From: conrad@brahms.udel.edu (Jon Conrad)
Subject: Re: "Company" in concert
Organization: University of Delaware
Date: Tue, 26 Jan 1993 14:36:09 GMT

In article <1k228pINNo9b@mizar.usc.edu> 
adolphso@mizar.usc.edu (adolphson) writes:

>> >Although I did like "Pacific Overtures" quite
>> >a lot.  I think I was the only person in the 4000-seat Dorothy
>> >Chandler Pavilion who *did* like it. 

This reminds me of a personal experience I forgot to mention before.  I
was seeing Pacific Overtures at the Winter Garden, enjoying it (in fact,
in awe of much of it) though aware that not everyone was.  At
intermission I struck up a conversation with the woman next to me,
clearly a very nice Lady In From Long Island (or somewhere) with her
husband for a nice Wednesday matinee at the theater, who never expected
anything like *this*.  I told her, as clearly and nicely as I could, why
it meant so much to me, and she listened very attentively, and when her
husband came back to his seat from a quick smoke outside, she called out
to him as he crept along the row, "Oh Murray!!  This boy LIKES it!!!" in
the tone of someone who's just found a man with two heads.

Oh -- and as the second act started and the orchestra played its brief
curtain-raiser, she turned to Murray and stage-whispered triumphantly,
"See?  I TOLD you there was an orchestra!"  Mind you, the orchestra had
been playing all through.  But since the show opens with Japanese
instruments played onstage, and the pit was largely covered by the
stage, the orchestra Didn't Exist for them even though they could hear
it.  This mind-set baffles me.

>[About Anthony Perkins:]

>> I started asking myself, "Well, who WOULD
>> be a good Bobby?"  And came up with Anthony Perkins, who was the right
>> age and persona, a good actor, a sufficient singer,

>Sufficient?  Good heavens, Jon, what do you look for in a 
>Broadway singer?  

As good a voice as I can get, and as the music demands.

>So Perkins wasn't a Melchior, but I think
>he's really quite good in Greenwillow.  His pop albums are
>sort of hit and miss, but that has as much to do with the
>sappy arrangements as anything else.

I'll listen to Greenwillow again.  My memory of it is disappointment
that his singing wasn't as good as I'd hoped (I've always liked him as
an actor and personality).  He has some challenging numbers to sing,
like Never Will I Marry, and he sounded uncomfortably stretched by them.
But I may have been feeling excessively severe that day.  For what it's
worth, though, the feeling was shared by Greenwillow's original
orchestrator, Don Walker, when I interviewed him in 1987.  He remembered
the show fondly but felt that Perkins's singing hurt the score.  Maybe I
allowed my opinion to be unduly influenced by Walker's; it can happen.

>Why did Perkins back out?  (I suppose I could look it up 
>for myself in Craig Zadan's book, but I'm lazy today.)

He had a chance to direct Bruce Jay Friedman's "Steambath," and that's
the direction he was most interested in pursuing at that time.

>This reminds me: in "You Could Drive a Person Crazy", Susan Browning
>didn't shout out "You son of a bitch!", but rather something like
>"You goddamned bastard!"  

Those expletives are basically ad lib anyway -- I don't think they're
scripted.  But I wonder why this particular subsitution.

Two textual points on this number while we're at it and if you remember:
Did they do the "real" ending (instrumental), or the awful made-up-for-
the-recording "Bobby is my hobby" business?  And did they sing "I could
understand a person if a person was a fag"?  I can buy it in character
in 1970 context, but out of that context it seems to make people
nervous, perhaps with reason.  I've heard "drag" substituted (that's
what Carol Burnett used when she, Marilyn Horne, and Eileen Farrell did
it on her show).  And for Cleo Laine's album Sondheim changed it to "if
he did it for a gag."  Interesting bit of sociology to be researched
here....

>> Barbara Barrie's replacement was Cynthia O'Neal, by the way.  People may
>> know her from various tv appearances.

>Cynthia O'Neal.  That name is really familiar.

And totally irrelevant.  Sorry.  I was free-associating.  Barbara
Barrie's replacement was Cynthia Harris.  Her biggest tv credit is
probably playing Wallis Simpson in a "The Woman He Loved" miniseries,
perhaps on PBS.

>I'm thinking back on all this kind of casting in LA.  Lots of washed 
>up has-beens or never-weres.  Priscilla Lopez in Irma la Douce!  There's 
>magic!  You like Shakespeare?  How about Macbeth, with Charleton Heston 
>and Vanessa Redgrave?  

I'd see Vanessa Redgrave in anything.  The idea of the two of them
together, though, is fairly mind-boggling given what we know of their
respective politics.  Still, though I'm no Heston fan, he's always been
serious (more so than most other movie stars, in their prime or not)
about keeping up his stage acting in classical roles -- which is, after
all, his background.  I can't treat this combination as intrinsically
ridiculous, or him and Kerr in Long Day's Journey for that matter.  I'd
kind of like to have seen them, though maybe the productions were as
poor as you imply.

>Oh yes.  Chorus Line, in particular.  I didn't like Chorus Line,
>if you want to know the truth.  The LA cast was almost exactly
>the original NY cast, and it just didn't do it for me.  And I
>though Sammy what's his name, who won the Tony, was dreadful.

What can I tell you?  I saw Chorus Line with its original cast in NY
(same trip as Pacific Overtures, if I recall) and bought it 100%, every
moment.  And I thought Sammy Williams was marvelous.

Jon Alan Conrad
Newsgroups: rec.arts.theatre