Steven M. Friedman - The Ultimate Broadway Musical List Book

The Ultimate
Broadway
Musical
List Book

Steven M. Friedman

The Ultimate Broadway Musical List Book

Copyright 2016 Steven M. Friedman.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-8695-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-8696-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016901972

iUniverse rev. date: 3/23/2017

Contents

While enjoying my newfound pastime, lecturing on the topic of Broadway Musical History at sea, I met an insightful, charismatic, truly brilliant man by the name of Shelby Coffey III. He loved my lectures and based upon his background and insight from his positions at the Washington Post , CNN, The Los Angeles Times, and the Newseum I asked him a fateful question.

How do I write a book and pull what I do together in a format that could be interesting?

He very quickly responded, People like lists. Tell people how you got your passion, write your lists, and then explain them.

It was magic: there it was and here it is.

I dont think this book was ever meant to be serious, but I hope it can create lots of fun conversation among musical theater aficionados. So Shelby, I thank you for the terrific inspiration.

Maybe I was 7 or 8. I am not quite sure, but I recall vividly taking an original cast recording of Can-Can, Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, or The Music Man and putting it standing up on the inside lid of my Victrola and listening to great music and imaging what the play must have been like that the music came from. I remember Lilo singing I Love Paris and Hans Conreid singing Never be an Artist. Forget that I could barely understand the story or did not even care yet who Cole Porter was. This was a magical way to spend my time, listening to great Broadway albums of a special era that were hanging around the house. Who knew that these great moments would create a passion so strong, it lasted for the rest of my life.

My very real favorite of course was My Fair Lady. The chords of the overture, sounding so much more elegant than anything else, the lithe tune that follows I Have Often Walked Down This Street Before or Rex Harrison singing a Why Cant a Woman Be More Like a Man? I knew every lyric to every single song and could imagine what it must have been like to sit in the theater and see the plays.

In 1957, I can clearly recall watching the Sunday night production of Cinderella with Julie Andrews and when my birthday occurred a few weeks later my father bringing me home the recorded album. I too sat in my own little corner and played the music over and over again just filling me with energy recalling the great TV event of a few weeks earlier.

These recordings became my special time.

Passions just happen sometime. As the Sixties advanced there were more and more records. Camelot became a favorite; oh, they might burn Guinevere at the stake? How cool was that!

But my luckiest moment came when a friends parent asked if I would like to see Bye Bye Birdie at the National Theater at an upcoming Saturday matinee here in Washington DC. I was about 11 at the time and was not quite sure what this musical was about, somehow the recording had not infiltrated my house yet.

It was amazing. I recall the fourth row seats. The magic as teenagers were hanging from boxes singing about Hugo and Kim getting pinned, learning about Conrad Birdie and I was carried away to Sweet Apple, Ohio. No words can describe the exhilaration and enthusiasm I was feeling watching and recalling this event. I just recall it vividly! I was so unfamiliar with real theater we didnt quite understand that when the lights came up there was more to come. We thought maybe it was over but no one left.

With the album at my house after I saved my allowance (I think it was a $5.00 album), I began to choreograph and re-create all of the moments in Bye Bye Birdie for my family and the poor relatives that had to sit through my entire 45-minute rendition, playing every character in the script. But I was hooked.

Luckily there was a summer theater nearby, called Shady Grove Music Fair and it was a part of the circuit owned by Guber and Gross (Barbara Walters was married to Lee Guber). This venue initially under a tent was where I was introduced to even more Broadway than you can imagine. George Gobel (remember him) played Albert in Bye Bye Birdie, Patrice Munsel played in Can-Can, Jayne Mansfield played Lorelei Lee in Gentleman Prefer Blondes(I even have her autograph!), Martha Raye played Sally Adams in Call Me Madam and, for you trivia people, imagine Gail Storm In Finians Rainbow. (Im sorry if you dont know who Gail Storm is).

This summer stock circuit introduced me to the great musicals of the time and I was so enthralled that at school all of the non-jock kids would talk about the musicals. Oh, by the way, I was a non-jock kid. One of my friends at the time, Mark Freedman was a willing conversationalist as his father ran the PR for the Shady Grove Theater and we would sit and devour every last detail of the shows for months on end.

By the time I was 12 or 13, if a good musical came to town I got a $1.99 second balcony seat, and was able to ride the bus to downtown DC to the National Theater to see something fantastic.

1964 really hit pay dirt for me!

I went to Detroit every summer to visit my grandmother and her family of four overly interfering sisters who themselves belonged in Billy Crystals 700 Sundays.

In any event I was invited to a big event. There was a new Mostel show at the Fisher Theater. Would I like to go? I jumped at it, knew nothing about what we were going to see, and sort of thought I had heard of Zero Mostel somehow. That it was a musical called Fiddler on the Roof and it was on its way to New York with an intermediate stop in Washington DC was greater than cool. The Fisher had just re-opened and it was like no other theater I had ever seen. It was huge, lush, exciting. The National was dull old and small.

I got the program and learned that this story is based upon Sholem Aleichem short stories and I had a sort of a picture that he was a Russian writer who wrote Jewish stories. That was about all I knew. My grandmother, who was a very modern non accent speaking first generation person, was skeptical of the whole evening. I frankly did not catch at my age of 13 that she was in fact from Poland and had come from there at a young age and would have a connection to the proceedings. All I knew was that I was in for a great musical adventure. A Broadway tryout!

So all dressed up in a suit and tie (that was the required dress in those days) off to the theater!

The lights went down and the stage did not have a curtain in front of it as I recall. There was a little house and a fiddler was sitting atop the house playing some music. Suddenly this man (Zero Mostel) came out on stage and pointed to the fiddler on his roof and went on from there. Suddenly the entire cast of townspeople came out singing this song about who they were and what they were about. Tradition! They kept singing and I suddenly figured out that this was about a Jewish community, and since this was about 4 months after my Bar Mitzvah I was getting a very deep connection to this. I did not know there were Jewish musicals. (Actually there hadnt been.)