PLAYNG THE PALACE By Peter Filichia
Stewart F. Lane will bring back memories to many, as well as important history to others.
His It Happened at the Palace is a coffee table book that will keep you up even if you don’t drink any coffee.
Lane is celebrating the theater that he’s co-owned since 1980 – nearly seven decades after it came into being.
The Palace was erected in 1913, thanks to Martin Beck. Not until 1924 would Beck feel worthy enough to name a theater after himself – the one on 45th and Eighth that has since become the Al Hirschfeld.
Eleven years before that, however, he decided that the Palace was the right moniker for this showplace that uses 1564 Broadway as its address (although it’s really on Seventh Avenue).
During the decades when the Al Hirschfeld Theatre was the Martin Beck, even fervent theatergoers didn’t know who he was. Why, he was only the man who founded the Orpheum Circuit, that’s who. So, if Madame Rose were a little more knowledgeable, she would have sung, “There I was in Mister Martin Beck’s office.”
(Yeah, I agree; those two words don’t flow as nicely as Sondheim’s one three-syllable one.)
Lane reminds us that the new theater was initially erected as a shrine to vaudeville. Not long after it opened, the cowboys, the wrestlers, the tumblers, the clowns – as well as singers, dancers and comedians – all knew that “playing the Palace” was proof positive that they’d Made It in Show Business. Even The Jester in ONCE UPON A MATTRESS in “Very Soft Shoes” bragged that his father played the Palace.
All right, The Jester meant the royal residence of Queen Aggravain and King Septimus, but lyricist Marshall Barer knew that audiences would understand what he meant.
In his 208-page tome, Lane certainly brings up many shows that had me fondly remembering my trips there.
In fact, as a teen, I was at the Palace on January 29, 1966, when it re-opened as a legitimate theater after its years as a film house and occasional entertainer’s revue. SWEET CHARITY was the occasion, and the picture Lane chose – dancers doing “The Rich Man’s Frug” – brought back to me Bob Fosse’s Tony-winning choreography and Cy Coleman’s infectious dance music. True, the most recent issue of the cast album contains only two of the three sequences. But two-thirds of a sequence is (far) better than none.
Skip some pages, and you’ll see Joel Grey – then a recently minted star, thanks to CABARET – standing next to future star Bernadette Peters when they were doing GEORGE M! Lane also points out that the Palace was the logical theater for this musical because of its proximity to the statue of George M. Cohan, the singer-dancer-composer-lyricist-producer-entrepreneur whom the show celebrated.
Some pages on, there’s Grey again, thanks to his return to the Palace seven years later in GOODTIME CHARLEY, the story of The Dauphin and his struggles with Joan of Arc. There’s a picture of him going toe-to-toe with Ann Reinking (but not head-to-head; the photograph shows that she was taller than he).
The musical was not a hit, because many complained that she was a more interesting character than he. But the score by Larry Grossman and Hal Hackady has been long admired, and its cast album remains in print a half-century later.
Even if you’re breezing through the book, you might stop when you see Lauren Bacall, right arm raised high, as if acknowledging the tributes that her character Tess Harding was receiving as WOMAN OF THE YEAR.
Or is this picture from the 1980-1981 Tony Awards, when Bacall emerged victorious as Best Actress in a Musical?
Although Bacall was involved in 11 of the show’s Kander and Ebb songs (which netted the pair their second Best Score Tony), the one she did with Marilyn Cooper is the most remembered. There was the glamorous Tess visiting her ex-husband, whose second wife is far less striking. Each believed that “The Grass Is Always Greener” in someone else’s yard. The argument was case-closed settled when Cooper made a second mention of her husband. If you saw her, you probably can still hear her delivery, as dry as Chile’s Atacama Desert, in what is considered one of Broadway’s best 11-o’clock numbers.
The picture representing LA CAGE AUX FOLLES shows The Cagelles unapologetically insisting that “We Are What We Are.” Even before the Jerry Herman-Harvey Fierstein hit opened at the Palace (where it would set the theater’s long-run record), word had filtered from Boston that of the 12 drag queens, two were actually female. Soon audiences in the know were enjoying surveying them carefully to solve the mystery of which were the ringers. In case you missed this grand opportunity four decades ago, this picture that will give you another chance.
The photograph of Keith Carradine, the titular star of THE WILL ROGERS FOLLIES, comes on the page where Lane gives us the reason why Tommy Tune wanted the musical in the Palace: “Because Rogers was a Ziegfeld star, and the Palace looks like a venue where Ziegfeld would put on his famous Follies.”
Tune would win Best Director and Best Choreographer Tony Awards for this Tony-winning Best Musical. What cemented his latter award was his staging of “Favorite Son.” The Cy Coleman/Comden-and-Green song is itself a winner, as the cast album reveals, but far more impressive was seeing Carradine surrounded by young women as all did a hand-clapping, knee-slapping, chest-beating precision number that must have been hell to learn.
(Full disclosure: Tune borrowed the staging from a sequence in the 1930 film King of Jazz. It too is worth checking out.)
Would you think that the august Palace would have anything in common with The GEM Theatre in Garden Grove, California 2,792 miles away? Actually, it does, as Lane points out in his discussion of ALL SHOOK UP. The jukebox musical had originated there, 35 miles from the Hollywood studio where Elvis Presley recorded many of the songs heard in this musical.
The pictures of AN AMERICAN IN PARIS brought home another memory. I asked a dear friend what he wanted for his birthday, and a ticket to this show was the answer. I purposely bought us seats for January 29, 2016 – 50 years to the day when I first entered the Palace.
The musical had been playing for nearly a year, and we’ve all seen shows deteriorate in less time than that. But Brandon Uranowitz, Max von Essen and Robert Fairchild made immediately clear from their vivid rendition of “I Got Rhythm” that they were still giving as fresh a performance with the identical passion they revealed on the cast album I heard just before leaving my apartment.
Lane finishes the book by detailing the charms of SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS, the final show to play the Palace before the five-year upward move – better raised than razed! – and concludes with Ben Platt’s revue that reopened the theater this past May.
Perhaps it was a blessing that he submitted It Happened at the Palace for publication before the Palace played host to TAMMY FAYE…
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.
