ONE SONG GLORY By Peter Filichia
Everyone I spoke to before the Tonys knew he’d be a shoo-in.
And indeed, Jak Malone won the Best Featured Actor in a Musical prize. When his name was announced, I’m sure I wasn’t the only one giving a definitive, up-and-done head-bobbing, accompanied by a loud “Yes!”
Granted, part of Malone’s achievement is his frenetic interaction with his OPERATION MINCEMEAT castmates. However, what separates him from his four onstage compatriots is his solo “Dear Bill.” In a musical that’s played at a mile-a-half-minute pace, here’s a breather that will take your breath away.
“Dear Bill” is Hester’s improvising a letter that can pass for a love letter that’s needed for a World War II ruse. The reason is so complicated that you’re best off listening to the cast album or – even better – seeing the show.
So, in Malone’s gender-bending performance, Hester writes her “Dear Bill” letter. “I’m afraid I’ve not got long to write,” she sings, minimizing what she’s doing with “I thought that I’d send a few lines.”
Hester starts off with small talk about the progress (or lack of it) with the roses in the garden before she needs to rhetorically ask “Why did we meet in the middle of a war?”
Later comes “Your sister sends her love” and that her playing of the “piano is getting much better.” Her statement that the girl “hopes you’ll be home again soon” is corrected to an assertive and perhaps too optimistic “She knows you’ll be home again soon.” That leads to what she said before but is still on her mind: “Why did we meet in the middle of a war?”
Malone also won a Drama Desk, Theatre World and Outer Critics Circle Award. None of his castmates secured as much as a nomination from any of these organizations. Is there any doubt that “Dear Bill” is what did it for him?
But he won’t be the last Featured Performer to win a Tony by having a One-Song Glory. And, as you’ll see below, Malone was hardly the first one.
As recently as last year, Alex Newell shook up SHUCKED by having her character Lulu proclaim that she was “Independently Owned.” It’s one of those songs – and performances – where you know four seconds into it that if you have some hand lotion on you, you must apply it right then and there because you’re going to be applauding like crazy in a few minutes.
Brandy Clark and Shane McNally’s lyrics are frank. Exhibit A: SHUCKED must be the first Broadway musical to allude to a vibrator. Newell got a big laugh for that, but also one where she proclaimed, “And no disrespect to Tammy Wynette, I can’t stand by my man; he’ll have to stand by me.”
Richard Henry Lee is in the first three scenes of 1776 and then disappears for the rest of the show. Before he takes his leave, however, he has the jaunty “The Lees of Old Virginia” in which he shows that even a delegate with gubernatorial ambitions can have a sense of humor. Lee enjoys that his surname is the last syllable on an adverb, and he uses that part of speech whenever he can: “Social-LEE, political-LEE,” and nine others before he finishes the song delightful-LEE.
In THE GIRL WHO CAME TO SUPPER, Nicolas, a teenage royal, spends a night on the town and runs into Ada Cockle. She sells fish and chips in St. Martin’s Lane, where buskers often purvey songs as well as foodstuffs. Noel Coward didn’t just give Tessie O’Shea one song, but an almost-11-minute sequence where she sang four as well as one reprise in great London Music Hall fashion.
O’Shea needed only about two-thirds of 15 minutes to be famous. After she had finished the medley, O’Shea was through for the night. But when she appeared for her curtain call, the audience let her know that they hadn’t forgotten her. She didn’t slip the Tony voters’ minds, although two months had passed since THE GIRL WHO CAME TO SUPPER had closed.
Although Holgate and O’Shea had plenty of downtime starting around 9 P.M., Marilyn Cooper began work around 10 in WOMAN OF THE YEAR, with a dynamite 11 o’clock number in her one and only scene. She was Jan Donovan, who fit the template that Craig Carnelia created in WORKING: “Just a housewife… like my mother.”
The problem was, she was the second wife to Larry Donovan, whose first wife – Tess Harding – was now a media sensation who would be soon named “Woman of the Year.” When the two met, though, each believed that “The Grass Is Always Greener” in someone else’s yard. It’s a great Kander and Ebb song, where the former’s melody plays host to the latter’s witty and truthful lyrics. It was a duet, but those who talk about it mention Cooper in her Tony-winning performance first and foremost – if they even mention Lauren Bacall’s Tess at all.
PROMISES, PROMISES is one of the few shows to have had a Tony-winning Best Featured Actress in a Musical in each of its two Broadway outings: Marian Mercer in the original 1968 production and Katie Finneran in the 2010 revival. “A Fact Can Be a Beautiful Thing” was a duet that the former did with Jerry Orbach and the latter with Sean Hayes. When ruminating about time, the duo decides “The present’s very pleasant” – as is this Burt Bacharach-Hal David jaunty song.
When YOU’RE A GOOD MAN, CHARLIE BROWN moved from off-Broadway to Broadway in 1971, no one won a Tony as Best Featured Actress in a Musical for playing Sally.
And for good reason: Clark Gesner, who wrote the entire musical in 1967, didn’t include the Peanuts character that cartoonist Charles Schulz had created in 1959.
For the much-underrated 1999 revival, however, Andrew Lippa came in, included Sally and wrote her a hilarious song. Kristin Chenoweth wouldn’t have won the prize had she not been given “My New Philosophy.” Lucy had always been the ultimate fussbudget in Schulz’s comic strip and Gesner followed suit. But Lippa had Sally eclipse her as someone who just had to have her way.
In CITY OF ANGELS, Randy Graff played two roles and participated in two songs. But it was the solo for the secretary, Miss Oolie, that got her the Tony. To a barreling Cy Coleman melody and razor-sharp David Zippel’s lyrics, she admitted that “You Can Always Count on Me” in choosing men: married ones, gay ones, and members of the clergy. Given that CITY OF ANGELS takes place in the late ‘40s, perhaps Miss Oolie influenced the songwriters who a decade later wrote “Lookin’ for Love in All the Wrong Places.”
In 1982, NINE had three nominees vying for the Best Featured Actress Tony. Maury Yeston, who wrote a Tony-winning score (even beating out Stephen Sondheim’s MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG) that gave two terrific songs to Karen Akers and just as many to Anita Morris. Liliane Montevecchi, as Liliane Le Fleur, got but one, but – as Orson Welles famously said – “All you need is one.”
Liliane was filmmaker Guido Contini’s producer. While he couldn’t think of a subject for his next film, Liliane, unfurling a boa that was a long as Montevecchi’s considerable talent, urged him to do a musical. Thank you, Liliane, for spurring Guido to create a musical, the highest art form of all.
And then there was the Best Featured Actor in a Musical Tony-winner for a performer who didn’t have a One-Song Glory. Instead, he had a One-Monologue Glory: Sammy Williams, with his cri du coeur about his life as an outsider in A CHORUS LINE. It was all spoken word, but to many of us, it certainly sang.
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.
