On top of sharing a clip from the first rehearsal, Bareilles expressed regret thatcast member Nick Cordero, who passed away due to COVID early in the pandemic, couldn’t be there to join them.
A new theatre opens on Broadway August 10 with a show that kept a couple of old ones alive for quite a while on the other side of the Atlantic.
When the lights go up at the dazzling new Marriott Marquis Theatre, they will blaze onto Me and My Girl, a chirpy cockney musical that became a landmark in London before and during WWII and then returned there after a 35-year hiatus to an equally triumphant reception. This second coming was crowned by a coveted Olivier Award (the equivalent of a Tony) for the young English actor Robert Lindsay, who now heads the otherwise all-American cast featuring Maryann Plunkett and George S. Irving at the Marquis.
At the heart of this nostalgic singalong is one very simple idea, which dates back to 1936 when Lupino Lane (a British singing comedian along the lines of Lindsay, Jim Dale and Michael Crawford) suggested to the composer Noel Gay that there might be a show to be written about a poor young South London lad who suddenly finds himself heir to a fortune and has, therefore, to learn all about life among the upper classes.
Already it was, of course, a kind of reversed Pygmalion, but 30 years before My Fair Lady the idea had never been set to music. When it opened in 1937, the show got off to a slow start. But one night early in the run BBC radio had to cancel a broadcast and decided instead to relay some of Me and My Girl live from the Victoria Palace Theatre. It was the first time the West End had ever been broadcast, and when radio listeners at home heard Lupino Lane doing “The Lambeth Walk” to cheers of delight from stalls and gallery alike, they decided they had to visit the theatre too. As a result Me and My Girl ran for the next five years, despite being bombed out of two theatres early in the war, and “The Lambeth Walk” became everything from a Coronation anthem in 1937 (it was the year George VI inherited the crown from his abdicating brother Edward VIII) to a military marching song in 1940.
The real success of Me and My Girl has always had to do with its immediacy and its accessibility. Like Broadway’s George M. Cohan, Noel Gay wrote the kind of songs that ordinary theatregoers not only sang in their baths but probably also thought they could write in their baths: sunny, optimistic, patriotic numbers that seldom taxed either brain or pen. Indeed, Gay’s most quintessential and popular song has a chorus of only seven words, of which only two are different and only one has more than one syllable: “Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run, run, run.”
But like most of Cohan’s work, Gay’s Me and My Girl also seemed to disappear into oblivion when the curtain rang down on its final performance in the early ’40s. London, like Broadway, had moved on to other things (the year Me and My Girl closed was the year Oklahoma! opened) and no one was giving odds on ever again seeing another professional production of Gay’s mega-hit.
No one, that is, except Gay’s son Richard Armitage, a distinguished theatre and music agent in London. Armitage decided that if the book were somewhat rewritten and if some of the best of Gay’s songs from other shows could be added to the score, then Me and My Girl could perhaps be brought back to an increasingly nostalgic West End.
But that still left a central casting problem. The “Me” of Me and My Girl is a cockney wide-boy, Bill Snibson, who learns that he is by birth an aristocrat and is then pressured by his newly-discovered relations to become upper class and forget his Lambeth sweetheart, the Sally who is “My Girl.” The twist on the old Pygmalion plot that became My Fair Lady is that in this case both Bill and Sally get two-way tickets into the aristocracy, so that they can always go back to the wrong side of the tracks afterwards. Whether or not the show works depends on the playing of Snibson. It’s one of those roles a young Danny Kaye might have coveted, since on the printed page only about half of it really exists: all the rest is business and charisma and a talent for pratfalls, and to find a Lupino Lane around London now would be like setting out to find George M. Cohan having a pre-theatre drink in Sardi’s.
Brilliantly, Armitage as the producer and Mike Ockrent his director, therefore, went right to the other end of the stage spectrum, and to an actor who had made an altogether different reputation in the classical theatre (a notable Hamlet at the Royal Exchange and Edmund in Olivier’s last King Lear and Benedick in a recent BBC television Much Ado About Nothing) and in several domestic dramas and situation comedies on the small screen. Robert Lindsay had, however, started out in musicals, playing small roles alongside David Essex in the rock film That’ll Be The Day and the original London stage Godspell, and remembering this, the management offered him the role in Me and My Girl that he now re-creates on Broadway. “The funny thing is,” said Lindsay recently, “that I originally turned this down two or three times. It seemed very out of date as a script, and I just couldn’t see it working for the 1980s. But then they persuaded me to take a tape of the music away with me on holiday, and when I played ‘The Sun Has Got His Hat On’ and ‘Leaning On a Lamppost’ and ‘Love Makes The World Go Round,’ I thought this really is a lot of fun. Then again, I had terrible doubts when they first asked me to come to Broadway with it because the whole thing seemed so terribly English and London-based, so I said no again, and it wasn’t until they pointed out to me that half the audiences we played to in the West End last summer were in fact American tourists that I realized maybe Americans were understanding it after all.”
One might add that Broadway has a long tradition of cockney musicals, going back through Half a Sixpence and Oliver! and Stop the World to My Fair Lady itself, which was a Broadway creation despite its Covent Garden setting. One might also add that not since Jim Dale and (in London) Michael Crawford first took to the stage as Barnum has there been a musical performance of such manic energy as that now given by Mr. Lindsay here. As Michael Coveney noted in the Financial Times, “like all great performers, he has the knack of making you feel utterly secure even while he is involved in the most complicated stage activity, shimmying and dodging like a boxer or emitting vegetable-stall cries in the midst of quite normal conversations. He is both stylish and engaging, not all that common a pairing of qualities, but one that indicates a star.”
“I think I really agreed to Me and My Girl,” continues Lindsay, “because of my father. He had been a trade union man all his life and it was just at the time of the miners’ dispute, and everything and everyone in Nottinghamshire, where he lives, was very gloomy, and Dad said, ‘That’s it, that’ll cheer them up, just do it,’ and he was right. But it was only when I began meeting the American tourists who gave us standing ovations every night last summer in London that I realized what was really happening here. This was the England they had come all the way over to see, and they found that in real life it just didn’t exist any more. But then at the Adelphi Theatre they discovered aristocrats with tennis racquets on country lawns and a little man in a funny pork-pie hat saying ‘Wotcher, me old China,’ and they loved it.”
And no wonder. Me and My Girl is a celebration of the English at their most characteristically mindless. But for sheer musical charm and comic invention it may prove hard to beat on Broadway. As for Robert Lindsay, he embodies a leggy, all-singing, all-dancing musical comedy talent of a kind rarely seen since the days of the great Ray Bolger himself.
Set in South Harlem, amidst a vibrant and eclectic community of West African immigrants, MERRY WIVES is a New York story about tricks of the heart, performed in the heart of the City-Central Park’s magical Delacorte Theater.
Browse restaurants by food type, ranging from American to Asian, French, Italian, Mexican, and much more, find the address, website, and relative price, as well as a brief description of what you can expect.
1975 Liza Minnelli to the rescue! With only six days to learn the role of merry murderess Roxie Hart, the Academy Award-winning stage and film star agrees to fill in for an ailing Gwen Verdon in Chicago. Minnelli stays with the show until mid-September. Always willing to do a friend a favor, Minnelli makes a highly-publicized return to the stage in 1997 as she fills in for a vacationing Julie Andrews in the musical Victor/Victoria.
1989 Shenandoah returns to Broadway for a revival run that proves to be brief. Starring John Cullum as Charlie Anderson, the production of the Civil War-era musical closes September 2 after approximately four weeks of performances.
1998 After arguing for 600 performances about a white-on-white painting, the three characters in Yasmina Reza‘s Tony Award-winning play, Art end their run at Broadway’s Royale Theatre. The comedy, translated from French by Christopher Hampton, begins its national tour September 14 starring Judd Hirsch, who also appeared in the play on Broadway and in London. During the Broadway run, various trios of stars played the roles of three friends that Alan Alda, Victor Garber, and Alfred Molina originated.
2002 Edie Falco and Stanley Tucci open on Broadway in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune at the Belasco Theatre. This marks the Broadway debut for Terrence McNally‘s romance, which played Off-Broadway’s Manhattan Theatre Club in 1987. The production is much in the press due to the presence of screen actors Falco and Tucci and their onstage nudity throughout the opening scene.
2004 Actor Todd Cerveris stars opposite his brother, Tony winner Michael Cerveris, in The Booth Variations, playing the actor brothers Edwin Booth and John Wilkes Booth.
2013 Zachary Levi goes on his First Date with Krysta Rodriguez as Austin Winsberg, Alan Zachary, and Michael Weiner‘s musical opens on Broadway at the Longacre Theatre. The show about a tightly wound guy who is set up with a serial-dating cool girl, runs for 174 performances.
Today’s Birthdays: Esme Percy (1887-1957). Sylvia Sidney (1910-1999). Dustin Hoffman (b. 1937). Connie Stevens (b. 1938). Marcia Lewis (1938-2010). Keith Carradine (b. 1949). Jennifer Simard (b. 1970). Michael Urie (b. 1980). Ryann Redmond (b. 1987).
The London revival of Mary Poppins, based on the P.L. Travers stories and the original Walt Disney film, resumes performances at the Prince Edward Theatre August 7.
The cast is led by Zizi Strallen as Mary Poppins, Charlie Stemp as Bert, Charlie Anson as George Banks, Amy Griffiths as Winifred Banks, Petula Clark as Bird Woman, Liz Robertson as Miss Andrew, Claire Machin as Mrs Brill, Jack North as Robertson Ay, and Paul F. Monaghan as Admiral Boom and Bank Chairman.
Katie Cox, Rose Dawson, Megan Donovan, Megan Judge, Ellie Kit Jones, and Maddison Thew alternate in the role of Jane Banks with Logan Clark, George Hamblin, Charlie Murphy, Frankie Treadaway, and Fred Wilcox alternating in the role of Michael Banks.
The ensemble comprises Yves Adang, Angeline Bell, Lydia Boulton, Alison Connell, Adam Davidson, Danielle Delys, Joseph Dockree, Charlie Donnelly, Stan Doughty, Glen Facey, Davide Fienauri, Harry Francis, Lyndsey Gardiner, Ian Gareth-Jones, Maria Garrett, Mark Goldthorp, Jacqueline Hughes, Emma Hunter, Jason Kajdi, Sam Lathwood, Jordan Livesey, Tania Mathurin, Laura Medforth, Alex Pinder, Ben Redfern, Clare Rickard, Lucie-Mae Sumner, Scott Waugh, and Monique Young.
The stage production is co-created by Cameron Mackintosh and has a book by Oscar-winning screenwriter and Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes. The score by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman includes the film songs “Jolly Holiday,” “Step in Time,” “Feed the Birds,” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” with new songs and additional music and lyrics by the Olivier award-winning team of George Stiles and Anthony Drewe. The producer for Disney Theatrical Productions is Thomas Schumacher.
The musical also has orchestrations by William David Brohn, dance and vocal arrangements by George Stiles, sound design by Paul Gatehouse, lighting by Hugh Vanstone and Natasha Katz, co-choreography by Stephen Mear, reimagined set and costume designs by Bob Crowley, co-direction and choreography by Matthew Bourne, and direction by Richard Eyre.
The stage production of Mary Poppins originally opened in the West End in December 2004, running for over 1,250 performances. The production won two Olivier Awards and an Evening Standard Award and subsequently ran on Broadway for over six years.
(Updated August 7, 2021)
Live entertainment giant,Live Nationwill require proof of vaccination or a negative Covid test for entry to live events and shows held in the United States.
Together Apart, 10 mini-musicals about connecting on Zoom at the beginning of the pandemic—written, directed, and starring Brown University alumni—stream on Broadway on Demand beginning August 6 to benefit The Actors Fund.
Conceived by and featuring Grammy winner Lisa Loeb, the cast also includes Emmy winner Julie Bowen (Modern Family), Emmy winner Josh Hamilton (13 Reasons Why), Ann Harada (Avenue Q), and JoBeth Williams (Kramer vs. Kramer).
Together Apart evolved out of a Brown Musical Theatre class reunion on Zoom held during the pandemic attended by graduates from the early ’80s through the late ’90s. The seven-minute musicals are interspersed with short pieces by Eric Kirchberger, who plays Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Loeb says, “As I sat in the Zoom reunion, listening to everyone talk about their current lives, connecting with friends, and reflecting on all of our vivid musical theatre memories from Brown, I realized that we shouldn’t just talk about what happened in the past, but we should write a Zoom musical about what’s going on, and it should happen all in the world of Zoom. And by sharing our storytelling and our passion and love for theatre, we can work together to provide an outlet for our shared creativity while giving back to this incredible cause.”
The mini-musicals include How Can I Connect?, It’s Okay Mom, The New Normal, Find The Music, Red State/Blue State, Teaching Online, Breathe, Care and Feeding, Family Game Night, and La Dolce Jersey.
Danny Ursetti serves as copyist with post-production video/audio by Kevin Surace. The recording engineer/coordinator is Tye Hunt Fitzgerald, the streaming coordinator is Joe Porter, and the musical director is David Lai.
Together Apart is executive produced by Loeb and produced by Beth Wishnie. It is co-produced by Carl Belfatti, Leslie Buxbaum, Matt Hoverman, Maria Seigenthaler, and The 24 Hour Plays.
Tickets are free of charge with a suggested donation to The Actors Fund. For further information click here.
(Updated August 6, 2021)