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Back in 1990, it missed its chance by a matter of months. ONCE ON THIS ISLAND opened in October of that year. By then, original Broadway cast albums were no longer issued as long-playing records (or LPs, as they were more commonly known). The Tony-winning CITY OF ANGELS, which had released its original cast album […]

Frankly, I’m glad that I saw it in its New Haven tryout and not in New York when it became a disgrace. Saturday night September 26, 1970 was the last performance of TWO BY TWO at New Haven’s Shubert Theatre. My house seat was next to Arthur Miller’s. He was undoubtedly there because Joan Copeland, […]

The picture projected on the back wall of the theater showed a smiling Thomas Meehan holding a very filled martini glass in each hand. Perhaps the one in his right hand was in celebration of ANNIE, his first Broadway smash-hit musical in 1977. Maybe the one in his left hand was to toast THE PRODUCERS, […]

Suddenly I’m not so certain of the one Fact of Broadway Life that I’d been so sure of for decades. As I’ve often proclaimed over the years, “No play will ever — EVER — outrun LIFE WITH FATHER’s 3,224-performance, seven-years-and- seven-months run.” In the last forty years, the only non-musical that’s remotely approached that mark […]

There it was in a used bookstore, a fifty-cent paperback that had been released in 1960, now understandably tattered. But my eyebrows zoomed up as high as an elephant’s forehead when I saw this copy of MY STORY by Mary Astor. Whoa! I’d long heard that this was the great grandma of tell-all books. So I paid […]