THE THEATER MIRROR, New England's LIVE Theater Guide
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Myrna and Harvey Frommer, who teach at Dartmouth and specialize in oral history have written "an oral history of the Great White Way" called IT HAPPENED ON BROADWAY that may be having its publication date while you are reading this. They are also nudges who bombarded the mirror with press-releases for nearly a year. I don't think they were nervous --- after all, they've already been through this with IT HAPPENED books on BROOKLYN and on THE CATSKILLS --- so maybe they're just proud. Their press-releases were unconvincingly over-long strings of hype and superlatives though, so I resisted, (The mirror covers New England after all, not them Sothron carpet-baggers) until first they sent me a rave review, and then a bound-galley, and you know what? The damn thing is good! Whenever it really is published it'll cost $35.00, but if you put it by your bedside, as I did, you will not regret a sleepless night until you've read all the 300 pages. But I won't bore you with opinions, or superlatives. I'll just quote some passages:
"There are other neighborhoods in New York City and in cities all
across America where audiences are being seated, where curtains
are rising and performers are poised to play their roles. But here
is the apex, the acme, the one singular sensation: BROADWAY.
...
"A hundred Broadway babies, bards, balladeers, and boulevardiers
whose dreams and defeats, trials and triumphs are woven together
into this memoir: each of them, once upon a time, fell in love
with the theater and through these pages remembers the journey
propelled by that love. Bringing the reader through the stage
door, into a world of dressing rooms and rehearsal halls, flywings
and projection booths, around pianos in angels' living rooms and
conference tables in producers' offices, they reimagine the
auditions, readings, rehearsals, openings, runs, closings, and
lived-for moments of glory under the bright lights, center
stage.
"All the world may be a stage, but there's only one Broadway."
===Myrna & Harvey in their introduction
HAL HOLBROOK: Theater was mainstream, riding a wave of tradition
that was vital and essential to the entire entertainment process
in the United States.
We had actors who lived in the theater. That was all they did. We
had playwrights who were writing good plays, sometimes astonishing
ones. In 1947 and 1948, I cxame into town and saw "A Streetcar
named Desire" and "Death of A Salesman". I saw "King Lear" for the
first time at the old National Theater. I saw Katherine Cornell,
Helen Hayes, Frederic March, Florence Eldridge, the Lunts, Louis
Calhern.
MANNY AZENBERG: Olivier, Scofield, Gielgud, Albert Finney, Peter
O'Toole, Alan Bates...
HARVEY SABINSON: Tennessee Williams, Wiliam Inge, Arthur Miller,
Kaufman and Hart. There was Irving Berlin, Jule Styne, Cole
Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Frank Loesser --- great shows
every year.
MERLE DEBUSKEY: You had continuing producers; it was their life.
Kermit Bloomgarten would produce a play every year or two.
SABINSON: There was a hard-core audience that had to see
everything in a season
FREDDIE GERSHON: Going to the theater was an event. It was very
carriage-trade.
MORTON GOTTLEIB: I loved the glamor; I don't mean just the
dressing up, but the whole feel of how lucky you were to see a
Broadway show.
TONY WALTON: Jerome Robbins had named names during the McCarthy
era. Jack Gilford's wife, Madeline, was one. Zero Mostel was
another.
CHARLES DURNING: Zero Mostel didn't work for ten years. He told me
he went from making a thousand dollars to one hundred a week.
"What kind of secrets was I giving away," he'd ask, "acting
secrets?"
WALTON: Zero Mostel and JAck Gilford were cast for "A Funny Thing
Happened on The Way to The Forum". George Abbott had become th3e
director, and I was doing the set and costumes. We were
floundering out of town, and absolute disaster. When we opened in
Washington, George Abbott gave an interview saying "I think we
could save the sucker if we threw out all the songs."
Steve Sondheim made a big pitch to Hal Prince to bring Jerry
Robbins back in. ... Hal phoned Zero to ask whether he would be
prepared to work with Jerry Robbins.
"Are you asking me to eat with him?"
"I'm just asking you to work with him."
"Of course I'll work with him," Zero said. "We of the left do not
blacklist."
...
But when Jerry first came in, we were all terrified. He was
already a daunting figure. This was --- after all --- well after
"West Side Story". We stood on the stage of the National Theater
in Washington. Jerry Robbins ran the gauntlet, shaking everyone's
hands. When he finally got to Zero, everyone held their breath.
The tension was palpable.
Then Zero boomed out, "Hiya, loose-lips."
And everyone burst out laughing --- including Jerry.
CHARLES DURNING: "A Chorus Line" is an actor's play about actors.
When that girl starts singing "What I Did for Love" it has nothing
to do with sex. It's the love of the theater --- the horror, the
heartbreak, the disappointments. We've all had our share.
When I saw "A Chorus Line", and I saw it several times, I broke
down and cried. My wife does not understand why; she hasn't gone
through what I haved.
RONNIE LEE: The curtain went down, the lights came on. Everyone
had left the theater, and I was still sitting there weeping. My
wife was holding me in her arms
I was remembering the cattle calls. Hundreds came. They'd teach
you one step, everybody would do it, and they'd eliminate. Then
they;d teach you another step, perhaps two steps, and eliminate
again. They would eliminate for size, for looks, for color, you
name it. What we did for love --- "A Chorus Line" really caught
it.
CAROL CHANNING: It wasn't until a year or two ago that I learned Ethel Merman was offered the original role of Dolly and turned it down. All I knew was that Mr. Merrick told me he was going to have a musical version of "The Matchmaker" written for me. Thornton Wilder told me he wrote "The Matchmaker" about a woman he knew who had sandy hair like mine. "She was a tall, handsome figure of a woman, like you," he said to me. "You even look like her."
LEE ROY REAMS: Everyone thinks to be in the theater you have to have such an ego. I think you have to have a lack of ego to be up there. You're constantly receiving rejection, constantly being judged and criticized. To succeed, you have to be passionate about your work. And it's that commitment that makes us so verbal and indulgent in the craft.
ROBERT WHITEHEAD: Strangeley enough, when the musical theater was at its most exciting and most expressive of us as a country, our theater had a kind of world influence. A lot of plays were being done, and out of them grew the great musicals. But then the volume of productions went down, down, down, until there was practically nothing. And when the serious plays began to disapperaqr, the great American musicals began to disappear. One fed off the other.
HOWARD KISSEL: The Andrew Lloyd Webber shows and the like fulfill many people's idea of what an evening in the theater is supposed to be: spectacle, constantly changing panoramas, theater as movie. The average person doesn't know that something should happen to him while he's watching a play. He gets beautiful stage pictures and he thinks he's gotten his money's worth.
ELAINE STRITCH: As I am in the autumn of my life, I am finally
able to say that it is the work that satisfies. It is in the
moment. A movie star doesn't hear a "Bravo" from the seventh row.
I have gone back and forth from musical theater to straight plays.
One year I did Noel Coward's "Sail Away" and the next year I did
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" I went straight from "Showboat"
to "A Delicate Balance". It's a kick for me to do everything.
Still, I must admit that preparing for a play is such a difficult
adventure that every time I wonder why in God's name I choose to
do this. It's my version of nine months of a difficult pregnancy:
morning sickness and evening tears, misunderstandings, a long,
long trip.
FOSTER HIRSCH: The 1996 revival of Edward Albee's "A Delicate
Balance" made me hopeful. Here was a revival of a great play
originally produced about thirty years earlier that got wonderful
reviews and a decent run. It's a very demanding play, with lots of
dialog that requires you to listen in a way we're not used to
listening in this era of spectacle shows. Its success means there
is still a desire for that kind of theater. The glitter can come
back.
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