REMEMBERING REDHEAD By Peter Filichia
Let’s take a look at the first 10 years of Best Musical Tony winners and see how many Broadway revivals they’ve had:
- THE KING AND I and MY FAIR LADY: four
- KISS ME, KATE and GUYS AND DOLLS: three
- THE PAJAMA GAME and THE MUSIC MAN: two
- Even SOUTH PACIFIC, WONDERFUL TOWN, KISMET and DAMN YANKEES have had one Broadway revival.
All right, KISMET is a bit of a cheat, for when it was returned in 1978, it was retitled TIMBUKTU. But, despite the title change, it was pretty much business (and KISMET) as usual.
City Center has done its part, too, to bring these above-named shows back to midtown. Whether it was Jean Dalrymple and her Light Opera series in the 1950s and 1960s, or Encores! since 1993, both have done many of the above-mentioned Best Musicals.
But going to the next 10 years of Best Musical Tony winners reveals a show that won five other Tonys for a total of six. That’s just as many as the winner – THE MUSIC MAN – amassed the year before as well as the season before that: MY FAIR LADY.
John Chapman of the Daily News brought up those two hits and one other when he reviewed this other show: “Now we have four really tip-top musicals in town: WEST SIDE STORY, THE MUSIC MAN, MY FAIR LADY and REDHEAD.”
Despite this and many other endorsements, REDHEAD, which opened 66 years ago last week, remains the Tony-winning musical that has had the longest streak without a Broadway revival: 65 years and counting.
The closest REDHEAD has been to our theater district since it closed after 452 performances was a 1967 production at the fondly remembered showcase for budding talent called The Equity Library Theatre near Riverside Drive. After that, to see a potentially worthy production would mean a 31-year wait until 1998, when one would have had to travel 125 miles from Broadway to the Goodspeed Opera House. In 2015, the West Coast could boast a benefit concert for Theatre West in Hollywood, but productions have been very few and very far between.
Some say REDHEAD’s lack of a Broadway renaissance is the result of fear that no one could effectively replace star Gwen Verdon and director-choreographer Bob Fosse. That theory is hard to rebut, for the two of them wound up winning a total of 13 Tonys. How amazing that Verdon snagged a then-record four (the last for REDHEAD), but it still leaves her well behind her husband’s nine.
But the book couldn’t have been all that bad, given that Sidney Sheldon co-wrote it. Yes, we’re talking about that Sidney Sheldon who would eventually write mystery suspense novels and would sell over 300 million of them. So, he’d be right for REDHEAD, which was a Broadway anomaly: a musical theater murder mystery set in England, 20 years before SWEENEY TODD was musicalized.
The first surprise was that Verdon and her signature red hair was a red herring. It was the murderer who was the redhead. How fitting that one of REDHEAD’s songs was “Just for Once,” for just this once in her Broadway career did Verdon wear a brown wig.
And just for once, Verdon didn’t play a woman of, as they say, questionable virtue. Do the math: Verdon’s first Tony came from playing a scandalous dancer in CAN-CAN. The second was the result of her she-devil in DAMN YANKEES. And if those two weren’t salty enough, for the third, NEW GIRL IN TOWN made her an out-and-out (as well as a down-and-out) prostitute.
In REDHEAD, though, Verdon was quite the opposite, as you can tell just from her character’s dishwater-dull name: Essie Whimple. She was an aging British woman who was now inured to the fact that she’d always be – horrors! – unmarried. Hence, Essie mourned in song that “The Right Finger of My Left Hand” would never have a ring on it.
Her 10 fingers were constantly busy creating exhibits for the wax museum where she worked. The new one would be sensational in both senses of the word: it replicated the recent murder of Ruth, an entertainer who was killed backstage before a performance.
Thinking that the exhibit was in terribly bad taste was Ruth’s partner Tom (Richard Kiley), who came to the museum to complain. Just one look, that’s all it took for Essie to fall in love. Not Tom, though.
“She’s Not Enough Woman for Me,” he insisted, in a melody that was semi-reprised later when he changed his mind about Essie and decided that “My Girl Is Just Enough Woman for Me.”
So, “Look Who’s in Love” wasn’t a solo for Essie; Tom felt the same way, at least for a while. There was also a subplot where Essie became a performer who wound up doing the Cockney-fied “’Erbie Fitch’s Twitch” shortly after other entertainers did “The Uncle Sam Rag.”
In the vinyl era where space was at a premium, comparatively few cast albums offered orchestral dance sequences. Yet REDHEAD made room for two. Perhaps the idea was that so many musical theater enthusiasts had become familiar with Verdon’s dancing abilities from the DAMN YANKEES film, they could visualize what she did with “Essie’s Vision” and “Pick-Pocket Tango.”
There was a time when catching REDHEAD in Spanish was easier than seeing it in English. LA PELLIROJA opened in Mexico City on February 23, 1960, with a 20-year-old Virma Gonzalez heading a company of – get this – 77.
It only ran until May 8, and yet, in that time, it returned its $36,800 budget. It even went on a national tour to such cities as Monterrey, San Luis Potosi and Guadalajara. And LA PELLIROJA’S Spanish affinity didn’t end there: later that year, the production moved to Madrid, where it played before embarking on another national tour, lasting eight months in various Spanish cities. Most interesting was that the choreographer was Kevin Carlisle, who’d later receive a Tony nomination for his work on HALLELUJAH, BABY!
It’s always fun to see what song titles translate to in another language. The literal English translations include “From the Fingers of My Hand,” “She Is Not Enough of a [sic] Woman for Me,” “She’s a Pretty Woman for Me” and “Who Said Love?” And you won’t need a Spanish/English dictionary to figure out what the “Tio Sam Rag” was called on Broadway.
REDHEAD had a supporting player sing a song called “Two Faces in the Dark.” In Spanish, it became “Dos Caras En La Oscuridad” – the same title – but we bring it up here because the performer who sang it was the just-starting-out Plácido Domingo.
The score was written by one legend and one celebrity-to-be. The former was Dorothy Fields, celebrating the 20th time that a Broadway musical credited her with lyrics. She, Verdon and Fosse apparently got along, for seven year later, they returned with SWEET CHARITY.
The composer was Albert Hague, who became far better known as an actor, thanks to the Fame franchise. He portrayed Mr. Shorofsky both on the big screen and small (although these days, small screens aren’t as small as they used to be).
Fields and Hague had to be surprised when their REDHEAD won a Best Broadway Cast Album Grammy in a tie. Bet they didn’t feel in advance that they’d get just as many votes as their co-winner: GYPSY.
And you can’t say that an original cast album’s victory was the result of Verdon’s dancing or Fosse’s staging.
Peter Filichia can be heard most weeks of the year on www.broadwayradio.com. His calendar – A SHOW TUNE FOR TODAY: 366 Songs to Brighten Your Year – is now available on Amazon.
