Aidem
and Kate Wilkinson.

Steel Magnolias: I was with the show for much of the early run with Margo Martindale, Betsy Aidem, Rosemary Prinz, Mary Fogarty, Kate Wilkinson and Constance Schulman. The show was a big hit and we got lots of celebrities. Unfortunately, I was not there the nights Bette Davis or Elizabeth Taylor came, but I did seat Mary Tyler Moore, Valerie Harper (I went home during intermission and got my book of classic TV shows for her to sign--I already had Mary's autograph from Sweet Sue), Mildred Natwick, and Bob Fosse (who complained about his seat). (in the photo, the original cast with Joan Rivers). Here's what my colleagues told me about the night Taylor attended. She was late and the curtain was held for her (of course). Her seat was in the middle of the middle row, so half the row had to stand up when she and her entourage arrived. Before sitting down, she took a 360-degree look at the house as if to say, "Yes, it is me, Elizabeth Taylor." The show starts and one of the first lines is delivered by Margo Martindale as the hairdresser Truvy: "Ruth Robilene, now there's a twisted, troubled soul. Her husband was killed in World War II. Her son was killed in Vietnam. When it comes to suffering, she's right up there with Elizabeth Taylor." This line elicited an enormous guffaw from the audience, the loudest recognizably being from Taylor herself (People asked if that line were added just for that night and no, it was always there.) After the show, the star went backstage to greet the cast and the audience refused to leave. They wanted a glimpse of the legend and you had to exit through the theater to get out from backstage. Meanwhile, word has spread around the neighborhood that a real-live Hollywood star was at the theater and a huge crowd gathered outside. The police had to be called because the eager fans were blocking the narrow West Village streets. The cops finally had to escort Taylor out of the building to the applause of those in and outside the Lortel as if she were royalty, which she kind of was. And she loved every moment of it.

Theater Memories Part 5: Theater on TV

In the past few days, I've listed my memories of summer stock, national tours, out of town tryouts and regional productions. Next is TV productions of theater. Before moving to NYC, TV was my main means of seeing theater. Some video recollections:

Much Ado About Nothing (1974) A TV version of the Joseph Papp-produced revival with Sam Waterston, Kathleen Widdoes, Barnard Hughes, Douglas Watson (from Another World) and, I believe, Christopher Walken's younger brother. Papp's first production in his deal with CBS. I watched it at my grandparents' house while my family was visiting downstairs for the grandparents' anniversary party. I was 15.

Sticks and Bones: David Rabe's controversial Vietnam-shatters-the-American-family play ended Papp's deal with CBS. Tom Aldredge recreated his stage performance and Anne Jackson replaced Elizabeth Wilson.

Wedding Band: Papp subsequently presented some shows on ABC. Ruby Dee, Eileen Heckart, JD Cannon and Polly Holliday were brilliant in Alice Childress' play about interracial love in 1918.

Theater Memories Part 4: Regional Productions

John Glover was in many
productions with the
Philadelphia Drama Guild

After posts on summer stock, national tours and out-of-town tryouts, how about regional productions? Most of the regional shows I saw as a teen and college student were from the Philadelphia Drama Guild, for many years in residence at the Walnut Street Theater and then at the Zellerbach on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. Douglas Seale was artistic director. (He later was on Broadway in Noises Off and appeared on TV as butlers. I think he played Dolly Parton's once.) There was a resident company and John Glover, who later won a Tony Award for Terrence McNally's Love! Valour! Compassion! and starred on Smallville, was in most of the shows and stands out in my memory.

Here are the ones I recall seeing from PDG: The Glass Menagerie and Long Day's Journey Into Night with Geraldine Fitzgerald; Ceremonies in Dark Old Men with Douglas Turner Ward; Hamlet (Glover was magnificent); The Miser; Hedda Gabbler with Roberta Maxwell and Glover as Eliot Lovborg; Pinter's The Birthday Party with Leonard Frey and Glover; The Importance of Being Earnest; Twelfth Night with Domini Blythe; Saint Joan with Domini Blythe in the title role, David Rounds as the Dauphin and Tony van Bridge as the Bishop of Beauvais; The Night of the Iguana with Douglas Seale as Nonno; The Royal Family, soon after it was done on Broadway; Watch on the Rhine; Of Mice and Men; Joe Egg; Thark, a silly haunted house farce with Paxton Whitehead and comedienne Anna Russell; Robert Prosky and his two sons in The Price; The Front Page and AN Enemy of the People which featured several fellow theater students from Temple University.

Other regional productions in Philly: A Streetcar Named Desire with Shirley Knight (on tour with the McCarter Theater) which I saw on election night 1976; Maria Tucci as Major Barbara; Moby Dick Rehearsed; Love Letters on Blue Paper; Joe Orton's Loot; another Twelfth Night outdoors in the courtyard in City Hall. I may have forgotten some and will add them if I remember.

Outside of Philly: The Merry Wives of Windsor with Pat Carroll as Falstaff (Washington, DC); Albee's All Over (McCarter Theater, the production later transferred to Off-B'way); David Hare's The Secret Rapture (Chicago's Steppenwolfe); Humana Festival of New Play at the Actors Theater of Louisville (three times); Ashes/Vanities, Mr. Roberts (Pittsburgh Public Theater).

Theater Memories Part 3: Pre-Broadway Try-Outs

Patricia Routledge and Ken Howard
in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Now that we have done summer stock and national tours, how about pre-Broadway tours or out-of-town try-outs. Philadelphia used to be a major stop on the road to Broadway, but by the 1980s, the process became too expensive and most shows came from regional productions or were workshopped before opening in NYC (Michael Bennett pioneered the workshop process with A Chorus Line and Dreamgirls.)

Here are the pre-Broadway try-outs I remember seeing in Philly in the 1970s (most of the them big bombs): Who's Who in Hell written by and starring Peter Ustinov with George S. Irving, Beau Bridges, Olympia Dukakis, and Joseph Maher (a Shavian comedy set in the afterlife with Ustinov as a Soviet premiere, Irving as a Nixon-like US president, and Bridges as the assassin who killed them both, I enjoyed it and I thought it got a bum rap); Broadway Broadway by Terrence McNally with James Coco, Geraldine Page and Lenny Baker, Robert Drivas directs (I saw this just before leaving for college in 1977, it closed out of town, later rewritten as It's Only a Play and much more successful); The Prince of Grand Street with Robert Preston miscast as an aging Yiddish theater star, Sam Levene and Werner Klemperer were also in the cast; Alice, a musical based on Alice in Wonderland with Debbie Allen, Alice Ghostley, Cleavant Derricks, Hamilton Camp (Mike Nichols produced this attempt to cash in on The Wiz and Annie, but it closed in Philly); A Matter of Gravity by Enid Bagnold with Katharine Hepburn and Christopher Reeve (One of the few successful shows here, a light comedy and it was a thrill to see Hepburn on stage); 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the legendary bomb from Leonard Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner with Ken Howard and Patricia Routledge, it wasn't that bad (pictured); Ladies at the Alamo by Paul Zindel with Estelle Parsons and Eileen Heckart; Myrt and Phil again with Parsons and Michael Lombard, a terrible play about a miserable couple in crisis after the wife has a mastectomy; I Remember Mama by Richard Rodgers and Martin Charnin, Liv Ullman's only attempt at a Broadway musical. Ullman was a big star at that time due to her shattering performances in Ingmar Bergman films such as Face to Face, Persona, Shame, Scenes from a Marriage, etc. I only remember George Hearn as the father and George S. Irving as the irascible Uncle Chris, puffing on a cigar to show his anger.

More: Seascape with Deborah Kerr, Barry Nelson, Frank Langella, Maureen Anderman (Edward Albee's very weird play before it won the Pulitzer, Langella won the first of his three Tonys); Master Harold and the Boys with Zakes Mokae, Zeljko Ivanek; Sweet Bird of Youth with Irene Worth and Christopher Walken, probably one f the best performances of a Tennessee Williams play I've ever seen; Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding with Marybeth Hurt in the Julie Harris role, Glenn Close as the bride, and the kid who played Ted Knight and Georgia Engel's adopted son on the Mary Tyler Moore Show (or at least it looked like him, I could be wrong) (I can't remember if this was pre or post-Broadway, but I will list it here.)

Irene Worth and Christopher Walken 
in Sweet Bird of Youth.

Peter Ustinov (playwright-star), 
Beau Bridges, and
George S. Irving in
Who's Who in Hell

Theatergoing Memories, Part 2: National Tours

Now that we've discussed summer stock, how about national tours? Here are the ones I remember seeing as a kid in Philly (at the Forrest or Locust Street Theaters) and as a college student in Pittsburgh:

Jane Alexander and Henry Fonda
in William Saroyan's 
The Time of Your Life

Sleuth with Michael Allinson; Jean Simmons, Margaret Hamilton and George Lee Andrews in A Little Night Music; Dawn Welles from Gilligan's Island in Chapter Two; Jessica Tandy and Hume Cronyn in The Gin Game, Krapp's Last Tape and Not I (Samuel Beckett one-acts) and The Many Faces of Love, their two-person program of readings from poems, stories and plays incl. Tandy recreating her original Blanche DuBois; Hair with future rock star Meat Loaf in the ensemble; a production of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown at the Theater of Living Arts on South Street before it was gentrified; Forrest Tucker and George Dzunda in That Championship Season; The Time of Your Life by William Saroyan with Henry Fonda, Jane Alexander, Gloria Graham, Strother Martin, a young Richard Dreyfuss and Lewis J. Stadlen.

More: for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (can't remember cast); The Elephant Man (can't remember cast); Twigs with Sada Thompson repeating her Tony-winning performance as three disparate sisters and their crotchey old mother, Daniel J. Travanti (long before Hill Street Blues) and Oscar nominee Joe Mantell (Marty); Good Evening, a very funny two-man revue written by and starring Dudley Moore and Peter Cooke (I recall a hysterical sketch satirizing the life of Jesus long before Monty Python's Life of Brian and the classic bit about a one-legged man auditioning for the role of Tarzan); Barbara Rush (I think) and Tom Troupe in Same Time, Next Year; Equus with Douglas Campbell; Julie Harris in The Belle of Amherst; Children of a Lesser God; Lily Tomlin in her first solo show, Appearing Nitely; Dame Judith Anderson in a program of readings incl. an excerpt from Medea where she played all the characters.

Sada Thompson in Twigs

Theatergoing Memories Part 1: Summer Stock

I've recently joined a Facebook group called Broadway Remembered. Members post their memories of theater experiences. I'm still on summer vacation and the Broadway theaters won't re-open until the fall, so I have time to recollect all the shows I've seen in nearly 50 years of theatergoing. I put the shows in different categories and posted them to the Facebook group. I've never gotten more likes or responses from anything I've ever posted on FB. So I will be reposting them here on the David Desk blog.

Summer stock is one of the richest sources of memories. Stars from TV and old Broadway used to tour in recent or old shows for one-week stands. The Valley Forge Music Fair and the Philadelphia Playhouse in the Park were the theaters my parents took me to, starting around 1971 when I was about 12. I've been trying to remember all those shows.

At the Valley Forge Music Fair: Ginger Rogers in Coco, Jan Peerce in Fiddler, Angela Lansbury in Gypsy, Yul Brynner in The King and I, Lauren Bacall in Wonderful Town, Eva Gabor in Applause (she broke her ankle and we got the understudy), Frank Gorshin in Promises, Promises (he broke his ankle too but went on anyway), Robert Alda, Vivian Blane, Jane Kean, Selma Diamond, Hildegarde, Mary Small, Lynn Bari in Follies, Theodore Bikel, Lainie Kazan, Julie Wilson in Jacques Brel, Jack Gilford and Lou Jacobi in The Sunshine Boys. Note on Frank Gorshin: He was playing Promises, Promises a week after Gabor had her accident. He broke his ankle and on a local TV talk show when asked how it happened, he said he was doing an imitation of Eva Gabor at a party. At the performance attended, he limped but got through it. What a trouper, as they used to say.

More on Eva Gabor and Applause: When Gabor broke her ankle, her understudy went on for her at the Saturday matinee I attended with my family. There is a big number "But Alive" which expresses Margo Channing's vibrant, unconventional personality when she goes to a gay bar with her hairdresser-companion and Eve instead of the stuffy opening night party. Bacall brought the house down, dancing and singing. When we saw it w/o Gabor, they cut the entire number, going from Margo singing the intro to the song in her dressing room right to her apartment. I never learned if this number was cut because the understudy didn't know it, or if it was always cut because Gabor was not a dancer. It recently occurred to me they may have cut it because the producer may have thought a scene in an unquestionably gay bar would have been too much for the suburban Philadelphia matinee ladies in 1971 or 2-or whenever it was.

Lauren Bacall, Lee Roy Reams, and (I think)
Sammy Williams in the gay bar scene
from Applause.

At the Playhouse in the Park: Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara in Last of the Red Hot Lovers and The Prisoner of Second Avenue, Tom Poston and Marian Mercer in Lovers and Other Strangers, Lynn Redgrave in The Two of Us (three one-acts by Michael Frayn), Maureen Stapleton in The Glass Menagerie, Sandy Dennis and David Selby in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Sandy Dennis and Gale Sondergaard in The Royal Family, Shelley Winters in Cages (two one-acts) and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Meg Wynn Owen (Upstairs, Downstairs) in Out on a Limb (a revue of James Thurber pieces), Peggy Cass in An Almost Perfect Person, Steve Allen and Marcia Rodd in The Wake (a play by Allen about an Irish-American family), James Whitmore and Audra Lindley in The New Mount Olive Hotel (a lame comedy which was supposed to go to Broadway but never made it), Jan Sterling in The Hot L Baltimore, Paxton Whitehead repeating his Broadway performance as Sherlock Holmes in The Crucifer of Blood, Jean Marsh in Twelfth Night, Tovah Feldshuh in Peter Pan.

Summer stock tours have faded away. Too expensive. The Valley Forge Music Fair was tore down and a Home Depot is in its place. The Playhouse in the Park closed in the early 1980s. Next up will be national tours.

Paxton Whitehead as Sherlock Holmes

Bedrock Buried Child

While watching reruns of The Flintstones on MeTV, I realized that we never found out the secret of Bamm Bamm's origin. He just showed up in a baby basket on Barney and Betty's doorstep one night after they wished on a star for an infant of their own after enviously cooing over their neighbors' darling Pebbles. Where did Bamm Bamm really come from? This deep dark secret reminded me of Sam Shepard's Buried Child and Tracey Letts' August: Osage County. So here is a parody imagining the ultimate reckoning. With apologies to Sam Shepard, Tracey Letts, Joseph Hanna and William Barbera.

The scene is the living room of the Flintstone house. It is dark and gloomy, though it is early afternoon. All the shades are drawn. Fred Flintstone is seated in is favorite comfy rock chair, asleep in front of a TV set. The sounds of a rerun of The Prize is Price can be softly heard. Fred snores loudly and is surrounded by bones from a brontosaurus steak. The decaying carcass of Dino the dinosaur is one corner. A long-

What if Sam Shepard and Tracey Letts
wrote an episode of the Flintstones?

billed bird on its last legs is perched above a dusty hi-fi set, ready to play records with its beak. Wilma Flintstone, heavily made-up to cover her age and wearing an inappropriately revealing dress, staggers into the room, leaning on a wooden cane.

Wilma: Fred! Wake up, you old ton of guts!

Fred (struggling to wake, mumbling): What, what is it? (Sees Wilma) Oh, it's you. I was dreaming of Gina Lolabrickita and here you are, like a nightmare. Why did you have to wake me up?

Wilma: To tell you I'm going out. I didn't want you to panic if you saw I was gone.

Fred: Panic? Are you kidding? I'd probably be so happy, I'd give myself a heart attack.

Wilma: Very funny.

Fred: Where you are going all dolled up, anyway? Who'd want to see an old buzzard like you?

Wilma: Give it a rest, Fred. I'm going to meet Reverend Rockbury to discuss your final arrangements.

Fred: Final arrangements? I ain't dead yet, goddamnit. (He tries to rise but can't) You already got me dead and buried, why you scheming hussy. I'll bet you and that Bible shaker are plotting to steal all my money--- (he flops back into the chair).

Wilma: Don't make me laugh. What money? After 50 years at Slate Gravel what do you have to show for it? This dump? A dead dinosaur we can't afford to have buried. A broken-down hi-fi set that can't even play CDs? Ever since you started seeing that little green man from outer space, you've just fallen apart. You sit in that chair and watch old game shows and wrestling matches all day while I try to put food on the table. I tell you, Fred Flintstone, I am glad our daughter ran away. Glad, do you hear!