If Happy Little Bluebirds Fly Beyond The Rainbow, So Can the Harris Family!

Anyone who has ever availed themselves of the Off-Off-Broadway experience in New York City, whether as a performer, a crew member or simply “one of those little people out there in the dark,” will truly sink their literary teeth into Caravan to Oz, a splendid history of one family’s journey into a most exciting period in the American theater in the Big Apple. Anyone who hasn’t ever availed themselves of the Off-Off-Broadway experience in New York City, whether as a performer, a crew member or simply “one of those little people out there in the dark,” will truly sink their literary teeth into the book all the same. And in any case, this two-hundred-and-seventy page tome laden with stunning photography, emerges as a wondrous history lesson even to those not necessarily theater-oriented. To be succinct, it’s nearly impossible to put down once begun reading. The book bears vague similarities to Edie, the smash recounting of Warhol superstar Edie Sedgwick, except that in this case the story is actually told by the subjects in question, along with additional input by such legends of the Off-Off-Broadway scene and the cultural world at large as Tim Robbins, Bob Heide, Robert Patrick, Crystal Field, Mike Figgis, Mark Lancaster, Ritsaert ten Cate, and the late Ellen Stewart.

The caravan begins its initial drive down life’s highway in the Westchester, New York enclave of Bronxville, where actor-writers George Edgerly Harris II (hereafter referred to as George Sr) and his wife Ann launched a family of six eventual children, namely and in order George Edgerly Harris III (hereafter referred to as G3), Walter Michael Harris, Frederic Joseph Harris, Jayne Ann Harris (today Harris-Kelley), Eloise Alice Harris (today Harris-Damone) and Mary Lucille Harris, hereafter referred to as Mary Lou. After the family relocated to Belleaire, a suburb of Clearwater in Florida, and spent several years there in which all six of the children proved themselves extremely adept at both performance and self-producing various extravaganzas, the family once again headed north and took up residence on the Lower East Side, slowly assimilating themselves into the world of Off-Off-Broadway which had already begun coming into its own ten or more years earlier with the advent of LaMaMa Experimental Theater Company, the Living Theater, and the Caffe Cino. By the late 1960s, Walter Michael (not merely an actor-singer but a very impressive and self-taught musician) had established himself as the youngest original cast member of the hit musical Hair on Broadway, while George Sr took a role in The Great White Hope and subsequently took the show on the road, and mother Ann assumed a featured part in the classic horror film The Honeymoon Killers, alongside Shirley Stoler and Tony LoBianco. G3, meanwhile, trotted off to San Francisco to find his own path and, aside from being reportedly the first person to stick flowers into the gun barrels of the police during the Summer of Love in Haight-Ashbury while living on a commune, also began exploring drag artistry under the name Hibiscus as a founding member of the pioneering troupe The Cockettes. Upon his self-imposed termination in Hair, Walter Michael also ventured to Northern California to join his big brother but opted for a more spiritual path, ultimately becoming a monk of the Holy Order of MANS (although he did eventually return to the theatrical fold after a fashion). Once reborn as the theater company The Angels of Light, the girls of the family along with their mother settled into a happy existence as literally the First Family of Off-Off-Broadway besides appearances on a triumphant tour of several European countries.

The story also has some disturbing twists and turns. Hibiscus ended up as one of the earliest-known victims to succumb to the AIDS crisis. It’s also notable that brother Fred offers no input to the book whatsoever, leaving a reader wondering exactly what his side to the story might be. The Harris Sisters, however, continued to find fame as a trio within the cabaret club spectrum during the 1980s and 1990s (occasionally making appearances with the renowned downtown actor-singer Bobby Reed), and the entire book is interlaced with lyrics written by mother Ann for such shows as The Sheep and the Cheapskate, There Is Method In Their Madness, and Sky High. It’s almost a little too much to take in upon just one reading, to realize exactly how incredible this superb family of eight managed to accomplish in one lifetime together. But by the last page, one can’t help but feel a sense of peace, as well as the hope that anything in life is truly possible given the right brand of dedication and talent.

Caravan to Oz is available by ordering here. Do yourselves a favor and grab a copy.

Julie, Julie, Julie, How We Loved You. Julie, Julie, Julie, How You Cared

The first time I even heard the name Julie Wilson, I was twelve. I’d begun saving my allowance every month to make a trip to the old Disc-O-Mat record store in the city on 58th and 3rd because they sold Broadway albums for $3.99 apiece, so I’d buy three or four at a time. One of the first was Gypsy, and the liner notes explained that countless tours of the show had also starred such women as Mary McCarty (of whom I knew because I was a big fan of the TV show “Trapper John MD,” and I had no idea she was also a singer) and Julie Wilson, who I’d never heard of at all. So I just sort of put her name on a back burner and figured I’d get around to her eventually. I had a lot of learning to do, after all.

A few years later, in my late teens and when I started getting into cabaret proper, was when I really started learning exactly who Julie Wilson was and what she meant within entertainment circles. From what I could gather aside from her sensational facial beauty and perfect physique, she’d been somewhat of a big Broadway star and did a few movies, married a big Broadway producer named Michael McAloney and had two sons with him, went through a messy divorce, and all the while maintained a career as a major cabaret star at clubs like La Maisonette and The Persian Room. And was particularly known for wearing her hair in a beautifully-coiffed chignon with a gardenia attached over her left ear, much like Billie Holiday. Nice. But by the time I came along, apparently her voice wasn’t nearly what it had been in her heyday, and what she relied on most was talk-singing her way through the songs and managing to still thoroughly communicate the essence of the lyrics. By that point I’d still never seen her on stage, although I heard a few albums and honestly couldn’t figure out what the big deal was. That, clearly, was the naivete of a precocious seventeen-year-old who believes they know everything.

In 1990, I got my very first job as an entertainment journalist, for a magazine called Night & Day. And my debut assignment was covering the MAC Awards, which at that time was presented at Symphony Space. Receiving the Henry Luhrman Memorial Award that year just happened to be Julie Wilson. I didn’t know Hank (Henry) at all, he was before my time and had just died of AIDS sometime shortly prior. But in the course of her speech she revealed that she’d been in semi-retirement out of town and that it was Hank and his longtime partner Hilary Knight (best known for illustrating the “Eloise” series of children’s books) who had convinced her to come back to NYC and start over. Well, she started over but good; she got booked at the Carlyle and stayed three weeks. Bear in mind that up to this point I’d still never seen her perform on stage.

Well, I guess my coverage of the MAC Awards must have been pretty good, because three days later they had me sauntering off to the Ballroom to review Peggy Lee. Which was excellent. Then to the Duplex to review Judy Carne’s comeback show. Which wasn’t so excellent. Then I got wind of the fact that Mollie Taylor Martin (no relation to me) would be doing a show at Don’t Tell Mama that weekend, so I asked my editor John Hammond for clearance and he said yes. Mollie and I had done summer stock together on the Bucks County/Pocono/etc circuit in ’86. You can imagine my surprise walking into the club and literally smack into Julie, looking very beautiful with her chignon but no makeup and no gardenia and ordinary street clothes. She smiled at me, and I said, “Oh! Miss Wilson! Congratulations on the award the other night!” and kissed her hand. She said, “Well, aren’t you a gentleman! Although you look about twelve. What’s your name?” I said, “It’s Andrew Martin, but you wouldn’t know me.” She said, “Oh, but I do! You’re that new young man who writes the reviews. Are you reviewing our Mollie?” I said, “Well, yes. What brings you to see Mollie?” She said, “I dated her uncle for a time. Have you seen her perform?” I said yes, she and I had done summer stock together. Julie took my arm and said, “Well, then we have to sit together and you tell me all about yourself!” and steered me into the room to a table. But I didn’t tell her all about myself, because she did all the talking. She talked about how her older son (Mike) was planning to move into his first apartment on his own but she wouldn’t let him because it had no refrigerator, and how her younger son (Holt) was trying very hard to have an acting career and make a living, and the whole thing was frankly dizzying. So that was really the beginning of the beginning. We became friends and always had a wonderful time talking together. But she wasn’t like this “mega-star Julie Wilson person,” she was just Julie. And she was fabulous.

A couple of years later, at someone’s show at Eighty Eights (I can’t remember whose, I apologize), I brought my mother as my date (which I was wont to do when she was still mobile, because she loved going out to shows in the city). And Julie happened to be at the show, so we all had a drink downstairs afterwards. The meeting between Julie and my mom went off like a Roman candle. As many know, my mom was on TV a lot when she was a kid, so she and my grandmother were always running to coffee shops for snacks and stuff in between shoots, and there was this one day when they stopped in at (I think) Child’s around the corner from the Roxy. And of course Julie worked at the Roxy as one of the showgirls. My mom told Julie, “You know, this one day when I was eight or nine, you stopped in at the coffee shop around the corner from the Roxy and ordered a coffee to go. And I told my mother, ‘Mommy, I think that’s the most beautiful girl I ever saw in my whole life.'” Julie, of course, dissolved in peals of laughter when she heard my mother tell her this. So then, of course, THEY became great friends. In a lot of ways, Julie was like a second mother to me in that respect; if the three of us were hanging out at a show together and I said something to my mom in a snappy tone, Julie would say, “Andrew, don’t TALK to your mother that way!” and my mother would say, “Yes, you LISTEN to Julie!” So it was a lose-lose for me, but it was brilliant.

I was on my hiatus from cabaret during my marriage, we’re talking between 2001 and 2008, so other than occasionally attending a show if I had to cover something for New England Entertainment Digest or a similar publication, I really sort of kept my nose out of it. But I did know that Julie suffered her first stroke at that time. I didn’t see her again until the autumn of ’08 when I came back onto the scene, and even though she walked and spoke more slowly and seemed a bit feeble, she was the same old Julie when I ran into at Joan Crowe’s show at Metropolitan Room. And it was NOT like having to talk to an old lady who’d lost her marbles; she’d have suffered none of that gladly. Her first words when she saw me (even if a bit slurred) were, “Andrew, where’ve you been and how’s your mother?” God bless her.

She did a brand-new show in ’09 at the Met Room, and by then she couldn’t sing anymore at all; she performed the songs more or less as monologues. But even that was unequivocally brilliant and the utter essence of cabaret communication. I brought my cherished friend Alice Kane with me, and we had the most marvelous evening, slurping down Grasshoppers and watching Julie. Her eleven o’clock number, as I recall, was Brecht/Weill’s “Surabaya Johnny,” and by the time she got to the end of the final verse, screaming, “TAKE THAT PIPE OUTTA YOUR MOUTH, YOU RAT!!!” we were all absolutely mesmerized. THAT was Julie as only Julie could be on a stage, musicality or not.

The very last time we got to speak was (I believe) at the ’13 MAC Awards. The afterparty, specifically. I don’t know what prompted me to bring it up, but I asked if she knew that my then-husband and I had seen “Below,” a thriller that just happened to star her son Holt as the captain of a doomed submarine (my ex was crazy about submarines, don’t ask). She smiled and said, “You know, Holt brought me to the premiere. They treated me like a queen, which was very nice, and then the movie started. And it wasn’t very good. And then came THAT SCENE. You know the one, where he’s in the shower.” (There’s a scene where Holt is in the shower, fully naked from the back. Which for me was the best part of the movie, but I digress). She continued, “I was horrified. The lights finally came up when it was over, I slapped him on the arm and said, DON’T YOU EVER DO ANOTHER MOVIE WHERE EVERYBODY GETS TO SEE YOUR TUSHIE!!!”

Oh, my darling Julie. I can’t believe you’re gone today. Go with God, my sweet gardenia-bird.

The Reluctant Legend: A Glimpse of Stone

Elly Stone would most likely be the last person on earth to ever call herself a living legend, either publicly or privately. But she is indeed. And how. Best known as the definitive interpreter of the English translations of songs by Jacques Brel, finding fame as the star of the theatrical hit Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris and the film version that subsequently followed (both with lyrics by her late husband Eric Blau and contributions by Mort Shuman), Stone today, at the age of eighty-eight, often refers to herself as “just another grandma in Manhattan.” And even with a career which, to date, has spanned nearly seven decades and from which she removed herself completely from the limelight some time ago, her fan base continues to grow by leaps and bounds completely and utterly unabated.

A Brooklyn native, Stone was an introverted, abused child who chose to escape within her own thoughts rather than interact with those persons surrounding her. Her vocal prowess, however, showed promise and she possessed a keen ear, and while a student at Junior High School 50 in Williamsburg, a teacher introduced her to a vocal coach named Lillian Strongin, who retains the distinction of being the person that would truly unleash Stone’s instrument as it was intended. Strongin, who Stone has always considered her true mother, helped organize her audition material for the famed High School of Music and Art (now Fiorello LaGuardia High School), where she was accepted as a voice major. After graduation, Stone opted to marry at the tender age of seventeen, divorced her first husband shortly thereafter, and began a lifelong residence in Manhattan, rarely ever looking back upon her outer-borough roots. However, after a foray into folk music, she would meet Eric Blau, at the time a published poet, who had written a campaign song for a candidate seeking election as Brooklyn Borough President; Stone was engaged to sing it. He later told an interviewer, “I thought she was kind of cute.”

Blau and Stone began a whirlwind romance very soon thereafter, and this was a heady time for her. She’d phased out of folk music and into theater, first as a standby for Barbra Streisand as Miss Marmelstein in I Can Get It For You Wholesale in 1962, and then in Blau’s Off-Broadway revue O, Oysters! in 1964, by which time they were married and she’d given birth to their son Matthew. At this time, Blau’s friend Nat Shapiro (the head of International A&R for CBS/Columbia Records), introduced the two to the songs of Jacques Brel, which blew their minds. He also introduced them to Mort Shuman (a wunderkind composer in the 1950s of such classic pop tunes as “Save the Last Dance For Me” and “Teenager in Love”). Shuman was also a big fan. Jacques Brel, at that point, was only a star in Europe (particularly in Paris and his native Belgium), but the three saw a clear course. Brel was obviously as powerful an artist at the time as Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, and deserved adaptation into English. One thing led to another, and by 1968, Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris was opening at the Village Gate. What followed, aside from the recording of the original cast album, were productions in every possible corner of the globe and truly a worldwide miracle. As Stone says, “Not a day has gone by since the show’s inception forty-seven years ago, without the show being played somewhere on the planet.”

While all of this was transpiring, Stone was working diligently into the late nights in the studio after getting off stage at the Gate to record her first album, the self-titled Elly Stone, which emerged on CBS/Columbia. Although not a commercial success, the record did include several translations of Brel that weren’t included in the original show (among them “My Childhood” and “Song for Old Lovers,” interpreted from “Mon Enfance” and “Chanson Des Vieux Amants” respectively) as well as the extremely-poignant “Alexander’s Song,” a tribute by Blau to his father, who made a living as a New York City taxi driver. Her large cult following rushed to purchase copies, and it still remains a favorite among her fans. Several selections on the recording were developed in tandem with orchestrator/arranger Ralph Affoumado, and Billboard Magazine referred to it as “one of the best undiscovered albums of the year.”

Once freed from having to star in Brel on stage as a full-time occupation (by 1973 the show had closed at the Gate and moved to the Astor Place Theater with a cast that featured Teri Ralston among others), Stone set about a separate career as a concert artist. She’d appear with a full band in venues ranging from Lincoln Center to The Bottom Line from that point on, as well as such out-of-town locales as Wolf Trap, and recorded a second album, Spirit of ’76, as a celebration of the Bicentennial year. Here, while Brel interpretations were again evident, she and Blau worked with David Frank to develop such songs as “Mr. Williams” (for which Stone herself wrote the music), “Soft Shoe Routine,” “Snows of Fifth Avenue,” and “New Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Old Soldiers in the Chinese Restaurant” (both with music by the aforementioned Affoumado). Again, among her fans, the record sold like hotcakes. However, a year or so earlier, she and Shuman (and Joe Masiell) were cast in the film version of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, which also featured a cameo by Brel himself. It has been a cult hit for years. And, she’s never seen the film.

Her last appearance on the legitimate stage came in 1977 at the Astor Place, in another Blau musical called The Cockeyed Tiger. But he started creating a new work and consequently stumbled upon composer/lyricist Elliot Weiss, who had only recently graduated from Juilliard and had written the music for a short song cycle. Blau wrote the lyrics and entitled it The 104 Bus. It premiered in 1982 as the second act of one of Stone’s concerts at The Bottom Line, and featured such vocalists as Joseph Neal and Kitty Hendrix. Later, when Stone premiered a concert at Symphony Space in ’83, it emerged as her opening act.

It was shortly thereafter that Stone drew the professional veil as a stage presence for the most part, and expanded her work teaching voice. She’d inherited valuable manuscripts that Lillian Strongin had inherited from her own teacher, William Earl Brown. These were the sayings and teachings of Giovanni Battista Lamperti, the nineteenth- century master, whose name is synonymous with Bel Canto. He and his father, Francesco Lamperti, are still revered as being among the greatest teachers of all time. Stone feels that in teaching and editing the manuscripts for publication, she found her calling.

She has also directed quite a few legit stage productions of Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris for over the last three decades, including one at Town Hall in 1983 which starred Karen Akers. Another most notable of these was in 1986 at the Beacon Theater, where the show opened with her singing “My Childhood” as an unannounced surprise on the first night, and drove the crowd to stupendous ovation. And there was her handling of the twenty-fifth anniversary production of the show at the Village Gate in 1993, starring Karen Saunders, Gabriel Barre, Joseph Neal and Andrea Green.

Though Elly Stone will never confess to having no regrets, she does look back on her past with nonchalance. “It’s life,” she says. “All I did was live it.” And live it she has indeed. Thank goodness.

The Godspell Experience…And My Personal Position Therein

I’m writing this piece in the first person, which many know I’m not usually wont to do. It simply isn’t my way as a journalist, because I was taught that the best way to express reportage was to keep oneself out of it completely, other than being the mechanism that moves the narrative along on its literary way. But this time around, I have no choice. As many know, in the late fall of 2011, I saw the publication of my first book, All for the Best: How Godspell Transferred From Stage to Screen. Surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly, this was borne from an article I wrote here on The Andrew Martin Report earlier that year. At the same time, an author named Carol de Giere was also very hard at work on a book of her own, entitled The Godspell Story: Inside a Transformative Musical (presented by Scene 1 Publishing) which, unlike mine, covered not merely the way the book transferred from a stage musical that began as a college play and became a worldwide cultural phenomenon before a cult film, but every possible aspect of the show from its earliest germination to how it’s viewed today. De Giere, it should be noted, is quite possibly the globe’s greatest expert on the work and life of composer/lyricist Stephen Schwartz (her previous book, Defying Gravity, is also a masterfully academic glimpse into the career of this wonderful creator of musical theater for Broadway and beyond). And as such, besides including Schwartz to supply an in-depth Foreword, she has, through almost-unfathomable research, managed to create a tome that could best be described, pardon the pun, as the definitive Bible of the entire Godspell journey. I should note that I was among those persons singularly honored to be interviewed by de Giere for her project and I’m thrilled to have my book listed in the Bibliography as a resource. But this is, for me, small potatoes compared to the privilege of reading the book and soaking up such voluminous knowledge, to which I and so many others were so previously unexposed. Reporting from the very first nanosecond of the show’s development by John-Michael Tebelak in 1970, de Giere wondrously illustrates Godspell‘s conception and the winding path it took from Carnegie-Mellon University to Cafe LaMaMa to the Cherry Lane Theater to a planetary success which continues to this day. She has left absolutely no stone unturned, not merely by dint of her in-depth interviews with members of the original company and the creative team (including profiles of those who’ve since left us, including the late great Lynne Thigpen). But this doesn’t even begin to describe what the book delivers, namely an entire and oft-staggering treatise which at times can leave the reader gasping for air. DeGiere’s attention to detail is overwhelming, and whether the reader is a newcomer to the show’s flock of die-hard fans or a longtime member of same, it all transpires to be most brilliantly educational. In point of fact, Carol de Giere and The Godspell Experience are but two of all good gifts around us, sent from heaven above. So thank the Lord. Thank the Lord for all his love. And purchase a copy!

Getting Right Down to the Nitty Gritty…with Bobby Banas!

Bobby Banas (left) in “Let’s Make Love, alongside Marilyn Monroe

A certain clip on YouTube recently went extremely viral on the Internet, showing a sextette of dancers in 1964 on Judy Garland’s weekly CBS Sunday night program engaging in an energetic routine to the novelty song “The Nitty Gritty,” as voiced by Shirley Ellis (also well-known for her recording of “The Name Game”). Featured front and center was a young male dancer, whose dark hair and black button eyes made him an immediate standout, aside from his impeccable rhythm and the fact that he was tearing into it like his last meal. His name turns out to be Bobby Banas, and besides how brilliant he was in that particular performance, before and after that he’d already made featured appearances in such films as West Side Story, The Unsinkable Molly Brown and as one of the chimney sweeps in Mary Poppins, besides being known as the boy who kissed Marilyn Monroe in Let’s Make Love and a plethora of television appearances, which included a famous episode of Get Smart! He’d also made his first initial click in Peter Pan on Broadway with Mary Martin and the subsequent television version on NBC. Banas later became a much-desired choreographer as well as dance teacher in the Los Angeles area, and counted numerous notable names among his students. He’s mostly retired now from the world of terpsichore, but occupies his time as a Rosarian (an expert on rose blossoms). And The Andrew Martin Report couldn’t be more thrilled that the gentleman, now in his very early eighties, found the time to grant us an interview.

ANDREW MARTIN: When you were growing up, did you always know you wanted to be a dancer? Or was it simply that you started in dance classes in any way reluctantly and eventually people came to see that you had a genuine talent for it? Where did the passion for it really begin?

BOBBY BANAS:  I must say that I didn’t know I wanted to be a dancer at that time. It wasn’t until 1941, when the war broke out. Both my parents decided to take jobs, and since they were both from Pennsylvania, my dad became a Military Chief Inspector for the steel mills in McKeesport while mom became a propeller inspector for Curtis Wright in Erie. They were wondering about what was to become of my sister and I, of course. Well, it so happened that our grandmother, dad’s mother, was widowed and lived on a small farm in Windber. Dad thought he could help his mother financially and that it would be a great place for us to grow up, and he and mom visited twice a month. And there was a dancing school in town. So on one of dad’s visits, he went to look it over and to see if Sis and I could take dance lessons. Well, that was the beginning. The teacher’s name was Agnes Shontz, and she taught just about everything; ballet, jazz, tap, acrobatics and ballroom. I guess she thought Sis and I would be a miniature version of Fred and Ginger. So Sis wore a beautiful pink gown, and I a black tuxedo, and we danced to Strauss waltzes at parties, weddings and recitals. It was fun. And as we got better at it, she taught us some lifts and spins. At the same time, my grandmother was a heavy churchgoer and she was Russian Orthodox, so we were obliged to go. I eventually became an altar boy for four years and thought of priesthood. But on Saturday evenings, the church had social gatherings at the church hall, and I was blown away when all of a sudden the music would get loud with accordions and violins and balalaikas. The crowd would start to chant when a couple of dancers headed for the room, flip-flopping, knee-spinning, jump-splits and coffee-grinders. I started jumping up and down and couldn’t stand still, because I wanted to join in. It seemed like every clan in Russia was there doing a ritual dance. When the last group finished, everyone in the room grabbed a partner and it was polka time. One Sunday on our way to church, as my Sis and I were walking through town, I heard this unbelievable sound of voices and hand-clapping. I stopped, and it was a storefront with painted windows, so you couldn’t see inside. Once again it was though I was struck by lightning. Here were these voices intoning, “Bless me, O Lord, Hallelujah!” in an infectious pounding rhythm, and my body responded as though someone had taken control of my limbs. I started to dance spontaneously. My sister was saying “Robert, we’re going to be late for church!” and I barely heard her. But I turned and reluctantly headed in her direction.

AM: I understand that your first real dance job on Broadway was in the chorus of Peter Pan at quite a young age. What was that experience like and what were the standout moments? Conversely, how did it differ from doing the television version later?

BB: Well, first you have to understand what led up to that. After the war ended, Dad headed to LA to search for a brother of his. He didn’t have luck tracking him down, but he fell in love with the weather and sent for all of us. Sis and I started dance lessons again, but she became interested in boys and completely lost interest in dance. I continued on, got a scholarship with the Michael Panaieff ballet school and also a scholarship to Hollywood Professional School. I was going to continue theater and dance at UCLA when I graduated, but I attended an audition for Carousel at the LA Civic Light Opera and got cast as Enoch Snow Jr. Then Kiss Me Kate, Annie Get Your Gun, Brigadoon, Plain and Fancy, and then Peter Pan. Which went to Broadway, and I loved being on Broadway. We played at the Winter Garden for six months, and then Mary Martin got tired, so we closed and did the TV version. But it could only be shown once, as NBC couldn’t get the rights to re-broadcast it at the time. They did eventually, though, and it still gets shown, which makes me happy.

AM: You did so many films as a dancer at the beginning of your career for which you were uncredited. Do you resent that at all? Or was it just sort of, “all in a day’s work?”

BB:  Well, I started in film and television in the 1950s, where first I did a lot of rock’n’roll movies for the producer Sam Katzman. As far as TV, I did Danny Kaye’s show, Dinah Shore’s show, Milton Berle’s show,  “Hollywood Palace,” and “Hullabaloo” later, and then even later I was on a special with Lindsay Wagner and a bunch of others. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. I worked all the time. And yes, it was unfortunate to sometimes not be credited. But I will say, Steven Spielberg always went out of his way to credit everybody. I was in both “Hook” and “Always,” and he was very generous about giving credit. At the time I was starting out, getting credit didn’t really matter to me. All I wanted to do was dance. But looking back on it now? Sure, I should have been credited. We all deserved it.  

AM: Can you describe what the experience was like of making West Side Story? How did you feel when it won the Oscar that year?

BB: West Side Story was a big boost to the cast members. Having worked with Jerome Robbins twice before, in both Peter Pan and the film version of The King and I, I felt confident that I had a good chance of getting the job.  But when I saw a lot of unfamiliar faces at the casting call, I figured he’d brought all of his Broadway cast members and this was a publicity stunt. After getting five auditions and getting picked with some other local guys, I was proven wrong about that. Up until the awards came out, I thought it was just another musical. Boy, was I wrong. All the doors started to open when you said you’d been in West Side Story. I was getting jobs right and left, and that’s when I started to choreograph and teach.

AM:  What was it like to work with Marilyn Monroe on Let’s Make Love, and did her death have a profound effect on you?

BB: Working with Marilyn Monroe was a dream. But to be choreographed to kiss her, at the end of the dance number…oh, I thought my heart would explode. What was so funny was, during the end of the dance number, she grabbed me and Alex by the hair before she was to swing around one of the poles. Well, I had a lot of pomade in my hair, and after grabbing it she flew around the pole and lost her balance. She turned to the director and said, “I think someone has too much grease in his hair.” OOPS! So they sent me to makeup to wash my hair. I returned, and the number began again. Now the end was approaching, and I was supposed to kiss her, so I hit her lips with mine but slid across her face. So I turned to the director and said in a low voice, “I think someone has too much grease on her face.” To which they both laughed. Of course it was sad to learn of her death. I felt the same when I learned about Natalie Wood. Both had unusual circumstances and questionable facts about the truth.

AM: Can you describe what the process was like of making Mary Poppins?

BB: Mary Poppins was a delight to work on. All of us sweeps were hired on a higher rate for the stunt-like dancing we were to be doing. DeeDee Woods and Marc Breaux were so nice to everyone, it was more like a family and made everyone feel at ease. I also worked with DeeDee on Li’l Abner and she was a gem there also. It was a lot of fun, with a lot of very energetic dancing originally choreographed by Michael Kidd.

AM: Do you have any one film performance of yours that you’d consider your very favorite of all?

BB: I guess I’d have to say working with Marilyn Monroe. I became the envy of all the other male dancers because of the kiss. but it was a great experience to work with Jack Cole, who gave me a lot of strength and posture to better my dance technique.

AM: Is it at all surprising that the clip of “The Nitty Gritty” from the Judy Garland show has gone so viral recently? What do you remember most about doing that show? And was that your choreography?

BB: I can’t BELIEVE what has happened with the “Nitty Gritty” clip. Several years ago a friend said he had a copy that he found somewhere. He gave me one, I looked at it and put it away. I didn’t think it was anything to get that excited about, and that was that. Then I guess someone else found a copy, and posted it on YouTube. Then someone else posted it on Facebook and the sh*t hit the fan. I was getting e-mail and calls, and questions about who was which dancer besides me, and all types of remarks wanting to know what type of dance it was. Yes, it was my choreography and my own interpretation of the song. Peter Gennaro was the choreographer for Garland,  but he had to go to New York that week for some reason and his assistant didn’t have any idea what to do with the tune, so the director asked me to come up with a dance and that was the result.

AM: I’m told that when you were teaching, one of your students (who adores you) was my pal Tracy Nelson. What other notable students have you had, and what do or did you enjoy most about teaching?

BB: I just started to teach and I enjoyed it so much. I started the Bob Banas Musical Dance Company, with young kids and older ones. We performed at City of Hope, the World Martial Arts Competition at the Sports Arena,  Rug Concerts, the Hollywood Press Club, the opening of shopping centers, and so many other venues. I’ve done lectures at different universities, I taught at the Dick Grove School of Music, and I’ve done a lot of work with disabled children. Some other students I’ve had were Cher, Barbara Hershey, Susan Clark, John Travolta, BarBara Luna, Charmian Carr and Bruce Lee, to name a few. Teaching is like giving back, helping and encouraging those who wanted the thrill of performing on stage with music and lights before a live audience. Some had the talent to pursue further, but for some reason had other dreams. But they took with them the great experience of having done it. And there were a few that went on to become professionals.    

AM: Obviously the world of theater-dance had lost a lot of wonderful people in the last thirty years. Who of your contemporaries do you miss the most? And who do you still treasure most as friends?

BB:  It’s so hard to name those dancers I worshiped most. I always thought Gene Kelly was great, but never had the chance to work with him. I did get to work with Bob Fosse and loved his work, Jack Cole had a great style, and I loved studying ballet with Michael Panaieff.

AM: What is an average day like for the Bobby Banas of today?

BB:  Well, I’m a professional Rosarian now, taking care of people’s roses. One of my clients is Debbie Reynolds, with whom I’ve been privileged to work on the movies Say One for Me and How the West Was Won besides The Unskinable Molly Brown. Usually I’m up at 5 AM to start with a client in Malibu, then off to Westwood, Beverly Hills and Studio City. My busiest time is just after New Year’s, when I get to prune all the roses back and prepare them for dormancy. Then in spring I get to revive them and prepare for the first bloom. I’m always at a nursery buying supplies, and checking out the new rose additions for the coming year.

AM: What advice would you offer to the average young man of today, no matter how talented or not, who wanted to try to make it as a dancer?

BB: To become a dancer today, I must say, is totally different from when I started out. Hip-hop and acrobatic tumbling seems to dominate the dance scene now.  The show “Glee” kind of represents the old style along with some hip-hop, but they add vocals to make everybody a triple threat. It does represent Broadway and in musicals in film and television, but in my day I had to study ballet, tap, ballroom, primitive, modern, acting and jazz. Now, it seems, if you can throw a back-handspring or a few coffee-grinders, you can call yourself a specialty dancer. Granted, any precision group dancing can be as effective as well as someone who spins on his head. Break dancing and hip-hop qualify as effective, of course. But I’d rather see West Side Story, Carousel, The Unsinkable Molly Brown and Mary Poppins.

And who wouldn’t? Bobby Banas is a national treasure. Please check out his rich legacy of dancing on film.

Meringolo Orchestrates Path to Guaranteed Cabaret Stardom

It was an unusually-warm Wednesday night in April of 1990 when your humble reporter stumbled into the now-defunct Broadway Baby, a wonderful piano bar on Amsterdam Avenue between 79th and 80th Streets on the Upper West Side, and met singer Marieann Meringolo for the first time. There was already scuttlebutt about her; she was known for having the potential to become the likes of another Jane Olivor for her incredible vocal precision and carriage on a stage. Like the aforementioned, she wasn’t exactly the prettiest peach on the tree (although undeniably glamorous) and in fact was quite aloof and somewhat mistrustful of someone she’d just met for the first time. But when she sang…oh, when she sang…she transformed instantly into a Botticelli angel. It was a mere two seasons later that she had a bonafide cabaret hit on her hands with the brilliant Wonderful, Wonderful: The Songs of Johnny Mathis in New York City besides Fire Island and beyond, and has since gone on to phenomenal glory in the arena whether at Feinstein’s with a wonderful evening of the music of Michel Legrand, or her Ladies tribute concert honoring the ouevres of such giants as Streisand and Warwick. However, it is with her most recent offering, Orchestrated!, which features her alongside a seven-piece band replete with lush ornamentation including a full section of brass, that the lady has completely come into her own as a major cabaret star with which to be reckoned. In point of fact, if this show doesn’t cement her success and elevate her to the stardom previously achieved by someone along the lines of the late Nancy LaMott or Eva Cassidy, there is simply no justice in this world. Yes, it’s THAT good.

It should be noted right off the bat that the majority of Meringolo’s selections mostly comprises material she’s done in previous shows, which (as she explains, are being done because while she’s been making her most-recent living as a headliner on cruise ships, are showcased with a full orchestra in tow, and she wanted to bring the beauty of the sound to the cabaret world) are really not the sort of catalog that others might choose to bring to a new cabaret act. This, however, is no obstacle to the miraculous Meringolo; it’s material that might otherwise crumble in the hands of a lesser-accomplished artist and yet somehow she’s owning every moment. In the more-than-capable sight of musical director Doyle Newmyer, she manages to take such songs as “Thou Swell,” “The Windmills of Your Mind,” “Fever” and “I’m a Woman” and transform them instantly into personal anthems. And a favorite old standby of hers, “Italian Menu,” is rendered into genius. More than this is her tribute to Dionne Warwick in a medley of no less than eight songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, and a tribute to Streisand that features a coupling of “Where Is It Written?” and “I’m the Greatest Star.” And Meringolo does include new music, notably two tunes by Marsha Malamet, “Crazy Love” and “I Am Blessed.” In point of fact, she couldn’t possibly have gotten any single element of the show more pointedly correct. It was certainly no secret in the nightlife world that she was already on a path to greatness, but Meringolo now possesses a maturity previously unwitnessed, not to mention an ability for sustaining an important note in a song, that trumps every possible ace .

And then there’s the band. Oh, goodness, where to begin? Aside from the aforementioned Newmyer, she’s got the legendary John Loehrke on bass, the brilliantly-animated Ayodele Maakheru on guitar, Sipho Kunene doing a wonderful job on percussion, Richie Vitale blowing on the trumpet, Jonathan Kantor on alto sax (who is REALLY outstanding), and the terrific Charlie Gordon on the trombone. The fact that JP Perreaux is loaning his eye to technical direction is merely the icing on the cake.

Marieann Meringolo and Orchestrated! will return to the Metropolitan Room, 34 West 22nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, on Friday, August 2nd at 7 PM for one night only. Run. Do not walk. And run QUICKLY!!!

Eternally Groucho But Never Grouchy: A Conversation With Lewis J. Stadlen

Lewis J. Stadlen is one of those legendary entertainers of Broadway, film, television and the international cultural sphere, whom it is simply impossible to forget for his over four decades delighting audiences of all ages. It may well be possible that most remember him for the first season of the sitcom “Benson,” in which he co-starred alongside Robert Guillaume, James Noble and Inga Swenson, but those truly in the know will equally remember his sensational work as Groucho in the 1970 cult Broadway musical hit Minnie’s Boys, with star Shelley Winters and fellow Marx Brothers Danny Fortus, Irwin Pearl and Alvin Kupperman. Later, he would portray Groucho again in a critically-acclaimed national stage tour, and fall into the hearts and minds of legions of fans. Before, after, in the meantime and in between, he would create the part of Ben Silverman in the original company of Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys, receive a Tony nomination for being Pangloss in the 1974 production of Candide, portray Lupinski in Mel Brooks’ 1982 celluloid remake of the classic film To Be Or Not to Be, play a featured role in Neil Simon’s The New Odd Couple in 1985 (which starred Rita Moreno and Sally Struthers, along with Stadlen and budding newcomer Tony Shalhoub as the male Latino love interests from upstairs), and find himself at this writing back on Broadway in Douglas Carter Beane’s play The Nance at the Lyceum, with Nathan Lane. Stadlen may not have picked up a heavily-deserved and unfairly-ignored Tony nomination in the process, but he remains one of the finest thespians of the last forty-plus years; the son of renowned voice-over artist Allen Swift always seems to roll with the punches regardless of the trappings of awards and tinsel. He’s even published a memoir, Acting Foolish, available at Amazon. And The Andrew Martin Report couldn’t be more thrilled that he took time out of his schedule to grant us an interview.

ANDREW MARTIN: If your father hadn’t been Allen Swift, do you think you would have followed a career path into acting regardless? And what was it like having him as a dad? Can you discuss your childhood?

LEWIS J. STADLEN: There is, of course no way to know.  It was my mother who discovered a theater camp, Gray Gables Theatrical Workshop, in Kitchawan, New York, for me to attend when I was fourteen. She sensed I had a creative bent. It was the first time that I felt self-confident about anything. I made my acting debut as Petrovin the artist, in a remarkable teenage production of Anastasia (Marta Heflin played the title role). My chief motivation, which continues to this day, was that girls took a greater interest in me. I attended the camp for two summers, and my social life revolved around a Saturday dance class during the school year that was attended by many of the campers at the wonderfully-atmospheric rehearsal studio, Variety Arts, across the street from the Forty-Sixth Street Theater. The Gray Gables Choreographer, Joe Vilane, who to this day is the best choreographer I have worked with apart from Agnes DeMille, taught the class. So because of that experience, I glimpsed the possibility of leading a useful life. That said:  I was extremely insecure about everything, and without my father’s unending knowledge and support, and the future rejection I was to later experience in the “real” grown up world, I’m certain my early enthusiasm would have been nipped in the bud. He was instrumental in every way in helping me to navigate the minefields of an exceptionally cruel and capricious business. He was instrumental in my ability to land my first job, which was the first national company of Fiddler On The Roof when I was nineteen. By that time, I had had the good fortune of NOT being invited back to the Neighborhood Playhouse, owing to the presence of one of the all time sadistic- bastards Sanford Meisner, who was probably responsible for destroying the confidence of thousands of talented, but all-too-trusting and self-critical souls. It was the first major rejection I experienced and with the help of my father, I was able to overcome it and by chance fall into the nurturing embrace of the great Stella Adler, who actually taught me the fundamentals of my craft which I use to this very day.  As I review a career that is into it’s forty-seventh year,  I realize I’ve mostly learned my survival skills from my actor-father, while my over all sense of choice and sense of esthetics have been gleamed from my college-professor mother, Vivienne Schwartz.  I would not have survived in my profession without either of their support.

AM: What are your thoughts about Minnie’s Boys, both the fact that you were so young to make your Broadway debut and also playing Groucho? (We’ll come back to the Groucho factor later). And was it surprising that even though the show retains a cult status, it really didn’t run very long? Also, what was it like to work with Shelley Winters?

LJS: Well, cult status is highly subjective. It’s rarely revived because the libretto is terrible, and as absurd as the creative experience turned out to be, I can only be grateful for what turned out to be my entree into the theatrical community.  I no longer had to introduce myself. (Be careful what you wish for.)  There were many reasons why Minnie’s Boys failed.  Shelley Winters was a disaster, but mostly, the story was thought to be in the same vein as Gypsy. But Gypsy was not about Gypsy Rose Lee’s attainment of fame as much as it was the story of her ambitious stage mother. Rose was a very human monster, and the show’s conflict had to do with the effects her behavior had on her children. Minnie’s Boys was about a show business family, devoid of any conflict. Everyone loved Minnie, and it was hardly a mystery as to whether the Marx Brothers would eventually overcome the obstacles before them and become a success. The original director and choreographer were two of the most inept individuals I have encountered in my forty-six years in Show Business; the choreographer is, ironically, a member of the Theater Hall Of Fame, which is a credit to her political abilities and certainly not her talent. Shelley Winters, a terrific film actress, was completely over her head in a musical comedy. You will observe that in most of her film performances she is usually murdered by her leading men, be it drowned, choked, stabbed, run over by a bus, etc. She was one of those performers who had the ability to throw her weight around, thinking only of herself, but in this case she did not possess the requisite skills to selfishly get what she wanted and wound up thoroughly subverting herself and the entire project. She was actually fired in previews, but her contract was such that the producer’s could not afford to pay her off for a year and hire another star performer. One being Kaye Ballard, who I performed with in a subsequent production at Pittsburgh’s Civic Light Opera in 1972. She was wonderful, but the role had already been cast in stone due to Shelley’s many deficiencies. As for the show running for some eighty performances in previews and another eighty after we opened, everyone wanted to bend over backwards to make it a success with the exception of the critics. It just wasn’t good enough, even though it possessed a mostly-winning score and had some excellent performances.  As they say, “The fish stinks from the head down.” That said, it was one of the most meaningful experiences of my life, and Danny Fortus (Harpo), Irwin Pearl (Chico) and Alvin Kupperman (Zeppo) remained friends from that day on.

AM: What were your thoughts on being cast to create the role of Ben in The Sunshine Boys? Was anything particularly intimidating (be it creating a role in a play by Neil Simon, working with Jack Albertson or Sam Levene, etc)?

LJS: It was very intimidating being cast in The Sunshine Boys. For the first few days of rehearsal, I was certain I’d be fired. I was a twenty-five year old actor with limited acting chops.  The person who most intimidated me was our director Alan Arkin, who I more than admired. A strange, brilliantly talented man whom I felt I rubbed the wrong way.  Neil Simon, who I got to know a great deal better during the next three decades, was at the top of his form in 1972.  (I have since done three more of his plays from scratch.)  A brilliant artist and craftsman, who I’ve come to realize always brought an operatic element to the productions of all his plays. He suffered not only from fear of failure, but also from success anxiety. A combustible combination. Jack Albertson was a wonderful actor, and it was a pleasure to perform with him. His Willie Clark is still the best performance in that role. But, the person who had the most lasting influence was the GREAT Sam Levene, who to this day I consider one of my foremost mentors, although he would probably cringe at that description. Besides being a great actor, he was incapable of dissembling in an industry that encourages an interactive fraudulence that erodes your soul. He taught me much about onstage comportment, consistency of performance and how to survive in life with your sense of integrity and self-worth intact. For a time, I felt I was actually turning into Sam Levene, who did have a propensity for falling on his own sword. Hopefully, I have taken all that was true in the man and learned to suffer not quite as much.

AM: What was it like to do Candide, and how did you feel about the Tony nomination?

LJS: Candide was, unfortunately, an unhappy experience. I did not get on with Hal Prince, and I don’t care to elaborate as to the reasons why. Let me take some responsibilities for my own actions; I was only twenty-seven at the time, and felt I had to be the spokesman for everyone’s discontent as well as my own. Perhaps I hadn’t quite perfected the good Sam Levene within myself. Based on some very legitimate contractual grievances with Mister Prince, I made the naive mistake of taking him on as a peer, and was crushed in the exchange. At this stage of my short career I believed that doing a Broadway show a year was my birthright, which proved to be a ridiculous assessment. That I could not enjoy the experience is unfortunate, since I have been told by many people that the production itself, and my performance in it, was one of their most enjoyable  theatergoing experiences. As for my Tony nomination, the cast was done no favors by Mister Prince, who would not allow any of the Tony voters to come to individual performances.  Instead he scheduled a ninth, a Sunday evening performance for all the voters to sit in judgement.  We were all nervous and exhausted and, as it turned out, Candide won a flock of Tony Awards, but none for the actors who were nominated from the show. It was par for the course of how the cast was presented, as if we were street urchins turned magically-professional by Hal Prince’s brilliant direction. (He DID win the Tony that year). The experience was instructive in many ways; I lost to the great Christopher Plummer, who probably shouldn’t have won for his performance in the musical Cyrano, but to lose to an actor of such brilliance was an honor in its own right.

AM: We all know that you took a little break from Broadway to play the featured role of Taylor in the first season of the sitcom “Benson.” First of all, what was your experience of that? Secondly, what led to your separation from the show, and was it very harsh? Similarly, did you know that Rene Auberjonois would be replacing Taylor with his own character of Clayton? How did that feel?

LJS: “Benson” was the epiphany needed to figure out what I wanted from my profession. My dear Stella Adler had posed a question to our acting class years before, whether our priority was to become an ACTOR or a STAR? I thought the question daft. Obviously, a star would get the opportunity to play the best parts. Why wouldn’t one aspire to stardom? “Benson” allowed me to fully appreciate the distinction. It was a thoroughly loathsome experience. Even when one is engaged in a poorly conceived theatrical endeavor, there is some flicker of idealism that one might be creating something of worth. Commercial television is about selling beer and cornflakes; the entertainment exists to serve the product. Everybody in charge of bringing “Benson” into the public sphere lied about everything. Our two crass producer’s were thrilled that the show wasn’t in the top ten in the Nielsen ratings because we had “no place to go but down.” Every week we were told to go out and beat the pants off of “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer.” I didn’t sign my contract until the fifth show, I hated the character I played, and was petrified I’d be typecast as the same sniveling asshole who was only around to be the butt of the joke. Apparently, Rene Auberjonois had no such concern. He was only hired to replace me after I had screamed my way off the show. I remember one of the producers telling me that they would let me out at the end of the season as long as I didn’t expect to get paid in return.  He simply couldn’t conceive that I wanted no part of his money.  Several months later, I was performing a one-nighter of my two person Groucho show in Mansfield, Ohio. A rather slow young man, who was running the spotlight, approached me at a Ham & Egg just before the performance. “Do you mean to tell me that you would rather be here in Mansfield than in Hollywood doing Benson?” In a flash,I recognized the significance of his question. “YES!” was my immediate reply. And if you notice, I don’t even list my television credits in my Playbill bios. Ever.

AM: In 1982, you were more or less rediscovered by the public by your portrayal of Dr. Gruber in The Verdict. Can you describe that experience?

LJS: It was a terrific experience. Sidney Lumet was a great director and it was an honor to work with Paul Newman, and be a part of the same project as James Mason, Charlotte Rampling and Jack Warden. We rehearsed the film for two weeks at 890 Broadway, as if it were a play. We’d run through the screenplay twice a day. In my scene with Paul Newman, I had ninety percent of the dialogue. It would be a three-minute tracking shot when we filmed it up in Boston, but for the process of rehearsing, Sidney had us walking around the rehearsal studio with me taking the lead and Paul trying to catch up. Because I was in awe of Paul, I’d slow up so I could be face-to-face while we conversed. Sidney kept telling me that he wanted Paul to chase after me because I was a big-shot doctor and his character was a down-in-the-heels lawyer, a drunk. But I kept slowing up due to my respect for Paul, until Sidney took me aside and said, “Listen, you’re fucking a twenty-two-year-old intern across the river in Cambridge. You’ve got three hours to get to her apartment, and then back to Boston before your next operation.” From that moment on,   I walked very fast. Giving an actor an “active” motivation is the mark of a great director.

AM: In 1983, the public at large once again got to enjoy your gift of comedy when you portrayed Lupinski in To Be Or Not To Be. What was it like to work with Mel Brooks and company? Were there any standout moments? In particular, what was it like to do the Shylock monologue?

LJS: It was very difficult. Mel Brooks can be a delightful, always hilarious man when he is feeling secure about a project’s prospect for success. In the case of To Be Or Not To Be, he knew he was competing with the original film, which in my estimation is a comic masterpiece. The director of the original, Ernst Lubitsch, was a genius, and Jack Benny and Carole Lombard were brilliant in their respective roles. Because Mel was afraid, and rightfully so, to be compared to Lubitsch and Benny, he pretended that we was not the director of the film. (He was.)  Instead, he gave the directing credit to the film’s choreographer, Alan Johnson.  This created a dysfunctional working relationship that was very hard on the actors. Mel was especially hard on my interpretation of the Shylock speech, which was a work-in-progress until we finally shot it, seven weeks into the shoot.  A large part of being a good director is instilling an actor with confidence, and Mel did the opposite. In retrospect, I realize that Mel was as petrified of performing Shakespeare as I was.  The night before the scene was to be shot,  I smoked a little grass and came to the conclusion that Lupinski’s motivation had to do with kicking ass for the Jews. But the next day, what I didn’t realize, was that the shot before had me rushing out of the theater men’s room straight at Mel, who was dressed as Hitler, while surrounded by several big, strong, blond body guards in SS uniforms who grabbed me by my arms and hurt me. Suddenly, I wasn’t just emoting Shakespeare’s prose, I was fighting for my life. It was a terrific acting lesson. It’s never about the words; it’s about the subtext you create underneath. Mel was more then pleased, thank God, because you don’t want to get on his bad side! Essentially, with the exception of my rendering of that speech, I was too young for the part. Felix Bressart, who was in the original, was much better. As was everything else in the original film. There was to be plenty more Mel Brooks in my life, but two decades later.

AM: It’s absolutely amazing to think that when the The New Odd Couple came to Broadway in ’85 at the Broadhurst, with an all-female cast featuring Rita Moreno, Sally Struthers, Marilyn Cooper and Jenny O’Hara among others, you played one of the Latino love interests along with Tony Shalhoub, who was making his Broadway debut at the time. What was that situation like in general, first of all with the ladies as the leads and secondly to be working with Shalhoub?

LJS: It turned out to be a turning point. I was thirty-seven, and in a depression over what to do with the rest of my life. I think it’s becoming clearer after the re-telling of these experiences that an actor’s life is not a walk in the park. It’s a roller coaster ride complicated by the need to re-invent yourself every decade, as you morph from flavor of the month,to being a character actor who now appears too young for the roles he might be considered right for. If you’re lucky. The original roles of the Costazuela Brothers (the male re-imagining of the Pigeon Sisters), was written for two middle-aged bald Hispanic actors, and I wasn’t bald, Hispanic or middle-aged. The only reason I was asked to audition for the part was, because as desperate as I was to find work, I had invited the show’s casting director to a Mets game the night before. Having nothing to offer me, she threw me a bone and scheduled an audition the next day for a role I wasn’t remotely right for. That afternoon I found myself in a room with about twenty middle-aged, bald Hispanic actors wondering what the hell I was doing there. I even expressed that sentiment aloud to the actors in the room. One of my many complaints that I voiced at the time was that Raul Julia, who spoke with a decided Spanish accent, seemed to be immune from type. He had recently been cast in Noel Coward’s comedy-drama Design For Living, playing an Englishman with a decided Spanish inflection. Seconds before I was to go into audition for the director,  Danny Simon (Neil Simon’s older brother), I decided that if Raul Julia could play Noel Coward,  I could play Raul Julia. So that’s what I did. It was a wicked take-off , and it proved hilarious to the powers that be. The next day, I was asked to audition for Neil and I turned the audition down as a waste of time. Some poor bastard had already been cast in the role of the other brother, and there was no way I could appear to be his brother. I received a conference call between the producer Manny Azenberg and Danny Simon that morning, begging me to come down to the Alvin Theater and audition for Neil. The moment I auditioned with the  bald, Hispanic actor cast in the other role, I knew I was going to get the part, and that the other actor was screwed. (I never found out what happened to him. He must have been bought out). Neil came down the aisle of the theater, and asked me if I was “fucking nuts” for turning down the audition. When I mentioned the plethora of bald jokes, he told me he would rewrite the part. I was astonished that I had gotten the role, and saddened that it had come off the back of the other actor. But…that’s show business!  The moment I walked out of the stage door of the Alvin (which has since been renamed the Neil Simon), a pigeon shit all over my new suit. A woman passing by assured me it was a sign of good luck and I told her I hoped so. After I was cast in the role of Manolo, Tony Shalhoub came in and blew them away as Jesus. It was his first high-profile role, in what has turned out to be an elegant career. Neil Simon rewrote the roles so that the two of us were sexually appealing, and the build up to our characters was so artfully written, that the moment we appeared in the doorway midway through the second act, carrying roses and boxes of candy, the audience was in hysterics. We had great chemistry together. Unfortunately, I got a bit distracted by falling in love with Rita Moreno.  But that’s a story for a different time.

AM: How did you come to play Groucho later Off-Broadway and on tour? Was it as a direct result of Minnie’s Boys, or were you just sort of “that Groucho guy?”

LJS: I didn’t play Groucho Off-Broadway. After Minnie’s Boys, I was offered all the plays and sitcoms that had a Groucho character. While Groucho was alive, I was the only actor he allowed to play him. I was super-sensitive about being typecast as his imitator, and tried everything in my power to choose roles as far away from that image as possible. In the 1970s, during a serious lull in my career, I put together a two-character play which I produced, Groucho, which I co-wrote with Denny Martin Flinn, who directed. We performed it for four weeks at the Ford’s Theater in Washington, and three weeks at the Tower in Houston, and were courted by several Broadway producers who wanted to bring it to Broadway. I refused for reasons I listed above, preferring  to play one-nighters and split weeks all over the country for three months a year, from 1979 to 1982.  I loved playing Groucho Marx, and the show we wrote was funny and literate, but I was happy to do it out of the New York public eye.

AM: You had a relatively-small but absolutely-memorable role on “The Sopranos.” What was that experience like?

LJS: My time on “The Sopranos” was very nice.  It was a show I actually watched religiously.  James Gandolfini was a remarkably generous actor to work with. The shooting schedule was more like a movie than a TV show; everyone involved seemed aware that this was the greatest gig of their lives. They actually wrote a segment about my character that I couldn’t do because it was the first week I was performing as Max Bialystock on Broadway in The Producers. They just renamed the character and got another actor.

AM: So many people, myself included, feel a regrettable loss from the cancellation of “Smash,” in which you’ve had a recurring role. Can you possibly share what the experience has been like, and why you think it’s hasn’t been able to hang on?

LJS: I watched the first twenty minutes of the first episode I was in and turned it off. I thought it was pretty bad. They wanted me to return for a fourth episode, but I turned them down. When you’re a recurring character, your time is not your own. You’re at their disposal at all times, and I don’t choose to live my life that way. Also, to be perfectly honest, I have memorized books of dialogue in my time, but for some reason I have a hell of time keeping disposable dialogue in my head. When you’re doing a recurring role, you’re usually the last person to be put on camera.  Instead of knowing what you’re doing and why, you’re trying to remember the verb that connects the sentence. I am in the fortunate position of not having to take every job that comes down the pike, which is mostly due to my three unions and their generous pension plans. Tell that to those asshole Republican governors from Wisconsin, Ohio and beyond.

AM: How are things going with The Nance?

LJS: I love doing The Nance. It’s a wonderfully ambitious piece. Nathan is his usual brilliant self.  Jack O’Brien is a terrific director. The cast is made up of kind and accomplished actors. The Lyceum is my favorite theater that I’ve played on Broadway. That said, it’s exhausting. I used to poo-pooh actors who complained about doing eight performances a week. That I’m jumping around out there like a teenager out there–I can almost see their point.

AM: Finally and honestly, Lewis, where do you see yourself ten years from now?

LJS: That’s a good question. I’ll be seventy-six.  Hopefully, I’ll be dining at the Edison coffee shop between a matinee and evening performance of a new play. Along with my old friends (and I MEAN old), Chip Zien, Mark Blum and Lee Wilkof (in their respective shows). With my ten-year-old grandson and Mary Macleod at my side.

Well, hopefully most of us will also all be around to meet them there for a good ol’ Edison corned beef on rye and a coffee. Until then, we’ll all continue to enjoy Lewis J. Stadlen on and off stages and screens, and wish him continued great good luck.

Getting Dishy with Judy Graubart

(Note: this piece was originally published in my monthly publication, CaB Magazine, on October 1st, 1992. It recently resurfaced on the Internet and I thought it was appropriate to post here for posterity).

Comic actress Judy Graubart still laughs about being married to Bob Dishy. “It only took us twenty years to do it!” being that the two began their relationship when both were members of Second City over twenty-five years ago. Now, six years later, the two are enjoying happiness both from each other’s company and the arrival of their son, Sam. Graubart, however, has much else to be happy about.

Growing up in Chicago as a rabbi’s daughter, Graubart began her initial performance path in after-school improvisational classes and programs from age five. “It was great for me,” she says over coffee at City Bakery. “I was an overweight kid and extremely nearsighted, and being insecure about all of that, so being involved in these little acting groups just pulled me out of that. It allowed me to think I was funny, and…I just loved being a part of dramatic activities.”

She honed her skills further at sleepaway camps following the death of Rabbi Graubart when Judy was eight, but didn’t get serious about performing until her attendance at the University of Chicago. “I did some productions in college, which were fine,” she says, “but my real break came because of a boyfriend I had, who was good friends with David Steinberg, and he was with Second City at the time. And so I began working as sort of the everything-girl at the club itself. I was a bouncer, I did my share of cocktail waitressing with my share of spills and no tips until finally I really knew the show, and they needed someone to be “the woman” one night; Second City was generally five or six guys and one or two women. So I stepped in and became the Man Who Came To Dinner. I just stayed. And before I was done with school, Second City did a United States tour through the Theater Guild, so I guess the rest is theater history. I’d been planning to be a French teacher, since my major was Romance Languages, but I wound up doing all of this instead. And I love doing improvisation. It’s not easy to do well; I think the ability to improvise successfully is there if actors are willing to relax and use it, but it can be hard to do a scene with somebody if they aren’t skilled in it. There were guys I had to work with who would just butcher what we were doing, and then I remember working with someone like Peter Boyle, who was TERRIFIC. I kept think that working with Peter was like talking with someone from your hometown; someone with whom you just speak a common language.”

The tour ended in New York, and Graubart transplanted herself here along with other members of the company. And distinguished company it was; Robert Klein and Fred Willard were in the company with Judy back in the Windy City, along with the aforementioned Steinberg, and the tour also featured Avery Schreiber and Jack Burns. Following other club dates with members of the company and Second City’s Broadway presentation in the early 60s, Graubart landed an audition and a job at Upstairs-at-the-Downstairs. “I had no money at the time, and I still owe Rod Warren for a sweater he loaned me some cash for,” she laughs. She stayed at the club for a year-and-a-half. “It was unusual for me at the beginning; you know, Second City was revues and this was revues, but Second City was improvised and these shows were scripted. What’s funniest to me is that I don’t remember doing the shows as much as I remember hanging out with Madeline Kahn and Janie Sell, and Dixie Carter and Lily Tomlin, hiding in the kitchen from the AGVA man, and going to the movies between shows, and having fried-egg sandwiches at the Warwick drugstore counter. It was a great time.”

Several plays and commercials continued to put bread and butter on Graubart’s table for a time, she was even a commercial spokeswoman for Cheer detergent. “I got so much mileage out of that,” she tells me. “It was just a bunch of spots of this character seeing how white she could get her clothes with Cheer. And it wasn’t just in the States; I’d gone to Germany to do some spots in German. Actually, it was about that time that Second City went to do a show in London, so I felt pretty international. I did some traveling around that time, France, and Israel. I thought I should cleanse my little Jewish soul after working for Cheer in Munich,” she laughs again. “Do you know, when I was having our son in 1986, I was trying to do some of those hokey Lamaze exercises, where they ask you to recite a mantra. Well, somewhere from the depths of my memory came the Cheer commercial I’d done in German. I started reciting “Cheer, it will get your clothes white as a ghost,” in German.”

Graubart managed to keep the bill collectors from the door and satisfy her artistic self, including the television version of Paul Sills’s “Story Theater,” shot in Canada with a cast of such Second City alums as Richard Libertini, Melinda Dillon, Dick Shawn and Valerie Harper, and then one day came the opportunity to audition for the new children’s educational program “The Electric Company,” produced by the Children’s Television Workshop. She landed the job and would stay with the show for its full seven-year run through 1978, creating characters that would delight children all over the country. “It was such a wonderful feeling to land a show as a regular, a show that was doing some good instead of just being a sitcom or something.” Again she was in illustrious company; Bill Cosby was a regular for the first two seasons, Rita Moreno would be with the show for some time, and other cast members included Todd Graff, Skip Hinnant, Luis Avalos, Hattie Winston, Lee Chamberlin, Melanie Henderson, June Angela, Gregg Burge, Irene Cara, and then-virtually-unknown Morgan Freeman. “It was marvelous that they welded together this group of different ethnic types and different energy levels. I guess I was the low-energy person in the family, except when I was doing a character like Jennifer of the Jungle, swinging on the vine and doing my “Oyoyoyoyoyoyoyoyoy” yell.”

And she still tries to see fellow cast members when she can. “I run into Skip and Lee and Hattie all the time, and my husband Bob is going into a film being written by Todd Graff (“Used People”). Luis is hard to track down, because every time I’m on the Coast I try to call him and there are a zillion Luis Avalos-es in Southern California, but one day I’ll hit the right one. And as for Morgan, it’s been fantastic watching him achieve what he’s achieved. It’s a pity that he seems to have a sore spot about doing the show, but I think he’s just so lovable. I remember we used to have these workshops, sketch development workshops, where we had to do a lot of improv-inspired exercises which I was used to, having done all of that stuff with Second City. And I remember Morgan just not having any of it; just going “I’ve worked this hard as an actor to get here, just so I could play children’s games with a bunch of adults?” And the other thing I remember is that Morgan and I used to have crossword-puzzle races. It was great. We were a family, really; we spent a lot of time together off-camera.”

Following her stint, she co-starred with Alan Arkin in the cult-comedy/sci-fi film “Simon.” “A great experience and a very funny film, but way ahead of its time,” Graubart tells me. “If it’s finding an audience now on Comedy Central, that’s terrific. I had a ball making the film.” Other than the odd commercial and voice-over, Graubart has spent the last few years concentrating on being Mrs. Bob Dishy and the mother of six-year-old Sam. Is there ever conflict between the couple, being that Dishy is a slightly more recognizable name than his wife? “I don’t think so,” she muses. “Truthfully, I’d have to think about it…no, I don’t think there is. Although he always told me there was,” she laughs. “I’m always so happy when Bob lands a project that there really isn’t room to feel anything else about it. But there’ve been times when projects would pop up that he’d initiate, or I’d initiate, and I’d want to do them with him, and he’d just look at me and say, “Judy, we are NOT the Lunts!” Which, like any good Jewish girl, would send me to bed for a week, but…no, seriously, we don’t compete. We’re actors seeking work, and there’s a tremendous support system there.”

Now that Sam is firmly ensconced in school, Graubart is actively beginning to seek work again. In fact, a very promising project is lurking around the corner even as you read this. “There’s a series of children’s books out now, called “The Magic Schoolbus,”which star a character named Mrs. Frizzle. She’s a schoolteacher who wears kind of funny clothes and weird shoes; her shoes are sculpted like animals, elephants with trunks and such. They’re wonderful books, and they’ve been gaining popularity. Anyway, they’re trying to develop a tape to go with the books, and as we speak, it looks like I’m Mrs. Frizzle. I don’t know that anything’s going to come of it because I never count chickens, but we’ve recorded it, and it’s probably in the mixing process now, and…we’ll see. Actually,” she continues, “I was telling Sam’s teacher that I was going to be Mrs. Frizzle, and she looked at me really sadly. She said, “But you CAN’T be Mrs. Frizzle! I’M Mrs. Frizzle! Look at my shoes!!” Poor thing, I hope she’s not too depressed. Anyway, I promised myself that no matter what happens, by the end of the year I was going to start looking for work seriously again, so keep an eye out.”

We promise. In any case, whether she’s Judy Graubart, Mrs. Dishy, Sam’s mother or Mrs. Frizzle, she is a consummate delight…and as one of the performers New York has missed so much in recent years, it’ll be nice to see her become the apple of the city’s eye again.

R.I.P. Kathi Moss: A Beautiful Woman Is Lost To Us

When Grease first opened Off-Broadway at the Eden Theater on February 14th, 1972, barely anybody including its stars (headed by an unknown fellow named Barry Bostwick and a gal named Carole Demas, besides a couple of ladies by the names of Adrienne Barbeau  and Ilene Kristen, and a chap named Alan Paul) remotely imagined that that the show would not only saunter to Broadway, but by 1980 become the single longest-running show in the history of New York when it displaced Fiddler on the Roof. It has since retained distinction as the fourteenth-longest-running Broadway show of all time. The show has had two very successful revivals since then, in 1994 and 2007 respectively, not to mention the mega-smash film version that was the undisputed hit of the summer of 1978, starring John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. And among the other legendary talents to be borne from the show was a very robust young lady by the name of Kathi Moss, who memorably created the role of Cha-Cha Di Gregorio and managed to virtually walk off with the entire second act of the show when she steals Danny Zuko (Bostwick) from Sandy Dumbrowski (Demas) and wins the high school dance competition as televised live.

If her work in Grease hadn’t already cemented Moss loudly and clearly as a Broadway legend, she won the chance to prove it all over again in Nine in 1982, directed by Tommy Tune and which would go on to win a Tony for Best Musical (in the season in which Dreamgirls was heavily lauded to sweep the entire shootin’ match).  She spent most of the first act dressed as a nun in full habit, singing backups in her rich female tenor,  and then almost disrobe completely to embody the role of the whore Saraghina on the songs “Ti Voglio Bene” and “Be Italian” with a chorus of four young boys. It not only stunned the audience at every performance, but Moss made theater history when she and the kids performed it on the Tony Awards in 1983, tambourines in tow.

Other than a brief turn in Grand Hotel in the early 90s, Moss didn’t return to Broadway again but stayed busy in regional theater, and kept her friends close, among them your humble reporter. She once said, “Nobody will ever know how hot it was to wear that nun’s habit night after night under those  goddamned lights . Whenever I got to remove that wimple and that tunic and finally feel the cool breeze through the lace shorts, I was the happiest woman on Broadway.” And then she fell into blissful marriage with her husband Tom Quinn, who she loved more than life itself.

Which is why it was so awful, just a mere matter of weeks ago, to learn that she’d fallen victim to a fatal blood disorder known as cardiac amyloidosis. Her families from Grease and Nine rallied together to put together a benefit concert at the Signature Theater on January 14th to help with the costs of the illness, but Kathi shuffled off her mortal coil just a few days later, peacefully and painlessly and in the arms of her cherished Tom. As it rightfully should have been. And once again, her families from both shows gathered to share their memories with The Andrew Martin Report.

Alaina Warren Zachary, who created the role of Ilsa von Hesse in Nine, was one of the rare few who worked with Moss in both shows. “Of the Grease experience,” she says, “Pat Birch will corroborate that Kathi was an amazing dancer, for a large woman. For this reason, she was made the official dance captain of the show. She traveled to London and other places, to teach the original Pat Birch choreography to many Grease companies. In the program, and according to the union, Kathi was listed as Dance Captain. BUT in typical Kathi style, she insisted on being called the Dance Queen. So you will find that listing in our programs. But wait, there’s more; Kathi, being Kathi, wanted more than the acknowledgement of Dance Queen. She also requested a tiara. Probably both Pat Birch and Louis St. Louis can back me up on this. And if memory serves, she was presented with a tiara. Kathi had her own expressions, as any one who knew her well can tell you. One that lingers (and it usually referred to timing for a step or who knows what all) was “block-a, block-a block-a.”  She, so fond of telling stories, was the first person I ever heard who said “long story short.” And one of my favorite facial expressions was when Kathi would close one eye and look at you. Outside of our onstage/backstage times in Grease and Nine. I was the person who recommended her to Tommy Tune, when we learned the Saraghina from the workshop would not be continuing on to Broadway with us. So Kathi auditioned and became the Broadway Saraghina. But she never shared the royalties that the workshop folks received. As I was saying, outside of our Broadway adventures, we played together as girlfriends. Kathi had a car and I was starting to think about buying a weekend place in the Hudson Valley, so Kathi decided we’d take a drive and look at real estate upstate. Probably the year was 1983 by then. I remember we stopped at a little antique shop in Cold Spring, where I found a lovely simple gold and amethyst bracelet, which is my favorite to this day. But that’s not the story I wanted to share. We had so much fun looking at houses that we decided to get a motel room, and continue looking at houses the next day. Of course it was a spontaneous decision, so we hadn’t packed anything. We bought toothbrushes and toothpaste, but we had no pajamas and no other clothes than what we were wearing. It was Kathi who suggested (and I still laugh about this) that we take down the drapes and wear those around the motel room. Which we did. Toga style. The last story I’m sharing was a phone conversation I had with Kathi. After becoming a weekender upstate around 1984, I sold my Chelsea condo and moved full time to the Chatham area. I knew at some point that I would need to return to the city in order to pick up one more year to qualify for an AFTRA pension, and that year turned out to be 1997. I’d been away from New York for a long time, away from my performing pals, my agents, the casting people and all the Broadway society that had been a vital part of my life from 1971-1985.  So, naturally, I had trepidation about returning. How would I pick up the threads of my active, prosperous performing career after an absence of more than ten years? What would I say to everyone? Kathi, on the phone, had the advice. She said, ‘Coma. Tell them you’ve been in a coma for ten years.’ So typical of Kathi humor.”

Alan Paul, who of course followed his marvelous success in Grease as a member of the Manhattan Transfer, has equally wonderful memories of Moss. “She was such a great talent,” he says, “with a dynamic voice, that needed no mic to reach the far corners of the balcony. She was also a great swing dancer. We shared a little secret while in Grease. When we started out Off-Broadway at the Eden Theatre, the entire cast was on a favored-nations clause, making a big $280 a week. Kathi’s role as Cha-Cha, and my characters of Johnny Casino and Teen Angel, didn’t make our appearances until the second act, so we figured we were getting paid the same amount as everyone else while putting in half the time. On many occasions, we would sign in an hour before the start of the show and then sneak out to do whatever we wanted. It used to drive our stage manager, Tommy Smith,  completely nuts. But we never missed a performance, so he gave us slack.” Paul continues, “Another fond memory of Kathi was with her dog, Chichornya, named after the Russian folk song. He was an Afghan, absolutely beautiful, but the stupidest dog I ever met. Kathi lived in an apartment downtown that was on the third floor, and had a balcony overlooking the street below. One day, Kathi left her dog on the balcony to run some errands, and when poor Chichornya saw Kathi exit the building, he jumped three floors to get to Kathi, breaking both his back legs. Fortunately, they were able to pin together his legs and he was his jolly self again, except he now walked with a limp. Seeing how traumatic this must have been for Chichornya, it was a logical assumption on Kathi’s part that the probability of this scenario ever happening again was nil to slim. Well, unfortunately, that was not the case with Chichornya. Three months later, he once again jumped off the balcony, three floors in order to get to Kathi, and once again broke both his hind legs. He healed again and, as far as I know, Kathi never put him out on the balcony again and they lived happily ever after.”

Entertainer Nancy Hillner, now a sought-after theater teacher in Rhode Island, never actually worked with Moss but chimed in, “In 1974 after seeing Grease, I used to ‘second-act’ the show often. I had auditioned for the national tour a year or so earlier before I had even seen the show, and wanted to see what I had missed out on. I enjoyed it so much, and I kept going back because they looked like they were having so much fun, especially Kathi. I can still see her hand-jiving!” She continued, “I knew Kathi from Charlie’s, a theater restaurant across from the Royale. I worked the coat room, and Kathi and the rest of the Grease gang would sit at table twelve, a big round table near the front. She enjoyed her cocktails and liked to stay late, and we would chat/dish about mutual friends. One good friend (whose name I won’t mention) at one point did the show with her, and when I asked Kathi how she was, she didn’t pull any punches; she said she was awful! I truly loved how honest she was, but just in case people might know who it is, let’s just say I loved her brutal honesty about people. I also remember when she lost all of her Cha-Cha weight. What a difference! If I had to sum her up, I’d say she was always there with a smile, she loved having a good time, and her talent was a knockout.”

Dee Etta Rowe (now Dee Etta Rowe Ferraro), also from the original cast of Nine as  Olga von Sturm, said, “I didn’t know Kathi at all, until she joined us in the workshop. But I thought she was perfect for the role. She was very professional, fit right in with all of us even though she joined the cast later on, and was always very nice to me. And oh, how she loved to laugh. Nothing ever seemed to bother her at all!! Kathi was very kind, and loving, and talented. It was a pleasure to have worked with her and shared the stage with her!!”

Though Walter Charles wasn’t an original cast member of Grease, he became the first original replacement as Vince Fontaine and later scored success in Sweeney Todd, Cats and La Cage Aux Folles. “Kathi and I were close friends during the years I was with Grease, in the first National & Broadway companies,” he says. “Although, we hadn’t seen each other for some years and had lost touch, I was, like all her devoted friends, devastated to learn of her illness and passing. It just seems so inconceivable. For the years I was in Grease with her,  she shared one of her Christmas traditions with me; we’d get into an old station wagon she had, a Country Squire or something, and she’d drive to this Christmas tree stand downtown that she liked. We get our trees, tie them to the roof of the car, then drive back uptown, park, and go to a sweet shop that used to be on Central Park South called Rumplemayer’s. We’d sit at a table and have a hot chocolate together, with whipped cream!  Then she’d drop me at my place, I’d unload, we’d get back into the car, and help her unload at her place. We laughed the whole time. We were also the “fact-finding committee”, which was part of a larger Equity committee during the musician’s strike during the 1970’s, and which closed down the musicals for about twenty-seven days, I think it was. Kathi and I were on the phone constantly with each other, or meeting up at her place or mine. She was a loyal, trusted friend during that time in my life, I will never forget her, and will always hold her memory close to my heart.”

Colleen Dodson (now Colleen Dodson Baker), who created the role of the Gondolier, says, “My favorite memory of working with Kathi on Nine was her grace under pressure at the rehearsal for the 1982 Tonys. Anita Morris and ‘A Call from the Vatican’ were rejected because it was too risqué, so the producers decided to go with Kathi and ‘Be Italian.’ I’ll never forget waiting for our rehearsal to start; we were in the house at the Imperial watching the Dreamgirls cast rehearse, and when Jennifer Holliday started singing her heart-stopping number, “And I Am Telling You,” we fell silent. You could tell by how somber the Nine girls got that we all had the same thought – how are we EVER going to follow THAT?! But then our time came, and Kathi took the stage. Nothing was going to intimidate her. She was a total star. Powerful and radiant. She owned her talent, her love of our show, and she reveled in the chance to perform her number. She showed us all the way that day, the night of the Tonys, and every performance she did during her run of Nine. I can’t see the YouTube clip of  ‘Be Italian’ on the 1982 Tonys without thinking back to that afternoon.”

Nancy McCall created the role of Arabella in Nine, later finding fame as the booking manager for both Palsson’s and Steve McGraw’s on West 72nd Street, the home of such Off-Broadway hits as Forbidden Broadway, Forever Plaid and Bittersuite. “It is easy to remember Kathi’s generosity. One night, she treated a group of us to dinner at Barbetta. And her opening night present of the mini-tambourine, with ribbons in the Italian colors, was a treasure. There are stage memories, but a standout was her generous, radiant smile, when I was an ensemble tambourinist.”

As if none of this was enough, Katie Hanley (the original Jan in Grease and later a star of the movie Godspell and heavily featured in Xanadu) said, ” I will never forget the first rehearsal for the cast of Grease at the Eden; the opening night memories are still with me every Valentine’s Day. As each actor walked into the room, I was struck by the amazing casting. Kathi and Tim Meyers walked in together, and their enviably deep friendship was apparent from the beginning. When Kathi read her first line, the power and talent in that gal had us exploding with laughter, along with every audience she played to. One of the highlights of the show was her entrance into the prom in her outrageous poofy yellow dress, booming out,  “They call me Cha-Cha, ’cause I’m the best dancer at St. Bernadette’s.”  And was she EVER! She took that stage and filled it with so many delicious moments, and was a major contributor to the success of Grease.  I just wish she’d been in the movie!! Selfishly,” she continued, “my favorite moment in the show was just before ‘It’s Raining On Prom Night.’ There were only a few of us onstage, and I was fortunate enough to have been positioned with my back to the audience, frozen, and looking up at Carole Demas. It was great to be part of the audience, soaking up Kathi’s intro. I go to YouTube for a listen every now and then, and get fed by all that is in her voice. I should point out that I didn’t see Kathi again after I left the show, but in spite of all the years that have gone by, my memory of her is fresh.  Those intelligent, big eyes…the face of a doll, her powerful voice, amazing dancing feet, and a presence that exuded generosity of spirit, authenticity, no-nonsense wisdom, and a refreshing sense of humor about herself, all rolled up into one who is impossible to forget.”

Linda Kerns created her own stir in Nine as Helga von Sturm, and remembers, “As well as the many laughs (and Kathi had the greatest, heartiest laugh of anyone I know) we had in our dressing room, during the run of Nine, one of the things I remember with great fondness is the ‘Champagne Saturday Nights.’ Kathi started a tradition of someone (usually herself) bringing in a bottle or two of Freixenet to wrap up the week. Then one holiday (I think it was a Christmas), she presented each of us with the greatest tallest champagne glass, which I STILL HAVE! Thru several moves, one of them across the country, that glass has gone with me to remind me of the wonderful times we had. It sits proudly on a shelf in my home, and using it is never out of the question.”

Even Raul Julia’s intrepid dresser, Susan Wright, has her memories of Moss. “I think of our Nine year with so much fondness and happy memories, and Kathi was a big part of that. I loved her number in the show. She sparkled and shined with joy, and was so lusty. The lust absolutely poured out of her! Sometimes I wonder what those kids really thought was going on. I know Raul thought she was wonderful, and so great in that role. We all did. Who couldn’t?”

Jim Wann wasn’t even a member of either cast; he was busy starring in Pump Boys & Dinettes in ’82 at the Princess Theater. But he, too, absolutely adored her. “I am remembering, with a big smile, Kathi Moss paddling around on that little round thing on wheels that Pat Birch put her on at the Kennedy Center in Hot Grog. Talk about a low budget! She also sang her ass off in Country Cabaret and especially in Nine. She made me, a country boy, want to be Italian just to hang out with Saraghina. And well, maybe I shouldn’t mention this, but everyone thought she was brave for dating Roger Howell. Who I love, too.” He continued, “I have thought of Kathi often through the years. We worked together a few times, and I never had a bad moment in her company. She was always great-hearted and generous with me, and she always made my work come alive in a way that made folks want to laugh and applaud. To me, she was a true theater person, who reminds me of all the best reasons to have friends in the theater.”

And Carole Demas, not merely a legend of Broadway for creating the role of Sandy in Grease but also of children’s television, and who is still knocking it out of the park in concert as recently as just a few weeks ago in the Westchester town of Irvington, said, “My husband, Stuart Allyn, owned a recording studio on Broadway and West 58th Street years ago. He was engineering and producing an album with our St. Croix friend and client, Llewellyn Westerman, a tall, broad shouldered sailor by trade (never a motor-ever!) and ‘Calypso King Of The Virgin Islands’ several times over.  Llewellyn plays guitar, sings in a sweet, deep voice and writes true Calypso; the poetry of the islands, full of his observations of life, the beauty of his home, his political ideas–his songs were (and still are) the real Calypsonian deal. I was singing backup, creating the soaring, mysterious soprano voices of mermaids for his song, ‘Underwater.’ All was well, and I was having a great time, until he decided I should sing some Calypso stuff–not exactly my ‘ting,'” she laughed. “He also needed a low, rich woman’s voice to join with mine. But it was after 10 PM. Who to call? I hadn’t seen Kathi in ages, but I called her, full of apologies for the hour and the short notice. In fifteen minutes, she was in the studio. Llewellyn met my weak protestations that ‘I wasn’t sure I could sing Calypso’ with a hearty, ‘Take off your shoes, girl, and just sing it!’ Kathi wasn’t exactly experienced singing Calypso, either, but her shoes were off in seconds and we wailed, rocked and crooned, swaying and stomping in our bare feet, screaming with laughter, until well into the early morning. Unforgettable.  Kathi was absolutely fearless, and I will be grateful to her forever for helping me find my groove. The woman had a direct connection to the joys of life.”

Long story short, as the lady herself would say, Kathi Moss will remain sorely missed by the Broadway community as well as the legions of fans she so completely embraced with her talents. One more angel now sings with the feathered choir, in a rich deep tone that will caress the clouds forevermore and always steal the show. Ti voglio bene, mia cara signorina.

Concertgoing: This is My Life

The Three Degrees.
(From left, Helen Scott, Freddie Pool, Valerie Holiday)

One of the most wondrous things about growing up in a showbiz family is that from a very early age you find yourself attending concerts. If you’re even luckier, those concerts encompass a wide range of styles and tastes.

The very first I ever attended were Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center. My recently departed cousin Barry Finclair was one of their violinists, so he always got us great seats. But the first solo concert I ever saw was PDQ Bach, when we were visiting relatives in Poughkeepsie. I was maybe seven at the time, I hated it and I fell asleep midway through. In retrospect, I so wish I hadn’t, because Peter Schickele is a genius.

Aside from all the Broadway shows I ever saw and have seen, not to mention thousands of cabaret acts, concerts are my favorite things to attend. The first one I really remember clearly was Carly Simon, at Hofstra in 1980. This was before she caught stage fright, right around the same time when “Vengeance” was a big hit. I want to say it was a good show, but it really wasn’t. She did all the big hits, like “Anticipation” and “That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” and “Legend In Your Own Time” and “Nobody Does it Better,” not to mention “You’re So Vain,” but she was also trying to transition into harder rock and it was a study in fruitlessness. But I love that I got to see her.

Then in ’82, Mom took me to an Elly Stone concert at the Bottom Line, may it rest in peace. THIS was a big deal. I don’t expect half of you reading this to know who Elly is or remotely care, but she’s kind of a legend; she was the star of “Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris” and was basically considered the new American Piaf in her day. My mom was such a fan that Elly was and still is considered a goddess in our house (I’m friends with Elly now, all these years later, and she thinks that’s hilarious). But that was the night I fell in love with concertgoing. We actually sat through the second show, and it was also the night I became acquainted with the wonderful work of Kitty Hendrix, who sang backup for Elly and also became a friend of mine. Plus, who wouldn’t want to be thirteen years old and taken to see a show at the Bottom Line?

A year after that I had a chance to see Pete Seeger in concert, which really gave me my love of folk music. He was doing a very informal show in Westchester as a benefit for the Clearwater Project, with which he’s fiercely committed to clean up the Hudson River. As a special treat, he invited Arlo Guthrie to come up on stage and join him to duet on “Guantanamera.” To call it glorious would be an understatement. Which is why, when I was in college in 1986, I took an elective seminar called “The American Folk Tradition,” hosted by Mary Travers. Every week she would have a guest from the folk music world come and do an interview for about forty minutes, and then they’d do a mini-concert for the rest of the hour, sometimes joined by Mary and sometimes not. Because of that, I got to see such artists as Odetta, Judy Collins, Richie Havens, Buskin & Batteau, and the New York Choral Society. The best was on the last day of the seminar, when she had Peter Yarrow as her guest. After the interview, they got up together and sang “Lemon Tree” and “500 Miles,” and then Peter said, “Mary, that was fun, but I keep feeling like there was something missing.” Then we heard a guitar strum from the back of the house, we all turned around, of course it was Paul Stookey, and we all went wild. He strolled down the aisle, playing and singing “The Wedding Song” and joined them on stage, and they gave us a blissful concert for the next hour. It was other-worldly.

That same year, David Bowie played at the Garden with his “Spiders from Mars” tour, and they just happened to add a second date. So my friend Jessica, who is a major Bowie fan, called me and said, “Look, they’ve added a second date and I have no money. If you can get us two tickets I’ll be your friend forever.” Now, I am not the biggest Bowie fan on earth by a longshot, but I knew what a great show he puts on plus I’d never seen a show at the Garden, and I had the cash so I got us the tickets. Whether I’m a fan of his or not, I cried my eyes out when he sang “Jean Genie.” It was THAT good.

That was the same year that the Monkees (minus Michael Nesmith) embarked on their “Pleasant Valley Sunday” tour, and it was coming to Pier 86 (when they still did concerts there).  So my friend Sandy begged me to get tickets for her and myself. I had a mad crush on Peter Tork, so I didn’t exactly need a lot of persuasion. We attended together, and they were amazing, but best of all was that for their opening acts they had Herman’s Hermits featuring  Peter Noone, as well as Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, and The Grass Roots, with whom I’ve had a lifelong love affair (and they sang EVERYthing, “Sooner or Later,” “Live for Today,” “Midnight Confessions,” “The River Is Wide,” you name it).

Right around that same time and through the late 80s, I caught three shows at the Bottom Line that absolutely changed my life for their greatness. The first was Phoebe Snow (again with friend Jessica). The second was Laura Nyro (with a boyfriend whose name I can’t remember) and the third was Janis Ian (alone, but we were all united as one in her genius).  I had a ticket to see Joan Armatrading three weeks later, but that afternoon I caught a vicious flu and had to give the ticket to a friend.

In 1990, my life was to rearrange when I was offered a job as a cabaret reviewer and features contributor for a magazine called Night & Day. My very first assignment was to review a Peggy Lee concert at The Ballroom. And I’d not been a huge fan of Peggy Lee until then, but this was an assignment, after all.  So I spent days figuring out what to wear, what to do with my hair, even what pen to bring with me to take notes. Miss Lee walked out onto that stage with a nine-piece band and knocked my socks off;  it was the sweetest trial by fire anyone could ever experience at twenty-one years of age, to be shown into the Ballroom, guided to the best seat in the house, encouraged to order anything I’d like to eat or drink for free, watch Peggy Lee for an hour, go home and write about it, and then GET PAID!

As if that wasn’t enough, four days later they sent me to the Beacon to review a major concert experience called “Heartstrings.” They rented me a limo, and my cherished friend Kim and I got all gussied up and attended the show and the party afterwards at Citicorp Market. It had a core cast and a script of which the theme was a fable about AIDS infiltrating humanity, and I was afforded the opportunity to discover some really fantastic musical theater performers (including a sensational vocalist named Mary Beth Purdy, who brought the house down when she sang “Come Rain or Come Shine” and has also become a friend of mine since then) but even more than this, it was hosted by Christopher Reeve (darling man, who I got to meet that night and may he rest in peace) and Marlo Thomas, and included such delicious moments as Tommy Tune dancing to “Kicking the Clouds Away” with a chorus of beautiful girls and Barbara Cook knocking all of us on our asses by singing “Love Don’t Need a Reason” by Peter Allen.

The next ten years were spent with attending a LOT of cabaret and jazz shows, two highlights of which were Dr. Hook at the Village Gate and Chaka Khan at the Blue Note (and she is so short you can’t believe it). Then came 2001, when sort-of-ex-husband and I met (long story, we were together and then apart and together again and then apart and now we’re sort of…I’m not sure), and I’m thrilled to say that he LOVES concerts. The first was Jane Olivor at Westbury, about seven weeks after we met because we’re both major fans, and we subsequently attended four more of hers at different venues. (As most of you know, Jane and I eventually worked together on a project and she did me dirt, so I refuse to ever see a concert of hers again. Whenever the lunatic does one). But we attended a whole big bunch of them together. The memorable standouts are of course Cher (in her first Farewell Tour, hee hee) at the Garden, Bette Midler in the “Kiss My Brass” tour (also at the Garden, on the memorable night she was flying off stage on the carousel horse to end the first act and it got stuck in mid-air), Linda Eder at Carnegie Hall (to which we brought his parents, who bitched about my getting such crappy seats), and Il Divo at Radio City.

And then there was the night, in 2002, when he said to me, “Let’s catch a concert at Jones Beach this summer. Look up who’s playing. You pick the artist.” So I looked it up, and there happened to be a Three Dog Night concert, and I worship Three Dog Night. But the problem with a Three Dog Night show is that there’s never a guarantee that Chuck Negron will be in shape to go on, and if he’s not in shape to go on, they cancel altogether and don’t give refunds. So I figured we shouldn’t chance it. I said, “Styx?” He said no. I said, “Supertramp?” He said no. I said, “Pat Benatar?” He said, “Certainly not. I hate her.” (So much for me picking the artist, and I should have known then that the marriage was in trouble). So then I said, “How about Hall & Oates, with Todd Rundgren as an opening act?” THAT idea he  liked. So we got tickets. And they put on a GREAT show; they sang every hit except “Private Eyes.” The downside was Rundgren, who had cocaine running down his face from the moment he came out to sing “Hello, It’s Me.”

Now, I also have this friend named Jennifer. Our birthdays are two days apart, so we can never forget. And she always goes out of her way to get me something incredible as a gift. That’s my Lovey. (I call her Lovey and she calls me Bunny. Don’t ask, it’s a friend thing). Anyhow, in ’07 she called me and said, “So what am I getting you this year?” You should also know if you don’t already that I collect giraffe statuettes. Fifty-eight and counting, to be precise. So I said, “A crystal giraffe from Swarovski.” She said, “No giraffes. I’ve given you enough giraffes.” So I said, “A set of All-Clad cookware. My friend Susan Scudder says you have to be married for forty years before you earn a set of All-Clad.” She said, “I’m not buying pots. What do you want more than anything that you can’t afford?” I said, “Get me a ticket to the Streisand show this autumn at the Garden.” She said, “But that’s October. I want you to enjoy it on your birthday.” I said, “You’re asking me, I’m telling you. I’ll wait three months to enjoy it if it means I can see Streisand.” So she got me a ticket, and the show was on a Monday night (the 9th, if I recall, John Lennon’s birthday). As I was dressing to go to the show, she called  me and said, “I know how much you’re looking forward to tonight and I hate to ask this, but they’ve added a second show for Wednesday and if you can possibly wait, I can get you upgraded to a Skybox in one of the Club Suites for that night.” So I waited the two nights. And it was the best thing I ever did. I saw Streisand from the best seat in the house.

Much more recently and as many of you know, I’ve been taking a lot of road trips with dear childhood friend George. Mostly New England but also Long Island. Anyway, all of a sudden after one of our trips this summer he offered me a ticket to go with him to the Beacon and see the Dukes of September, which is Boz Scaggs, Donald Fagen of Steely Dan, and Michael McDonald of the Doobie Brothers. Would YOU say no? So of course we went, and it was absolutely magical.

The reason I bring all of this to light is because last night, Scott Barbarino (my cherished publisher at NiteLifeExchange.com) invited me to come see The Three Degrees do their show at Iridium. This will probably be their last time in New York; they’re hitting the road in a few days to do concerts in Japan again. For those of you unfamiliar with The Three Degrees (and shame on you if you are), they’re the female vocal trio who scored a huge hit in 1974 with the song “When Will I See You Again?” The current group is not comprised of the original members, which started in Philly in ’63, but they are three fabulously-talented women named Valerie Holiday, Helen Scott and Freddie Pool. And their energy is mesmerizing. It was literally one of the greatest concerts I have ever seen. Of course they sang that hit, but also “Dirty Ol’ Man,” “Shake Your Groove Thing,” “Maybe,” and did an incredible tribute to their fellow artists from Philadelphia (The O’Jays, McFadden & Whitehead, The Trammps, etc).

In closing, it was a trip to the  moon on gossamer wings. And I can’t wait to go see another concert. Soon.