THE BROADWAY BARBER By Peter Filichia
A century ago this month, people who read Liberty magazine were talking about Ring Lardner’s newest short story.
“Haircut” involves a barber who talked and talked while serving a customer sitting in his chair.
The 13-page story starts off blithely enough but soon devolves into a dark tale of severe sexual situations and murder.
The 100th anniversary of Larner’s opus started me thinking that I’d like to go to a non-stop, talkative barber as well – as long as he was into musicals. Perhaps a trip to The Broadway Barber would go something like this:
“Next!
Come on up. I’m no Sweeney Todd – although you will get the closest shave I ever gave if you’d like that, too.
No? Just a haircut? Fine. CAROUSEL says, ‘Stonecutters cut it on stone,’ but haircutters cut it on heads.
And speaking of Rodgers and Hammerstein, I was over at my sister’s house the other day and saw that my nephew had a Hardy Boys book. It wasn’t like the ones we read when we were kids; they’ve all been rewritten. So wasn’t I surprised to find that this one had Frank in a location where he said, ‘the corn is as high as an elephant’s eye.’
Now, you and I know that when Hammerstein wrote the opening song for OKLAHOMA!, he wrote ‘the corn is as high as a elephant’s eye, to purposely reflect the way an Oklahoma cowboy would talk. But, hey, what really impressed me is that a book aimed for pre-teens would include a reference to a song that’s now 82 years old. Not bad, Rodgers and Hammerstein; not bad at all.
Did you hear that that MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG revival will soon be released as a movie? I couldn’t afford the prices they were paying at the Hudson, so I’ve been getting by on the excellent cast album. Be nice to see Jonathan Groff, Daniel Radcliffe and Lindsay Mendez do what I’ve been hearing them do for months. Hope you’ve heard this album, too.
What I did recently see was THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY. It was really something, not just because this Sarah Snook is amazing as Dorian and all the rest of Oscar Wilde’s characters, male and female, in costume, too; the most astonishing thing for any musical theater fan is that the show contains a song from THE APPLE TREE.
Yes! Despite the fact that Wilde’s story was published 75 full years before THE APPLE TREE opened, we suddenly heard, ‘Look at me… I am gorgeous!’
I instead looked at the musical theater fan I’d brought with me; he was as astonished as I, for we both knew it was the actual recording that Barbara Harris sang on the original cast album. Snook lip-synched every word of it.
Frankly, we both thought that it wasn’t an ideal fit. Nothing against the song, of course, but it was originally written for Ella, a down-and-out chimneysweep whose fairy godmother turns her into a beautiful, glamorous, radiant, ravishing movie star called Passionella.
Sheldon Harnick, to a fun melody by Jerry Bock, stressed how far Ella had come: ‘See the way my nose stopped running,’ she joyously sang. Yeah, but that lyric doesn’t apply to either Dorian, for he never had that problem, as we could see on the many giant screens that filled the Music Box stage.
Later, Snook sang ‘Every studio will sign me!’ which wouldn’t be something Dorian would sing in 1891, for the first movie studio was still years away from seeing the light of day.
In THE APPLE TREE, Passionella sported quite the set of breasts. ‘Look at those!’, she sang in utter awe of what that fairy godmother had given her below her neck. In actuality, they stretched out so far and straight that you could have put every recording of JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR on them and still have had some space left.
Now, you might not think Passionella was so endowed if you go to Lincoln Center and catch the broadcast of the 1966-1967 Tonys. There Harris sang “Gorgeous,” but ABC’s powers-that-be must have deemed that half of what she usually had would be quite enough for home audiences, thank you.
But as my friend and I sat there listening to the song we knew so well, we wondered what Dorian – a man, after all – would refer to when ‘he’ sang ‘Look at those!’ I won’t tell you, although I won’t be surprised if you can guess. But don’t just guess: under any circumstances, see Sarah Snook in THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY.
Did you hear the good news about BEAU? The country musical that started at Joe’s Pub, then got a cast album, and even got a movie is now going to get a real live production in a real live theater. Come June 6, it’ll be presented courtesy of Out of the Box Theatrics at Theatre 154 – so named because it’s at 154 Christopher Street, where, we learned from WONDERFUL TOWN, you can meet such interesting people
In BEAU, those interesting people include twentysomething Ace Baker, the guitar-playing frontman at a rustic bar and grill. Ace never knew his father, so he sings ‘Dad, I’d like to meet you … do we have the same color hair?’ That’s so touching, don’t you think?
Ace’s mother tells him that Beau – her father and therefore, his grandfather – died long ago. But Ace finds out that he’s still alive. I won’t spoil the surprise on how he learns this, but what’s even more touching is Beau’s being so moved that his grandson took a 200-mile trip just to meet him. He admits, ‘This heart had been closed for decades,’ but now, Ace has opened it. There’s more to tug at your heartstrings in Lyons and Pakchar’s flavorful score, too. I’ll be counting the days to June 6 the way a kid counts them to Christmas.
Luckily, we won’t have to wait as long for WONDERFUL TOWN at Encores! That starts April 30. I wonder if Amanda Green will find a way to fix the section of “One Hundred Easy Ways to Lose a Man” that her daddy and Betty Comden wrote.
Let me explain what I mean in this musical that Rosalind Russell recorded twice – once on an original cast album, and once for a TV special. (The latter is the superior one with much better sound.) Russell played Ruth, who recounts attending a baseball game with a date who predicts what will soon happen.
Ruth is not above correcting him: ‘You’ll walk right into a triple play just like it happened in the fifth game of the World Series in 1923.’
Yes, there was a triple play in the fifth game of a World Series – but it happened in 1920. Problem is, Comden and Green had set up a rhyme scheme with ‘knee,’ ‘see,’ and ‘me’ – so ‘three’ is what they had to settle for.
Funny; Ruth says to one of her dates, ‘I’m afraid you’ve made a grammatical error.’ Ruth, I’m afraid you’ve made a baseball error.
That should do it! Want the eyebrows trimmed, 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.
