http://www.theatermania.com/peterfilichia Read Peter Filichia's Diary every day on TheaterMania.com en Copyright 2008 - TheaterMania.com The Understudy. Teresa Rebeck’s play parallels being an understudy and feeling as if you’re in a Kafka play (which this understudy actually is). But she characterizes Harry (Justin Kirk) as someone who walked away from his fiancée Roxanne (Julie White) two weeks before the wedding with little explanation. Then he puts down the star status that Jake (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) has in action movies to make himself feel good (when we all know Harry would d take the money) So I didn’t much care for the guy. Understudies deserve a better poster-boy.

For this is one tough job. Gareth Saxe, who recently played Hamlet in New Jersey, said, “It wasn’t as hard to what I did in The Winter’s Tale in Central Park in 2000. I only had a small role, but I had to understudy Leontes and Polixenes, too. Learning both those roles and all those lines was a bigger challenge than Hamlet.”

Kurt Rhoads understands. Last year, The Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington DC was doing Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Caesar in rep. Andrew Long, who portrayed Antony in each play, injured his Achilles tendon during the first scene of Caesar. After a short delay, Rhoads -- who played Ventidius (whoever he is) in A&C and Cinna the Conspirator in JC -- would now have to play Antony. And he hadn’t had a genuine understudy rehearsal since May.

Rhoads went out and did each play twice in the next three days, and both plays on Saturday – when I saw him. He was flawless, and even eclipsed the previous greatest achievement I ever saw an understudy give: Richard Howard took over the title role in Cyrano de Bergerac at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival after Marco Barricelli had a family emergency and had to leave. Sure, Howard had to cry out “Line!” about a half-dozen times - but who could find fault with such a role as Cyrano?

But you know who currently might have an even more difficult job than Saxe or Rhoads did? Mark Alhadeff in Love Chiild. The play is a frenetic look at a Brooklyn production of a Greek play – but Daniel Jenkins and Robert Stanton play all the actors and everyone else who comes backstage. Each actor must play more than a dozen roles, but this means that Aldaheff must learn two dozen, for he understudies both guys. Now that is trial by fire.

If he ever goes on, I hope he’s treated better than Olympia Dukakis was went she went on for Wendy Hiller in The Aspern Papers during the show’s Philadelphia tryout in 1962. Dame Wendy had an ear infection, so Dukakis went on – but while she was doing the first scene, she felt someone pushing her -- Dame Wendy in fact, who actually finished the line she’d had started. Says Dukakis, “I think that if she’d had her leg shot off, she would have played the part and dragged a bloody stump around the stage.”

Joy Franz was Phylicia Rashad’s understudy as the Witch in Into the Woods. “I got home from vacation, and went home just to drop off my luggage before I went to the theater,” she said. “But when I got home, the phone was ringing. ‘Get down here. You’re on tonight.’ I said, ‘But I haven’t even washed my hair!’ only to hear ‘Never mind - get in a cab and get here.’ I was terrified, but I got through the performance, though I was a little rusty from being away from the show. I should have gone over the show even during my vacation. It was my job to be prepared just-in-case.” (Look at that! Franz saved the day, and STILL felt guilty.)

Joan Copeland stood by for Vivien Leigh in Tovarich. “I didn’t have to go on for many months, and had many understudy rehearsals,” she says. “Stanley Lebowsky, the conductor, used to accompany me on the piano, transposing on sight to the keys in which I was comfortable. Then the night came that I was to go on, and Stan popped his head in my dressing room to say that because the orchestrations weren’t in my keys, he was going to have the orchestra cut out during my songs. Well, I thought, that that would sound terrible -- to have a large orchestra playing for everyone else, and suddenly just a piano for the main character.” So trouper Copeland just went out and sang out of her comfort range.

Like Kirk in Rebeck’s play, understudies bear the brunt of feeling inferior. You're not the low man on the totem pole; you're not even ON the totem pole. Carolee Carmello, who was understudying in City of Angels, said she didn’t dare presume to speak to the show’s star Gregg Edelman. Not until she was on the same playing field with him -- when they each had a lead in Arthur at the Goodspeed Opera House five years later -- did she dare start talking to him. It led to their marrying.

How much is an understudy appreciated when he steps in? Arnold Wesker saw that during the tryout of his play The Merchant, after Zero Mostel died and understudy Joseph Leon took over, “The death of a star invites a breakdown of courtesies. With a star in your play, you are regarded with greater respect.” What a slap in the face to Leon!

It’s such a tough job that Judy Kaye says she turned down Hal Prince’s invitation to be Madeline Kahn’s understudy in On the Twentieth Century no fewer than three times. Good thing she accepted on the fourth request; when Kahn left the show, Kaye’s career was jump-started.

That’s what all understudies must hope for – all those 42nd Street-like stories. When Fiorello! was casting, Tom Bosley’s agent got him an audition to understudy the title role. But Bosley got the actual role, a Tony, and a career.

Brad Oscar is prominently featured in the new Forbidden Broadway: Behind the Mylar Curtain book – but would he have been had he not taken that understudy job as the Nazi in The Producers? It led to his assuming not only that role, but also Max. He’s proof that anything is possible.

But anything-is-possible works in the other direction, too. Marilyn Cooper had the lead in I Can Get It for You Wholesale, and seventeen years later was merely understudying in Ballroom. But just as ballplayers can go down to the minor leagues and work their way back to the majors, Cooper, two and half years later, was in Woman of the Year and won a Tony. How I loved her acceptance speech: “I guess if you sit at the poker table long enough, you eventually come up with a winning hand.”

So some understudies can go on to their own successes, as two of Ethel Merman’s did: Vivian Vance in Anything Goes and Elaine Stritch in Call Me Madam. Sometimes the understudies eclipse in fame and awards the person for whom they’re standing by: Estelle Parsons in Whoop-Up.

Luckily, many theatrical aficionados appreciate understudies. Seth Christenfeld says one of his favorite things is “Going to a show specifically to see an understudy or replacement, in hopes of seeing a different take on a role.” Theatrical superlawyer Mark Sendroff says that when he was growing up in Nassau County, “If I heard that an understudy would be on for Alexis Smith in Follies, I’d take the Long Island Railroad right into town.” So they’re not among the audience members who groan when the announcement is made that the star can’t appear.

Christenfeld and Sendroff know that an understudy can go on in front of an indifferent-to-hostile crowd and completely win over the audience. That he will probably get a standing ovation as he takes his curtain call (in, deservedly, the precise same spot the star does). Best of all, they’ve heard the crowd going out and insisting that the star couldn’t have possibly been any better.

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com
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Saw the 1961 musical Subways Are for Sleeping at Opening Doors Theatre Company. Long before the hippie movement, Comden and Green were writing about people who dropped out of society so they could enjoy the simple pleasures of life. At show’s end, though, they came to the same conclusion that hippies did: There are pleasures in making an honest living, and money isn’t such a bad thing.

What a wonderful cast director Hector Coris has. Erin Cronican excells as Angie, the magazine writer who’s been assigned to study these drop-outs; Spencer Plachy charms as Tom, the most industrious of the idle with whom she falls in love. Of course, Angie doesn’t tell him that she’s doing a story too, and of course seconds before she plans to tell him, he finds out and feels betrayed. Alas, the ol’ I-was-going-to-tell-you plot thing was well-worn by 1961. No wonder producer David Merrick had to hire seven people with the same names as the seven theater critics to rave about the show.

Jule Styne’s music deserves to be better known, for “I’m Just Taking My Time” is a lovely ballad, and “Comes Once in a Lifetime,” a bouncy piece of optimism. The lyrics are fun, with one song’s offering a clever nod to “Old McDonald Had a Farm.” A convoluted piece about taking the subway to such faraway places as Pelham Bay and Van Cortlandt Park allowed me to imagine Comden and Green doing research by taking a field trip all over the New York Transit System. How thrilled straphangers must have felt to see them there!

Lending superb support are Lexi Windsor as Martha Vail, a vixen who never leaves her apartment and only wears a towel so no one can come in and evict her, and Scott McLean Harrison as Charlie, the drop-out who’s willing to drop back in when he comes to love her. Windsor has a smile that makes Mary Tyler Moore’s look like a guppy’s, and was also worthy of the Tony that Phyllis Newman won in this role. Harrison has the chance to be the next Dudley Moore.

In 1961, Carol Channing opened Show Girl. Today, she’s still glowin’, crowin and goin’ strong – maybe not by doing eight a week, but by releasing a gospel-themed album called For Heaven’s Sake. This can’t be the “Voice of God” that was referred to in Les Miserables, could it?

1961 was the year that Jerry Orbach got his first Broadway lead in Carnival. Now we can read his poetry in Remember How I Love You: Love Letters from an Extraordinary Marriage. It takes in the 13 years when the star started the day by writing a short verse to show his feelings for his wife. She was Elaine Cancilla Orbach who, in 1961, left her dancing job in one Pulitzer prize-winning musical (Fiorello!) to join what would be  another (How to Succeed). Ken Bloom collected and curated the letters in this tender 189-page book. What’s bittersweet is seeing on the back cover a note from Mrs. Orbach saying, “My love poems from Jerry are keepsakes that I will treasure forever,” for she died unexpectedly this past April.

Both Channing and Orbach are among the 39 choices that Robert Viagas made for his thoroughly winning book, I’m The Greatest Star. It’s such a great coffee table book that I’ve just got out and buy a coffee table.

“I’m the Greatest Star” is associated with Barbra Streisand, but Viagas didn’t choose her as one of his 39. Streisand, who made her stage debut in 1961 off-Broadway in a one-performance flop called Another Evening with Harry Stoones, would have easily been included had she not abandoned us after two Broadway shows. Let the punishment fit her crime.

Others whom Viagas chose who were represented on Broadway in 1961 were Zero Mostel (Rhinoceros), Alfred Drake (Kean), and Barbara Cook (The Gay Life). Had a great time with Cook last week – in a manner of speaking. DRG has released the six-disc The Essential Barbara Cook Collection. I immediately grabbed five discs, put them in my car CD player, and loved driving around Jersey and hearing “Bojangles of Harlem,” “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” “Nashville Nightingale,” and “I’d Rather Be Blue” among the 57 cuts. And why didn’t I take the sixth disc? It’s a DVD of Mostly Sondheim. I look forward to the day when we can get just the sound on a car CD player from a DVD.

Drake is the subject of “Alfred Drake,” the Gerard Alessandrini song you can read in Forbidden Broadway: Behind the Mylar Curtain. Alessandrini, with Michael Portantiere, have come up with a honey of a book that details FB’s illustrious history in pungent paragraphs and pictures. But best of all are the lyrics. We’re not told that any lyric is “to the tune of,” so we just have to guess – and that’s part of the fun. This will sit on the other end of that coffee table I’ve got to get.

1961 was the year that Harold Prince – still represented on Broadway today at the Majestic – co-produced Take Her, She’s Mine by Henry and Phoebe Ephron. Now their daughters Nora and Delia adapted Ilene Beckerman’s Love, Loss, and What I Wore that’s a smash hit at the Westside. Every woman I know who’s seen it has been enthralled. Fun for men, too, to see what’s on women’s minds these days.

Come Blow Your Horn opened in 1961, and there have been two recent losses connected to it. One was the recent death of Lou Jacobi, who played the owner of an artificial fruit company whose two sons didn’t share his penchant for plastic grapes. Sorry he didn’t get to do the film, but glad the film happened, because we got a good Cahn-Van Heusen song out of it.

Jacobi lived in my neighborhood, and whenever I saw him, I’d yell out “Fade Out—Fade In!” citing the 1964 musical he did with Carol Burnett. And he’d always smile, stop, do a little dance, and sing, “Every night I dream of her; dream of her; dream of her” – the first lines of his big number. Nice guy.

The author of Come Blow Your Horn was, of course, Neil Simon. It was his first hit, and it ran 75 times longer than his play that opened and closed unexpectedly last week. Who’d ever expect a Neil Simon show to not even reach double figures in performance numbers?

Many theories have been advanced for the failure of Brighton Beach Memoirs, but I’m wondering if Simon himself didn’t like the production and demanded that it be shut down? When producers are taking two full-page ads in the Times, seems to me that they’re trying for a run.

But a more likely reason is that three weeks of previews resulted in unhappy theatergoers who weren’t going to recommend this too-dour play to friends and relatives.

Oh, Brighton Beach Memoirs has plenty of very funny lines, heartwarming moments, and an optimistic finish. But it also features a Depression-era father who loses a job and soon has a heart attack; a son who gets fired at a time the family can’t afford it, and then, through gambling, loses what little money he had; a widow who hadn’t had a date in years, and now that she finally gets one, is left waiting because the suitor wound up in the hospital after a DUI incident. The only family I know to have more strife than the Jeromes are the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath.

All this may have played better in the prosperous ‘80s, where the Depression was a half-century behind us. Now that many families are experiencing times not unlike the Jeromes, they may well prefer entertainment that’s happier from start to finish.

But all those theories that Simon has had his day and that time has passed him by can be supported by one statistic. The 25 original productions of Neil Simon’s plays amassed 13,704 performances, for an average of 548 performances each. (The average would be higher if his last two hadn’t each run under 80.)

There have only been four Broadway revivals of Simon’s plays – that small figure alone tells you something -- and they’ve totaled 597 performances, making for a 149-performance average. Still, who would have expected this Brighton Beach Memoirs to last 1290 performances fewer than the original 1299-performances?

Oh -- one other thing: The Yankees won the World Series in 1961, too.

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com
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Black and white.

The 19 producers of Finian’s Rainbow were smart to spring for an extra salary. They could have just had David Schramm, expertly playing the bigoted Senator Billboard Rawkins, get blackfaced when he’s turned black after Sharon McLonergan’s offhand wish comes true. That’s what happened respectively to actors Robert Pitkin and Sorrell Booke on the two previous occasions when Finian’s visited Broadway (in 1947 and 1960) – and probably most every other actor who’s ever played Rawkins.

(That brings up that famous tale that just has to be apocryphal, right? During one production in a summer stock tent, Rawkins was to walk up the aisle, get spray-painted black, and return back – except, as the story goes, just before he took that walk, a theatergoer on the aisle got up to go the men’s room. The spray-painters mistook him for Rawkins, and let him have it. Can’t be true, right?)

Having Schramm give way to black actor Chuck Cooper is an inspired notion. Eliminating the blackface keeps the nay-sayers from using that as Exhibit-A that the show is racist. That couldn’t be more erroneous. What other show from its era has lines that can match “I think it’s just ridiculous making such a fuss about a person’s color,” “All we have to do is broaden out that narrow mind a little (and) reduce some of that bigotry,” and “She gave you a new outside when she should have given you a new inside.”

Maybe that extra salary and the cost of an extra Rawkins costume explains the scenery. Did the producers find a high school that had just finished doing Finian’s Rainbow, took a few flats off their hands, and U-Hauled them to 44th Street? Seems so. But the St. James famously has a shallow stage, so at least the action is pushed nice and forward where we can all see it.

And hear it. Does any musical announce as much that its songs are actually being sung? There are lines such as, “Oh, that cheap Irish music.” “Let’s go into a bit of Irish dance.” “It makes me want to dance and sing.” “I’m weary of minstrels who are always singing.” And “The Begat” makes no pretense of being anything but a performance number.

But if you had music of this quality, wouldn’t you brag about it, too? It was Burton Lane’s finest achievement of the six musicals he wrote for Broadway. It’s so good that “Old Devil Moon” should definitely not have been dropped from the overture.

Meanwhile, E.Y. Harburg’s lyrics are among Broadway’s best. Sure, there are songs in the entire Broadway canon that can match his wordplay in “When I’m Not Near the Girl I Love,” but I can’t think of many. I always love when a lyricist finds three rhymes that don’t remotely have the same spelling; Harburg did it with “tennis,” “Venice,” and “menace.” Perfect rhymes all.

Some may say, “Hey, if you’re such a stickler for perfect rhymes, what about ‘skeer’ with ‘year,’ ‘fickle’ with ‘partickle,’ ‘hell’ with ‘collaterell,’ and all the rest?” But those ARE perfect rhymes. What Skeer, partickle and collaterell aren’t are genuine words -- but they’re certainly perfect rhymes. This type of whimsy makes me smile; false rhymes and false accents make me wince.

And what is more lovely than the sentiment expressed at the end of “That Great ‘Come-and-Get It’ Today”? Harburg believes that if the economic and mercantile system changed so that the poor could get their hands on money, they would want “to keep it,” yes, but also “share it.” I’d like to think so, too.

Wish there were more of the score, though. Finian’s is unusually stingy with its songs, offering eight in the first act and only three new ones in the second. Scattered among them are four reprises. Sure, the policy in those days was to let people hear your best songs once again so that they’d come to love them and buy them when the singles were issued. But I’d have love to hear new songs in the reprise-spots.

I have to wonder if Lane and Harburg ever thought about musicalizing a speech that Finian has early in the show about “The McLonergan Theory of Economics,” when he’s telling his daughter Sharon about the wonders of America. He says, “Gold radiates a powerful influence on America. It fertilizes the oranges in Florida, activates the assembly line in Detroit, causes skyscrapers to sprout from the gutters in New York, and produces bumper crop of millionaires.” Now that’s a song!

Harburg and Fred Saidy’s book is full of nice in-jokes. In this age where we don’t have much cigarette advertising, how many caught the one about “Lucky Gold” cigarettes? It’s an amalgam of two brands wildly popular when Finian’s originally debuted: Lucky Strike and Old Gold. To those who think Finian’s is racist? Be more concerned about its promoting tobacco.

The show’s economic message resonates in these troubled times. Case-in-point: “Americans are the best ill-housed and the best ill-clad in the world.” Of course, it’s a joke – but the best comedy has truth in it. Where else can a woman who’s been sleeping in the park suddenly find herself in a Broadway hit, as Terri White has famously done through this production? Perhaps only in America.

White’s marvelous. As Woody, Cheyenne Jackson looks quite natural with a guitar over his shoulder. Kate Baldwin’s Sharon really grows in “Old Devil Moon,” from a woman who isn’t in love during her first A-section but is by the coda. Christopher Fitzgerald as leprechaun Og is fun, but he does lose the punch of a line that Tommy Steele got the most of in the infamous film version. When Finian says to Og, “You can’t be a leprechaun. You’re too tall,” Fitzgerald merely says, “And I’m getting taller.” Steele got flustered and frustrated, and moaned the line, almost as if he felt he was a disgrace to leprechauns everywhere. Much funnier.

But of all the cast members, I partickle-y enjoyed Jim Norton as Finian. All right, his singing voice isn’t so much; even in these days when everyone’s recording an album, we’ll never get a CD out of Norton. (Luckily, we just got a honey of an album from his castmate Baldwin on PS Classics, who does songs by Lane and/or Harburg, including two winners from Darling of the Day, Clear Day, and even one from Flahooley.)

What Norton does have, though, is a natural musical sense. Notice that on the button of each of two songs, he has perfect timing in the way he puts down his carpetbag that contains the pot of gold. (That pot, however, should be established as heavier than it is; no one has struggles a whit when picking it up. Warren Carlyle should have noticed this, though he’s otherwise done a good job of directing.)

All in all, I experienced my own rainbow when I saw Finian’s. I cherished the golden score and the silvery voices. I was happy that the producers weren’t yellow and faced the black-white business head on. And finally, I’ll be blue – no, red with anger -- if theatergoers don’t respond to this revival. Here’s hoping that there’ll be a lot of green in Finian’s Rainbow’s fuchsia.

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com
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