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7, Oct 2017

Get Me to the Stage On Time

by Steve Cohen
The Cultural Critic

This story was originally commissioned by, and appeared in, Playbill’s annual Tony edition
 

Maybe, as the joke goes, you can get to Carnegie Hall with “practice, practice, practice,” but if you’re in a Broadway show you usually need something more: a bus, a subway or a cab. And sometimes you run into problems on the way.

One of the funniest stories Elaine Stritch told in her acclaimed one-woman show was about covering for Ethel Merman in Call Me Madam in 1952 while appearing in another musical on the same nights. Merman had a reputation for never missing a performance, and Stritch thought she could stand by for La Merm and also appear in a revival of Pal Joey because she didn’t have to go on in Pal Joey until 10:15 and both shows were near each other on Broadway. But then the producers of Pal Joey moved its tryout to Connecticut. So Stritch had to make her half-hour call at the Imperial, then get all the way to New Haven within two-and-half hours. Either find a way to do that, or give up one of her jobs.

“I used to date a guy at Yale with an MG,” Stritch recalled. “I called him up and told him I missed him.” She arranges to have him drive her between New York and New Haven every day through the tryout, including twice on Wednesdays and Saturdays. But one night it snows, and using the MG is out. Receiving assurances from Merman that she is well, Stritch catches a seven o’clock train out of Penn Station and into the blizzard and she orders a double brandy. When she gets to the Connecticut theater at 10:15, she sees her understudy “standing there ready to go on in my costume. I’ve got on a Dior suit, a beaver fur coat and boots. I say to my understudy, `Just give me your shoes.’ I wore a seven, she wore a nine and a half. I looked like Minnie Mouse in a Dior suit. I made my entrance.”

Getting to the show on time isn’t always a laugh. On Tuesday, September 11, 2001, every theater in Manhattan was dark, of course. But New York actor Michael Oberlander had to go to Philadelphia where he was starring in a world premiere musical, Camila, at the Walnut Street Theatre. Oberlander was at his home on the Upper West Side where he had a great view of the World Trade Center. “I actually saw the second building go down. It was horrible. All the bridges and tunnels were closed, but I knew they needed me in Philly and I never missed a performance in my career. So around 1 PM I got a cab and went on a spooky ride through Upper Midtown trying to find a rental car, hoping a bridge or tunnel would re-open. I never saw the streets so deserted and surreal. Finally I found a dealer on West 77th Street and was offered a car for $198, take it or leave it. I took it, because the Walnut was having its final preview before the press opening and my understudy wasn’t ready.”

There are no union rules that specify when a cover must be ready, and many theaters don’t require one to be in place until the end of previews. So there was no cover for his role and Oberlander felt he had to get to Philly. “And I agreed with the producer that we should show America that terrorists couldn’t stop us. As I crossed the GW Bridge I turned and looked back; there was the beautiful skyline at sunset and no towers. It was mind-boggling.”

As he drove south on the New Jersey Turnpike, Oberlander passed convoys of army and reserve trucks and ambulances headed in the other direction. He listened to the news on his car radio and kept in touch with the Walnut’s stage manager via cell phone. He got to the theater in Philadelphia at 8:46. “They started the show and gave another actor my lines and my songs, which he was able to do, in his own costume because mine wouldn’t fit him. I came in to the house, put on part of my costume and went on in the next scene. Nobody missed a beat.”

An earlier terrorist action led to a delay at a Broadway show. On January 20, 1981, the Ayatollah freed the American hostages in Iran, and when they returned home the producer of Sugar Babies, David Merrick, invited them to see his show. The audience at the Mark Hellinger Theatre didn’t know of the plans, and people were getting surly when the curtain was delayed. But when a man carrying an American flag started coming down the aisle, followed by others, the audience burst into cheers.

This wasn’t the first time Merrick delayed a curtain. When The Happy Time opened at the Broadway Theatre in 1968, New York Times critic Clive Barnes was on a plane from Pittsburgh to New York that was delayed by bad weather. As the plane circled, Merrick held up the opening for the Times scribe. After 25 minutes, audience members were grumbling and a critic from another paper complained: “We’re sitting around here waiting for that guy like we’re a bunch of pigs.” So management finally started the show without Barnes. He arrived 15 minutes after the curtain went up and gave it a decent review. Author William Goldman said that Barnes really couldn’t have panned the show after arriving late, or there would have been too much anger against him along the street.

Faith Prince co-starred in a play, Noises Off, that shows the comic pratfalls of a group of actors trying to make their stage entrances. She had an adventure of her own when she ran into gridlock because of a serious accident up ahead on the Saw Mill Parkway heading into Manhattan. “I was so anxious to get to my show that I climbed over the guard rail and into the opposing lane of traffic. Thank God for my strong lungs, I shouted at a cab and he stopped and took me to the theater by a roundabout route. I started out an hour early and wound up getting there just in time.”

Richard Rodgers threw his back out and was hospitalized just before the 1945 premiere of his creation, Carousel, at the Majestic. “I was taken to the theater in an ambulance and laid on a stretcher behind a curtain,” he said later. “I was so drugged with morphine that I couldn’t hear the applause, so I was convinced that the show was a failure.” Some failure!

And speaking of Rodgers, airplane problems almost ended the 2001 national tour of his The Sound of Music. Thirteen-year-old Michaela Alyse Tomcho, who played Louisa, says: “All the flights to Baton Rouge were delayed because of very bad storms. Our company manager warned us that we might be ending the tour right there in the airport. The airline personnel asked people if they would give up their seats to allow us to get to our destination. We finally arrived just before rehearsal time, and the show went on. What a scare!”

Another creative giant, Frank Loesser, hated to see his own shows because he felt powerless sitting in the audience. So he always delayed leaving his home to go to the theater, fidgeting and smoking cigarettes. When he arrived at the opening of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying in 1962 he sat nervously through one scene and when he thought he saw the scenery sway slightly he got upset. He turned to his wife, Jo Sullivan Loesser, and snarled “That’s it” and went to spend the next two hours drinking Scotches at a bar next door. How to… of course went on to win Loesser another Best Musical Tony Award.

Theater professionals still talk about Cynthia Nixon’s mad dash between two plays in 1988. Nixon, founding member of The Drama Dept. and co-star of TV’s “Sex and the City,” got a small role in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing, then was invited by Mike Nichols to be in Hurlyburly. Nichols and Nixon saw an interesting challenge. Her character in the Stoppard play appeared only in Act 2, and her part in Hurlyburly was only in Acts 1 and 3. So why not run back and forth between the two theaters — even though one was on 45th Street and the other was uptown at Broadway and 76th? She could commute by subway between the two. The producers of both plays thought it would be a great stunt; for Nixon, it was no big deal. “It was just like playing different roles in a production of one-acts,” she recalls. “When Hurlyburly moved to the Barrymore, just two blocks away from The Real Thing at the Plymouth, I was able to walk between the two.” She never missed an entrance in either.

Katharine Hepburn berated a cast member who arrived late for a performance of Coco in 1970. The poor girl’s car broke down in the middle of the George Washington bridge, but Miss Hepburn was unsympathetic. “You should have taken the subway!” she barked.

Alix Korey had an adventure when The Wild Party announced its closing at Manhattan Theatre Club and left Korey available, so she agreed to star in the annual Cabaret Convention at Town Hall which was to take place one week after the Wild Party closing. Then The Wild Party extended for a week, so its final performance coincided with Korey’s cabaret gig. “I couldn’t bear to miss our last show because we were such a tight company, and I was obligated to appear at the cabaret event, so I arranged with the director of Wild Party to slip into the shadows and leave the stage at the City Center on 55th Street, change costumes and wigs and get a cab to Town Hall on 44th Street just in time for my number. Because Cabaret Convention pays nothing, I bought the cheapest wig I could find — $15 at a drug store. After my cabaret song, I ran out into the street and caught a cab that Bobby Short was just getting out of. Back to City Center, back into my other wig and outfit and back onstage for the last two scenes of Wild Party.”

When Sherman Frank was conducting the 1976 Tony Award-winning A Chorus Line, his car stopped dead as he was driving in from the suburbs. He left the car on the road and tried to hail a cab. None would stop. So he stood in front of one and commandeered it. “I said to the elderly passenger that I’d pay to have the cab take her wherever she wanted to go, but I had to make a curtain. She was scared to death — thought I was a maniac — but she let me get in, and I made it in time.”

When Danny Kaye starred in Two by Two in 1963 he annoyed other cast members by mugging and going off-script. Some people laughed at Kaye’s antics but the youngest cast member, Walter Willison, wasn’t amused and showed it. Kaye, in turn, became hostile towards Willison. Tension escalated when Kaye was not nominated in the Tony Awards’ Leading Actor category while Willison was nominated for Best Supporting Actor. The night after the nominations were announced, Willison’s taxi got caught in the St. Patrick’s Day parade and he arrived nine minutes late for his half-hour call. That gave Kaye all the excuse he needed and he insisted that Willison not be allowed to go on that night.

It was the only time Willison ever missed a show, but there was one other time that he had a close call. Making a one-night stand in a Pennsylvania town, Willison had trouble finding the theater’s stage door. He tried coming in through the lobby but the ticket-taker wouldn’t let him in, even when Willison said that he was in the cast. Looking again in the back alley, Walter finally found an unlocked metal door and entered, only to find that he was under the stage, with access to the orchestra pit but not to the dressing rooms or the wings. So, with audience members already filing into the house, Willison had to go through the pit and then climb out over the instruments and stand up on a chair to step up from it and into the front row. There he shook hands with ticket-holders and said, “Excuse me, please, while I go up on stage.”

Something similar happened to Betty Comden and Adolph Green when they were appearing in one of that strip of theaters on 46th Street –– “you know, they all look alike,” said Green. They entered through one of the stage doors, walked out onto the stage and discovered they were in the wrong theater.

Judy Kaye was understudy to Madeline Kahn in On the Twentieth Century in 1978 and ran so many errands one afternoon that she wound up getting to the theater only ten minutes before curtain. “No one had cell phones or pagers then, and no one reached me to say that Madeline had phoned in sick.” The train almost had pulled out of the station without her. But then she filled in for the ailing Kahn three more times that week, and a month later she took over the role. “That was the real start of my career,” she says.

In 2003, Norbert Leo Butz added a final story to our catalog of adventures. “I was coming from New Jersey to do a matinee of The Last Five Years, the two-character musical by Jason Robert Brown. I had to relieve myself but I was caught in terrible traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel, so as soon as I got to the Manhattan side of the tunnel I pulled into an abandoned parking lot. Just at my moment of release a policeman showed up and slapped me with a $75 summons for indecent exposure. So I missed my show because I was caught with my pants down, literally.”

This would make an even better story if it happened when he was going to perform in Urinetown.
 
 

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