houses. Fading star Lahr was at loggerheads with much of the cast and crew. He mugged and ad-libbed madly, trying to completely dominate the show. When it reached New York Lahr won critical raves and a Tony Award, but few younger audience members—he was celebrating his fiftieth year in show business.
Foxy
was his Broadway swansong.
As for playing the frozen north, Lahr declared, “
You kon
have it, buster!”
Q : Was Mitch
“Man of La Mancha”
Leigh a one-hit wonder?
A : Most Broadway composers used to have several hit songs, but Leigh had “The Impossible Dream.” Period. However, he’d previously worked in advertising where he had created another hit “song”: “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.”
Q : Why is Broadway gayer than Hollywood?
A : Because the stage is more of an actor’s medium, and it’s from a distance. The camera specializes in outer personality, gestures, stereotypes, and reaching mass audiences versus a more sophisticated and tolerant urban audience. As to why so many performers are gay, Sir Ian McKellen (a Tony winner) explains, “We learn to start acting, to start passing, as children and teens, as soon as we realize we’re different.”
Why are so many gays creative and artistic? Novelist-playwright Truman Capote believed, “We channel our creative instincts into our surroundings and the world itself, not just into reproducing. We want to make the world more attractive and kinder, more wonderful.… Theatre’s the best and easiest place to pretend.”
Q : What proportion of Broadway is gay?
A : Who can say for certain? But theatre columnist and author Mark Steyn offers, “On the basis of my own unscientific research, I would say that, of the longest-running shows of the 1940s, some two-thirds had a homosexual contribution in the writing/staging/producing department. By the 1960s, the proportion of long-runners with a major homosexual contribution was up to about ninety percent.”
Leonard Bernstein once apprised a friend, “To be a successful composer of musicals, you either have to be Jewish or gay. And I’m both.”
Q : Did someone ever commit suicide to ruin a theatrical premiere?
A : The playwright Congreve wrote, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” Rachel Roberts’s dramatic promise was subsumed by her marriage to superstar Rex Harrison. After he left her (he had six wives, and mistress-actress Carole Landis’s suicide in 1948 nearly cost him his Hollywood career), Roberts’s life went downhill. She yearned for a remarriage; friends said she’d been more in love with Harrison’s Portofino villa than with the testy actor himself. But Rex refused, and the already suicide-prone actress planned to kill herself in time to spoil his much-heralded return to Hollywood in a revival of
My Fair Lady
.
That production took in the largest amount of money for a single week of any show until that time: $409,884, at the 2,699-seat Pantages Theatre in January 1981. Rachel had intended to grab the newspaper headlines for herself and in so doing remind the town and industry of the Landis suicide. But her Hispanic gardener didn’t show up to discover her body on the appointed day, and the LA coroner, despite Roberts’s precautions, didn’t at first believe it was suicide. After all, she was in her fifties, and British.
Q : Was Irving Berlin the greatest-ever Broadway composer?
A : He was one of the all-time greats, and one of few, like Cole Porter, who wrote both words and music. As a pianist, he wasn’t good and played only in one key, F sharp. Nor did he actually
write
his music; he dictated tunes to an assistant. He’d become a composer via misunderstanding: when asked to deliver a
lyric
, the Russian (born Israel Balin) thought he also had to compose the melody.
Berlin lived long enough—1888–1989—to become a legend in his own time, but early on wasn’t that universally esteemed. When Berlin, a Jew, married Ellin Mackay, she was expelled from the Social
Foxy
was his Broadway swansong.
As for playing the frozen north, Lahr declared, “
You kon
have it, buster!”
Q : Was Mitch
“Man of La Mancha”
Leigh a one-hit wonder?
A : Most Broadway composers used to have several hit songs, but Leigh had “The Impossible Dream.” Period. However, he’d previously worked in advertising where he had created another hit “song”: “Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.”
Q : Why is Broadway gayer than Hollywood?
A : Because the stage is more of an actor’s medium, and it’s from a distance. The camera specializes in outer personality, gestures, stereotypes, and reaching mass audiences versus a more sophisticated and tolerant urban audience. As to why so many performers are gay, Sir Ian McKellen (a Tony winner) explains, “We learn to start acting, to start passing, as children and teens, as soon as we realize we’re different.”
Why are so many gays creative and artistic? Novelist-playwright Truman Capote believed, “We channel our creative instincts into our surroundings and the world itself, not just into reproducing. We want to make the world more attractive and kinder, more wonderful.… Theatre’s the best and easiest place to pretend.”
Q : What proportion of Broadway is gay?
A : Who can say for certain? But theatre columnist and author Mark Steyn offers, “On the basis of my own unscientific research, I would say that, of the longest-running shows of the 1940s, some two-thirds had a homosexual contribution in the writing/staging/producing department. By the 1960s, the proportion of long-runners with a major homosexual contribution was up to about ninety percent.”
Leonard Bernstein once apprised a friend, “To be a successful composer of musicals, you either have to be Jewish or gay. And I’m both.”
Q : Did someone ever commit suicide to ruin a theatrical premiere?
A : The playwright Congreve wrote, “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” Rachel Roberts’s dramatic promise was subsumed by her marriage to superstar Rex Harrison. After he left her (he had six wives, and mistress-actress Carole Landis’s suicide in 1948 nearly cost him his Hollywood career), Roberts’s life went downhill. She yearned for a remarriage; friends said she’d been more in love with Harrison’s Portofino villa than with the testy actor himself. But Rex refused, and the already suicide-prone actress planned to kill herself in time to spoil his much-heralded return to Hollywood in a revival of
My Fair Lady
.
That production took in the largest amount of money for a single week of any show until that time: $409,884, at the 2,699-seat Pantages Theatre in January 1981. Rachel had intended to grab the newspaper headlines for herself and in so doing remind the town and industry of the Landis suicide. But her Hispanic gardener didn’t show up to discover her body on the appointed day, and the LA coroner, despite Roberts’s precautions, didn’t at first believe it was suicide. After all, she was in her fifties, and British.
Q : Was Irving Berlin the greatest-ever Broadway composer?
A : He was one of the all-time greats, and one of few, like Cole Porter, who wrote both words and music. As a pianist, he wasn’t good and played only in one key, F sharp. Nor did he actually
write
his music; he dictated tunes to an assistant. He’d become a composer via misunderstanding: when asked to deliver a
lyric
, the Russian (born Israel Balin) thought he also had to compose the melody.
Berlin lived long enough—1888–1989—to become a legend in his own time, but early on wasn’t that universally esteemed. When Berlin, a Jew, married Ellin Mackay, she was expelled from the Social
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