THEATRE-GOING WHEN YOUNG - PART 7 of 8
Continuing an occasional series about the theatrical events I was fortunate to experience when in my late teens. The first Blog in this series was posted in August 2015, the most recent in August 2021, so it’s been rather a long-running saga! I explained the background to the series in my 23 August 2015 Blog.
36. Bells are Ringing
By Broadway standards Bells are Ringing has a provenance without equal. And it is a truly charming musical – of the frothy rather than the profound school; entertaining, not challenging.
The story, and the lyrics that brought that story to the stage, were written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, a writing partnership of more than 60 years. The Comden and Green team collaborated on plays On the Town and Wonderful Town, and on movies Singing in the Rain, The Band Wagon and Aunty Mame….and numerous others. And by way of significantly more than an afterthought, I recall Green’s memorable performance as Dr. Pangloss in Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, both the video and the CD. As well as a practised lyricist, Green was a robust baritone,
Accompanying the Comden-Green lyrics for Bells are Ringing was the music of Jule Styne, another prolific star in the firmament of musicals. Think Gypsy and Funny Girl, and keep going.
The Broadway opening was on 29 November, 1956, and starred Judy Holliday as the answering-service telephonist who lives vicariously through the phone messages of her customers, until imagined life becomes real for her. Her co-star was Sydney Chaplin, in the later (1960) movie replaced by Dean Martin. Between times (in 1958) the play came to the Princess’s Theatre, where the lead was Shani Wallis, a British actress whose CV has scores of credits in film, television, and theatre.
Bells are Ringing has three memorable numbers, songs which entitle it to be counted among the finest of musicals: Long Before I Knew You, The Party’s Over, and Just in Time.
37. The Fabulous Ray Charles
Thanks to the wonders of the Internet I have been able to ascertain that the Ray Charles concert I saw was at Festival Hall on 1 September, 1964.
The Ray Charles life story poses some fundamental questions. What is a "good" person; what is a "bad" person? Can one become good having previously been bad? Should the fact that one has been bad, or remains bad, affect society's judgement of that person's professional worth? Should society accept redemption, and forgive; or should past behaviour forever remain on the scales?
Giving these thoughts some non-theatrical relevance: is it appropriate for Confederate General Robert E. Lee's statue to be toppled from its stand 150 years after his death because he was part of a scenario that some latter-day observers find unacceptable? Or why should we care whether Joseph Stalin's statue has likewise been removed from public prominence? And, closer to home: because Tom Wills is now believed to have been a murderer of Aboriginal people in the nineteenth century, should we now destroy the statue erected to mark his role in the development of Australian football? Is it not both futile and self-defeating to attempt to expunge the writing on the page of history? Probably. Yet, should the response be different if the purpose of the statue were specifically to commemorate the role of Wills in the suppression of the native peoples?
Enough to say, perhaps, that the past informs our view of the present (and the future), and that to obliterate uncomfortable aspects of the past surely does us little service. Which thought brings us to aberrant behaviour of a much less extreme nature, and to shine the light on Ray Charles. Despite Charles’s long and successful performing career, we cannot avoid seeing that he was a lifelong drug addict, and that he fathered twelve children from ten women, only two of whom were his wives at the time. Do these colourful aspects of Ray Charles’s life entitle us to impugn Ray Charles the musician, and his achievements? I say certainly not…………although his life experience clearly elevates him into the "interesting" category.
Mind you, the Ray Charles image was not exactly burnished by the programme note: "The sensitivity of Ray Charles will not allow the selection of music in advance of the actual concert performance. Programming of music for the concert is selected by Mr. Charles from the mood and response of the audience while the concert is in progress. It is likely, however, that many of the following selections will be heard." And there follows a list of some 47 numbers. What a jerk! What a wanker! One would have thought that a great artist, as doubtless Mr. Charles considered himself to be, would have been able to take any audience and mould it to his whim - and meanwhile stick to his preferred playlist. And what of the accompanying Ray Charles Orchestra who, presumably, had to flick with ease between at least 47 scores without pause to think "now that's a great idea, but when did we last rehearse it?"
[Incidentally, Charles was back at Festival Hall three years later, and on 17 August 1967 he performed fourteen songs - eight of which were not in the list of 47 from three years earlier.]
Having trashed the man and his memory I confess that I’m unable to offer starry-eyed admiration by way of counterpoint. I remember nothing of the concert. Undoubtedly, Ray Charles was a pretty big cheese in the entertainment world, but “fabulous” is a bit of a stretch.
38. Sam Snyder’s Fabulous American Water Follies
In the days before Flinders Park and the Melbourne Tennis Centre, the “home” of tennis in Melbourne was Kooyong, that is the stadium of the Kooyong Lawn Tennis Association. Kooyong, in addition to being both the club and the championship tennis venue, was also a general entertainment centre for mega open-air events, whereas Festival Hall – formerly the West Melbourne (boxing) Stadium - was the preferred indoor venue, and with considerably greater seating capacity.
On this occasion, in 1956, Kooyong was the venue, and entrepreneur Kenn Brodziac of Aztec Services brought to Australia the paraphernalia to equip Kooyong for an aquatic extravaganza. This was big time: an exhibition pool for water ballet 75 by 35 feet, and 5 feet deep; a diving pool 50 by 35 feet, and 8 feet deep - all up 60000 gallons of water. And all “able to be dismantled within 6 hours” [as if that was going to happen more than once!].
And, to add a touch of non-aquatic class, the show included Chet Clark, harmonica virtuoso…….and all of this accompanied by an orchestra led by prominent local bandleader, Tom Davidson. In essence, the show was a series of acts, linked to the water rather than to the stage.
I’m short of further detail because I’m short of recollection, but I see that a copy of the Australian tour programme – the very programme that I gave to the State Library some years ago – has an Internet asking price of $30 plus postage from Queensland, or $43 including postage if you choose to buy from an American source.
39. Anniversary Waltz
Hollywood actor, Richard Arlen (1899 to 1976), came to Melbourne to star in Anniversary Waltz – at the Princess’s Theatre, in a season commencing 15 August 1958. The play, by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields, had opened on Broadway on 7 April 1954, and ran for 611 performances.
Richard Arlen was still a headline actor at age 59, having acted in a prodigious number of feature films…..my count of his Wikipedia lifetime listing got to 148, but the program note tops that at “more than 250“ – and by 1958, indeed! Being able to count is not a pre-requisite for compilers of bio notes or of theatre programmes. Whatever the true number, Arlen in 1958 was clearly (already) a veteran of the silver screen.
The following note is from a Player & Sons, Film Stars series cigarette card (circa 1934, fourteen years earlier), by which time Arlen had acted in 26 silent films and about 30 talkies:
“Richard Arlen, christened Sylvanus van Mattimore, was born on September 1st, 1899, in Charlottesville, Virginia. During the Great War he enlisted in the Royal Flying Corps at the age of 16, training in Canada. Upon demobilisation he became a sports writer, was attracted to the Texas oil-fields, and eventually arrived in Los Angeles. After working as a motor-cycle messenger, he became a film extra. Wings gave him his first real chance, and won him his wife, Jobyna Ralston. They have one son, Richard, born in 1933. Richard Arlen is 5 feet 11 inches in height.” [There were a couple of subsequent wives.]
The programme notes for Anniversary Waltz (some 24 years after the cigarette card bio) tell much the same story, adding the anecdote that Arlen may be the only actor personally affected by the old theatrical greeting “break a leg”: while he was a messenger for a film laboratory, and delivering a can of film, he was struck by a car - owned by Paramount Studios - and had his leg broken. “Studio executives interested themselves in the boy with the engaging smile and gave him a chance to act.” Ah, the stuff of legend!
I have no recollection of Arlen’s performance or, indeed, of the play itself. I presume it was a pleasant enough affair within the light entertainment genre circa 1950s. But I’ve located a review of the 1954 premiere Broadway production, featuring Macdonald Carey in the lead role. The review is from TIME magazine, and the criticism is trenchant [I have made substantial cuts]:
“Anniversary Waltz tells of a couple who are celebrating their 15th wedding anniversary. The husband gets high enough to inform his in-laws that it is really a 16th anniversary – there was a year of unholy wedlock at the outset. No sooner are the wife’s parents quieted down than the daughter tells all on a TV show.
There is something so authentically unpleasant about the characters that the play might have some value if it aimed at realism. Aiming as it does for entertainment, it merely proves the shoddy road that can be travelled in the quest for laughs.
Anniversary Waltz fetches a laugh, now and then, but mostly it is crude, unavailing hackwork.” Gulp!
40. Abe Saperstein’s Harlem Globetrotters
It would be futile to trigger a discussion about whether there is a difference between sport and entertainment. Certainly, sport can /should/must be entertaining, but is it an “entertainment”? The discussion is likely rendered otiose [thank you Justin Dabner - I heard you use that word 30 years ago, and have waited these many years for an opportunity to use it myself!], rendered otiose by the cross-overs that occur in the real world. Think of ancient chariot races; think of gladiatorial contests. And think of the Harlem Globetrotters – basketballers playing their sport as entertainers.
Described as an American “exhibition basketball team” the Globetrotters were “created” in Chicago in 1926. They play exhibition games, and tour the world. They survive to this day. Their shtick is to “combine athleticism, theatre, and comedy in their style of play”.
Until the American National Basketball Association began to admit black players in the early 1950s the Globetrotters were exclusively black; and are largely so today. Sure, what the Globetrotters provided was not mainstream basketball competition, but many regarded it as of equal entertainment value and, in many respects, demonstrating greater skills. With such longevity, the Globetrotters have clearly dominated the market they created for themselves.
The Globetrotters appeared at Kooyong, at what would otherwise have been Centre Court. They comprised a squad of nine African Americans, and they played a second – all white -squad described as the New York National Basketball Team. It was Globetrotter custom to pit themselves against another (inferior) team brought along for the occasion……..and the programme note immodestly points out that in the 36 seasons (up to 1963) the Globetrotters’ record over the years had been 7677 wins to 310. One wonders whether there was some difficulty in lining up opponents.
In addition to the serious/comic exhibition match between the Globetrotters and the NYNB side the evening’s entertainment included six variety acts.
41. Danny Kaye….and his all-star international show
In more than one of his movies Danny Kaye played dual roles or multiple parts, and duality exists in his real life. There was the period of his successful film career as a comic actor, and there was the period of his championship of the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) – dare I say Danny Kaye the humourist and Danny Kaye the humanist. These periods overlapped. And there was plenty more in a life of 76 years (1911 to 1987) and, taken all together, Kaye is entitled to be remembered as one of the great and the good.
David Daniel Kaminsky, native of Brooklyn, of Ukrainian stock, is said to have begun his career entertaining his schoolmates with jokes and songs. Abandoning high school he ventured to Florida with a mate, the pair surviving for a while as a vocal/guitar duo. Later he polished his craft as a tummler at upstate New York resorts - a tummler‘s function being to encourage an audience or guests to participate in the entertainment. He met his wife-to-be, Sylvia Fine, at an audition in 1939, and they married in 1940. Kaye was 29, and had already been working as a professional entertainer for seven years. He was part of a vaudeville dance troupe, The Three Terpsichoreans, that toured the United States in 1933, followed by a six months tour of Asia in 1934. It is said that the effort to communicate with non-English-speaking audiences led to the employment of facial expressions and gestures – hallmarks of Kaye’s subsequent film career.
Kaye was in a number of Broadway shows in the early 1940s, and The Danny Kaye Show was a successful CBS radio programme in 1945/1946. His first feature film was Up in Arms, in 1944. Among his most successful films were Wonder Man (1945), The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), The Inspector General (1949), On the Riviera (1951), Hans Christian Andersen (1952), Knock on Wood (1954), and The Court Jester (1956). His television credits are extensive.
Kaye and Sylvia Fine were married for 47 years, and Fine occupies a significant place in Kaye’s professional life. She managed his career, and a number of Kaye’s films contain songs that are examples of Fine the lyricist and composer.
I have referred to Danny Kaye the humanist. This aspect of Kaye’s life stemmed from a trans-Atlantic flight in 1949. Kaye was seated next to the head of UNICEF. Kaye’s subsequent involvement with UNICEF was deep and lifelong. His biographer writes: “For all his successes as a performer his greatest legacy remains his tireless humanitarian work – so close were his ties to UNICEF that when the organization received the Nobel Prize, Kaye was tapped to accept it.”
Kaye’s involvement with UNICEF dates from 1949, about half-way through his feature-film career. By the time he appeared on the stage of the Princess’s Theatre in July 1959, fourteen of his seventeen feature films were behind him. His stage show is described in the programme notes: “Danny works with the band on the stage behind him because he must have uninterrupted contact with his audience – so that he can sit in the footlights, dangle his legs in the empty orchestra pit, smoke a cigarette (which he will probably borrow from somebody in the first row) while discussing current topics with anyone who wants to talk. And even though he’s really taking a breather in his strenuous routine, these intimate interludes provide some of the best-liked moments in his performance”
The next instalment of Theatre-Going When Young will be the final in the series. It will culminate with the 46th report of a performance or event I attended more than 60 years ago. Among those 46 there were a number of big names, world leaders in entertainment (including a couple of doozies in the final instalment), but none is more impressive than Danny Kaye……not just because he was at the top of his chosen professional field as a comedian, but because he was a man who had a very special interface with humankind.
Gary Andrews
