Yesterday evening, Susie and I spent several pleasant hours watching the old movie production of My Fair Lady on Turner Classic Movies. In the movie Rex Harrison reprises his stage performance as Henry Higgins and Audrey Hepburn lip-synchs her way through the role of Eliza Doolittle. At one point I remarked to Susie that the stage play by George Bernard Shaw on which the musical was based has a more interesting and plausible ending.
This put me in mind of a number of stage productions I have
seen that were truly memorable. I have not gone to the theater very often in my
long life but when I was young I was lucky to see some great productions. As a
boy, my parents took me to see a revival of Porgy and Bess. At the end of the
performance when it came time for the actors to take their bows, the actor
playing the villain Crown was greeted with boos and hisses when he stepped
before the curtain. He responded with a big smile and took a bow. Also when I
was in high school I saw José Ferrar give a luminous performance as Cyrano de
Bergerac.
My most memorable trips to the theater, oddly enough, all
involved plays by George Bernard Shaw. I saw Siobhan McKenna in Shaw’s St.
Joan. I saw Charles Boyer, Charles Laughton, Cedric Hardwick, and Agnes
Morehead in a London recital performance of Don Juan in Hell. You cannot get
any better than that!
Quite the most striking moment in any stage production I saw
was at the very opening of a production of Major Barbara in which Laughton
played Undershaft. As the curtain went
up on the first act, a group of young people were seen sitting on a circular
sofa in the middle of the stage chatting. After a few moments Laughton appeared
from a door at the left rear of the stage and without saying anything walked
slowly to the apron. He did absolutely nothing that I could discern to call
attention to himself but by the time he reached the edge of the stage every eye
in the audience was on him. It was an extraordinary tour de force of acting.
But my favorite theater experience is the time when I
appeared in a production with Shirley Jones, who had a lovely soprano voice and
was a big hit in a stage production of Oklahoma but later became famous for her
role in the TV series The Partridge Family. Since this must be the most
implausible sentence I have written on this blog, a word of explanation is
called for.
In the summer of 1956 I was a graduate student at Harvard,
writing my doctoral dissertation. Shirley Jones had just married Jack Cassidy
and the two of them were touring in summer stock in a production of The Beggar’s
Opera, with Jones playing Polly and Cassidy playing McHeath. When they came to
Cambridge for a week-long performance, a call went out for folks to sing in the
pit chorus. In those days I had a nice baritone voice and had done a fair
amount of choral singing so I tried out. It was a paying gig – seven evening
performances and one matinee, two dollars a performance. This is back in the
day when a Hershey’s chocolate bar was a nickel and a Mars bar was a dime so
$16 was serious money. The competition was not very stiff and I got into the
pit chorus.
The performances were in Sanders Theatre, which as some of
you know doubles as a concert venue and a lecture hall. There is no curtain and
the pit orchestra was set up in the space between the front row of seats and
the stage. Those of us in the pit chorus were dressed as beggars who were
prisoners in Mr. Lockit’s jail. We huddled next to the pit chorus and when it
came time for us to sing we surged forward, did our turn, and then shrank back
into the darkness. None of us ever actually made it up onto the stage, of
course, not even for rehearsals and I certainly never met any members of the
cast but to this day I can truthfully say that Shirley Jones and I appeared in
a performance together.
Quite the most striking moment of the entire evening, to me
at any rate, occurred before the very first line of dialogue was uttered. As the
lights went up Mr. Peachum and Mr. Lockit were seen sitting at a table drinking
beer. The actor playing Peachum then let
out a belch that could be heard in the last row of seats in the auditorium. I
was in awe of his ability to do this and tried several times to imitate it but
without success.
8 comments:
A quibbling clarification. Although Audrey Hepburn lip-synched the songs in My Fair Lady, she spoke the dialogue, in impeccable cockney initially, transformed into the King’s English by the movie’s donouement. Lerner wrote some of the greatest lyrics to prick the bubble of the arrogant and pompous, i.e., “Without your pulling it the tide comes in, without your twirling it the Earth can spin, without your pushing them, the clouds roll by, if they can do without you, ducky, so can I.”
My sole theatrical performance was as a supernumerary in Turandot, in which I was cast as one of the many guards called upon to carry the deceased slave girl Liu off the stage. The role of Liu was performed by two different women on alternating nights. There were three guards on each side, which required that two of us place our hands beneath her buttocks. One of the two was rather plump, and I was terrified that we would drop her in the middle of the stage. Princess Turandot was performed by the Bulgarian soprano, Ghena Dimatrova. Her autograph on a poster of the opera hangs on the wall of my dining room.
Wow, that beats my gig by a country mile! You not only got on stage, you got to lay your hands on one of the principals, and on her buttocks too. You could cadge drinks off that for a lifetime in a pub.
It was an absolutely phenomenal experience, because I got to see how a theatrical production is put together. I had to attend every rehearsal after work, even though I had no speaking or singing role. It was like putting together a human jig-saw puzzle – there was a director for the chorus; a director for the principal singers; a director for the plot itself; and a director for the orchestra. Those of us who were supernumeraries playing the guards were convince on opening night that it was all going to fall apart. But it didn’t. And experiencing the production from the stage increased my appreciation of what the audience sees, because on the stage you are so immersed in making sure your performance comes off without a hitch, you do not get to observe the entire production as the audience does. The experience increased my appreciation of those who make a living in the theater.
I did a stint as rehearsal pianist for a community theater production of Fidler on the Roof in Stamford, CT circa 1975. It being Stamford, it was a well funded affair and the pay was good. Being a rehearsal pianist, however, drove me insane.
The first problem is playing the same song over and over with the individuals playing the lead roles and the chorus. That was't so bad. The real insanity, though, comes from working with the choreographer. When a dancer missed a step, he would have a little fit, after which he wanted the music to start at a certain measure which was, more often than not, in the middle of a musical phrase. Musicians learn “chunks” of music at a time, chunks being a phrase often several measures long. It drove me nuts to start in the middle.
I swore to never again work as a rehearsal pianist, and to this day I can't stand to listen to the score.
I was in several plays in high school (including a production of Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound) and in one as a college freshman, before deciding I didn't have time to do any more acting b.c was busy with other (extracurricular and academic) things. Inspector Hound is fairly early Stoppard, and unless well-directed is just a play-within-the-play comedy, amusing and clever but that's about it. Maybe that's pretty much all it is even if it is well-directed.
It's Ferrer, not Farrar.
Jose Ferrer repeated his luminous performance as Cyrano in the movie production, for which he became the first Puerto Rican and first Hispanic to win an Oscar for best actor. He turned in equally outstanding performances as Toulouse Lautrec in Moulin Rouge; as the defense attorney in The Caine Mutiny, at the end of which he memorably throws a glass of champagne in Fred MacMurray’s face, after the acquittal of the accused mutineers (whom MacMurray had instigated, and then lies on the stand), and the disgrace of Captain Queeg (Bogart); and as a philandering Nazi in Ship of Fools. With his deep voice and superb diction, he dominated any scene he appeared in. He was also the uncle of George Clooney, having been married twice to George’s aunt, Rosemary Clooney.
Julius LaRosa thank you for all that fascinating information. It never crossed my mind that George Clooney and Rosemary Clooney were related and I have forgotten, if I ever knew, that José Ferrer was ever married to her. I guess there is still a lot to learn even at the age of 87.
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