PURLIE’S BACK AND RAHWAY’S GOT IT By Peter Filichia
It was heard so many times last season as people were leaving the revival of PURLIE VICTORIOUS.
“Now I’d like to see the musical version!”
And now they can. PURLIE, the 1970 musical adapted from Ossie Davis’ 1961 play, will run March 6-23 at the American Theater Group in Rahway, New Jersey. This comes courtesy of Jim Vagias, the troupe’s producing artistic director.
“When I was a teen,” he says, “my parents came home after seeing a matinee of PURLIE. Not only had they loved the show, but they also bought the original cast album, as well as five tickets for an upcoming performance, so that our entire family could attend.”
Although the cast album had provided young Jim a Love at First Hear, the show itself provided him with Love at First Sight. “From the opening number, it was sensational,” he says, citing “Walk Him Up the Stairs.”
It’s actually a funeral for Ol’ Cap’n Stonewall Jackson Cotchipee, who ruled supreme on his plantation where he’d cheated his sharecroppers for years. A flashback introduces us to Purlie Victorious Judson, a charismatic and eloquent young Black preacher, who’s returned to his small Georgia hometown where, with the help of his new-made friend Lutiebelle, he will conduct a ruse to extract money from the Ol’ Cap’n – money his sharecroppers would have had in the first place, if the bigoted miser had been at all fair with them.
Besides, Purlie’s motivation isn’t to get rich just so he can live the high life; he wants to start a church. Getting in his way, though, is Gitlow, a quintessential Uncle Tom who has the Stockholm Syndrome in his loyalty to Ol’ Cap’n.
“At that performance we attended, though,” recalls Vagias, “Tony-winner Cleavon Little, who usually played Purlie, was out. We had to see his understudy – an up-and-coming young actor named Morgan Freeman.”
Melba Moore was in attendance, however. As Lutiebelle – Purlie’s girlfriend-to-be – she made such an impression on Vagias that, for his second trip to PURLIE, he, his younger brother and a friend brought flowers to Moore as she arrived at the stage door.
“We hadn’t even expected to see the show that day,” he recalls. “We’d been doing yard work, but I had raved so much that we all had decided to go into the city [from his Jersey home] and buy tickets for an upcoming performance. So, there we were, in muddy jeans and T-shirts, when the box office man said, ‘If you’d like, I can give you front-row tickets for tonight.’”
Although they felt that they weren’t dressed for the occasion, they snapped up the tickets faster than Danny Burstein ever said “Adolpho.”
“And,” Vagias adds, “when Melba Moore started singing ‘I Got Love’, she looked directly at us.”
Ah, “I Got Love”! And to think that PURLIE’s opening-night Playbills didn’t even have the song listed. What is arguably the musical’s biggest showstopper was written during the fourth and final week of previews.
By that time, lyricist (and co-librettist) Peter Udell and composer Gary Geld had noticed that their leading lady was quite extraordinary. So, at the last minute, they wrote her a song worthy of Moore’s talents.
Luckily, one can still experience its joy on PURLIE’s original cast album. It was, however, released by Ampex, a company not known for theatrical recordings. Producer Andy Wiswell did due diligence by placing the songs in the order that they appeared in the show, but that relegated “I Got Love” to last place on the record’s first side.
Here’s betting, though, that if PURLIE had been recorded by Goddard Lieberson, Columbia’s legendary cast album producer and guru, he would have finagled and put “I Got Love” as the first song on the second side of the recording.
Why? Because “I Got Love” was a song that a listener wanted to hear time and time (and time) again. Picking up the needle and placing it at the start of second side where the groove is wider is much easier than squinting and finding the narrow groove between a plethora of songs.
And, after all, changing the song order is precisely what Lieberson had done with CAMELOT’S “If Ever I Would Leave You.” He placed it out of sequence as the first cut on Side Two, for he knew that this was The Show’s Big Song and that listeners would want to hear it more than over and over (and over) again.
In the theater, “I Got Love” became the knockout punch that ensured Moore would win the 1969-70 Best Featured Actress in a Musical Tony Award. Yes, she was PURLIE’s leading lady, but you know the Tonys and their funky policies with categories.
Back to Vagias. After he’d attended twice, the teen still wasn’t through with selling tickets to PURLIE. Soon, he enticed some of high school drama club friends to attend. Later, he went for a fourth time when the show was nearing its 688th and final performance.
The 20-month run had surprised longtime Broadway observers, for very little was expected from producer Philip Rose. Yes, he’d surprised Broadway 11 years earlier by producing A RAISIN IN THE SUN, but his two previous musicals had averaged 39½ performances.
He’d produced PURLIE VICTORIOUS on Broadway and was tangentially involved with the 1963 film (that has sometimes been known as GONE ARE THE DAYS). But, as Broadway’s moneymen were quick to point out, both iterations lost many dollars.
Nevertheless, Rose saw PURLIE VICTORIOUS as a musical, and if that wasn’t risky enough, he wanted to co-write the libretto, too. Davis gave his blessing, which led to an atypical billing: “Book by Davis-Rose-Udell.”
Yes, they became a hyphenate with their first names omitted because, Broadway wags said, there just wasn’t enough room on the window card and cast album for three more names.
And as if Rose wasn’t foolhardy enough, Broadway laughed at his opening a show on The Ides of March.
(Well, Herman Levin did just that with MY FAIR LADY and lived to tell the tale.)
PURLIE had a fascinating afterlife. On July 16, 1981, at the Lehman Center in the Bronx, Showtime recorded it. Robert Guillaume, who’d succeeded Cleavon Little and was by then a TV star thanks to BENSON, got generous entrance applause. So did Melba Moore. And so did the actor who was reprising his role as Gitlow, which didn’t happen when he first performed the show on Broadway.
By then, though, Sherman Hemsley had become a TV star, too, thanks to his role as George on THE JEFFERSONS. He, too, can be heard on the original cast album.
Vagias says that getting to Rahway won’t be much of a problem for New Yorkers who don’t drive. After they take a 40-minute train ride from Penn Station, they’ll find the theater after a pleasant 15-minute walk. Depending on the road they take, they’ll run into some very nice restaurants.
And no one is more eager to revisit the show than Vagias. “For years,” he says, “whenever anyone in our family saw a show and gave our opinions, it would always be a case of ‘Oh, it was good, but it was no PURLIE.’”
And Jim Vagias is hoping that American Theater Group audiences will be saying much the same for the rest of their lives, too.
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.
