Seth's Broadway Diary, Volume 1: Part 2 (26 page)

On Wednesday, I saw
All My Sons
, which, more than once, I've called
My Three Sons
by accident. I think John Lithgow is a great actor, and it was great to see him giving a sassy dramatic turn — even though he busted me the first time I met him. Kelli O'Hara got him to be a guest on my
Chatterbox
and I introduced him as John Lithgow, pronouncing it like "ow." He came onstage and told me it was Lithgow, like "oh." I immediately told him that the "w" at the end of his name should make it "ow," and he asked me how I pronounced "rainbow." Busted! I've been a fan of Patrick Wilson, who plays his son, since we first worked together on Barry Manilow's
Harmony
in the summer of 1997. I was disappointed that there was no singing in
All My Sons
. I'm always frustrated when a great musical performer does a straight acting gig. (Still annoyed about Barbra's stint in
Nuts
. Where was the belted theme song?)

I was
thrilled
at my
Chatterbox
this week because I got to interview old-school Broadway beltress Karen Morrow. She grew up in Des Moines and both of her parents were opera singers. When she was three, her parents had a party, put her on the piano bench, and she sang "God Bless America" with pretty much the same voice as Kate Smith. Even though she knew she could sing, she didn't know much about Broadway, so she decided to major in Economics. Then she heard Susan Johnson’s "Ooh, My Feet" from
The Most Happy Fella
and heard how similar their voices were and Karen realized she could do Broadway.
I
grew up obsessed with Susan Johnson and
The Most Happy Fella
. I have a tape of myself singing "Ooh, My Feet" when I was three years old, and it then became my audition song when I was 12
.
I put up a video on my website. Take a gander!
Karen got to work with Susan many years later in
Follies
and said that she was so thrilled and moved that she cried every day. Susan told Karen that for the opening night of
The Most Happy Fella
, Frank Loesser gave her an amethyst tiepin (the lead character, Tony, gives a waitress an amethyst tiepin instead of a tip in the first scene of the show). For the opening of
Follies
, Susan gave Karen the tiepin Frank had given her!

At the end of college, the famous choreographer Eugene Loring came to her school with his troupe of dancers. He heard Karen perform and told her that she had what it took to make it. He convinced her to move to L.A. and promised her that she could perform with his troupe as the lead singer. She got the okay from her parents and moved to the West Coast. She showed up at Eugene Loring's studio and… he didn't remember her!
Devastating
! She then hightailed it to New York. As opposed to Betty Buckley, who got a great part in
1776
within hours of arriving in New York, Karen arrived in Manhattan, went in to audition for
Subways Are for Sleeping
… and got typed out. That's when they stand you in a line and the auditioner points and says, "You, you and you stay. Everyone else, thank you very much." She got an appointment with an agent and as soon as she walked in, he asked her the existential question, "So… who are you?" Karen was dumbstruck. The agent shook his head and said, "From day one, Doris Day knew who she was." But then a friend got her another agent audition and she went in and
wasn't
asked a moronic Jean-Paul Sartre question. Instead, she sang. After her first song, the auditioner got on the phone. Rude? Hardly. He said into the receiver, "Honey, listen to this," held up the phone and had Karen sing again. Turns out, his wife was his partner, and they both signed her.

Her first big audition was as a last-minute replacement for Jo Anne Worley in the Off-Broadway show
Sing Muse
. She got hired on the spot (!) and as she left, she mentioned she was hopping on the subway. The producer stopped her and said, "Subway? Take a cab… you're gonna be a star!" He then handed her five dollars. In those days, that could have paid for a cab ride back to Des Moines. After that, she did the national tour of
The Unsinkable Molly Brown
as the standby for Tammy Grimes. She got to take over the role but didn't know how to handle doing a lead eight times a week. She thought she was supposed to go out with the cast after the show every night and par-tay. Suffice it to say, after a month of the show, her voice had the timbre of a young Joe Cocker.

After she toured, she got her voice back and decided she wanted to be thinner, so she went to a doctor to help her lose weight. She later found out that the weight loss potion he was injecting her with was speed! I guess "doctor" in the ‘60s was code for "pusher." Regardless, she loved her new bod and auditioned for Richard Rodgers for a revival of
The Boys From Syracuse
. He said, "I would love for you to do this role… but you're just too thin!" That's a statement that has ne'er been said to me. She still wound up getting the gig, and they had to pad her to give her some girth.

I asked her about shows she didn't get and she remembered being at the final callback for
110 in the Shade
. She was sitting backstage with Gretchen Wyler… and suddenly, in walked tall, beautiful Inga Swenson with no makeup on and a long, flowing braid. They knew they were sunk. I never realized that my main competition at auditions was the person with no make-up and the long braid. That must be why I keep losing all my gigs to Willie Nelson.

Karen had two auditions in the mid-‘60s. One was for a show that there was a
ton
of buzz for, and the other one had very little advance chatter. Karen decided that the one with all the talk had nowhere to go but down, and the one no one talked about had nowhere to go but up. And that's how she wound up taking
I Had a Ball
, which gave her a signature song and a brilliant
Ed Sullivan Show
performance on film forever. The show she decided against was
Kelly
, which wound up running for 1 (one!) day! If you've not seen her brilliant rendition of the
I Had A Ball
title song on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, you must go to my website and watch the whole thing. It's the epitome of a great Broadway performance. FYI, her waist looks like it's 16 inches, yet her agent at William Morris said she was too heavy. Who was her agent? Lara Flynn Boyle? Right now, Karen lives in L.A. and teaches a wonderful musical theatre performance class. Go to her website and watch the videos
and
listen to the belting (
KarenMorrow.com
)!

On Friday night, I hightailed it to Cipriani on 42nd Street, which is a gorgeous, cavernous event room that used to be the Bowery Savings Bank. Andrea Martin asked me to help out at a benefit for the Children of Armenia Fund (
COAFkids.org
). Andrea was the host and told the audience, "I know we're going through some hard economic times, but let's forget about that tonight. And what better way to forget hard economic times than by having dinner in an abandoned bank!" Brava. The multi-talented Bill Irwin performed one of his baggy pants clown acts and Andrea opened the show with "Come on-a My House," which was originally sung by Rosemary Clooney
but
was written by two Armenians! I told Andrea that we needed a big finale to end the evening and I would be in charge of finding someone. Well, of course, just like how I did my AP English papers, I waited 'til the last minute. I emailed the fabulous Mary Bond Davis (the original Motormouth Maybelle from
Hairspray
) and spoke to her around 3 PM that afternoon. She showed up a few hours later, totally decked out, and brought the house down with Amanda McBroom's "The Dieter's Prayer" (i.e. "Lord, let me think… that tofu's a food. And not something you made up… while in a bad mood").

Tonight, I'm hosting a salon for BC/EFA. Essentially, people pay money to come to a beautiful apartment on Central Park South to eat up a storm, mingle with celebs, and watch them perform in the living room. Fun! Andrea McArdle, Chris Noth, Anthony Rapp, Bebe Neuwirth and
more
are coming! I'm, of course, obsessing about the delicious food and how I can surreptitiously do all my hosting from the buffet area.

One Day More

November 3, 2008

Finally! The election is here. It's been so much stress for so long, I can't take it! Didn't the campaigns start years ago? The lead up to this election has been longer than the endless mega-mix I had to endure at an ill-advised matinee of
Saturday Night Fever
years ago.

Okay, let me take my mind off it by talking about Broadway! This has been a busy week. I took a job as a comedy writer on the
new
Rosie O'Donnell variety show and I've been doing a reading at the same time. First the TV show: I just started, so I can't tell ya much, except that it's gonna have some fabulous guests. I was a comedy writer on the first
Rosie O'Donnell Show
, and this one has the same people I worked with ten years ago. I dreaded walking in and having everybody clandestinely count wrinkles and multiply them by my hairline (the equation for "Yowtch! You've aged."), but I was pleasantly surprised when everyone commented about how I must be working out because my chest is so big. Hopefully, I'll be sitting behind a desk for the rest of the gig or else people will start to notice that my waist gained the same amount of inches that my chest did, and not in muscle. I'm also doing a reading of
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
based on the Shirley Temple movie. Yes, I'm a little long in the tooth for the role of Rebecca, but what I lack in youthful glow, I make up for in lethargy and a bad knee. Actually, there's a little girl playing Rebecca, and she's adorable. The rest of the cast is great, too. The character actor Marc Kudisch is playing a Rooster Hannigan-type, and sassy Tony winner Cady Huffman is his moll. Brooks Ashmanskas plays a shy radio engineer, and when we saw each other, we immediately started reminiscing about
The Ritz
. I was about to launch into a story about some of the inappropriate backstage behavior that the near-naked
Ritz
boys pulled when I realized that I was surrounded by a group of little, underage girls in the ensemble. I put the kibosh on my story, deciding that they don't yet need to learn what Quell is used for.

If you don't know what a reading is, it's when a play is read (and sung) by actors to give the creative team and producers insight into what's working and what's not. There's no staging — you just sit in front of a music stand and work off the script. There's a union term for it: a 29-hour reading. That means that you can use the actors for 29 hours in a week and pay them $100 each. I was talking to one of my fellow actors, who has done a ton of these types of readings, and he said that actors always jokingly complain about only getting $100, but recently he did a reading with producers who didn't use the actors for the full 29 hours (but it was very close), and therefore paid them
nothing
! How cheap is that? And who were the producers? The Ropers?

The book for
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
was adapted by Daniel Goldfarb (
Modern Orthodox
), the lyrics are by Susan Birkenhead (
Jelly's Last Jam
), and Henry Krieger (
Dreamgirls
) wrote the music. I was hoping to get a big
Dreamgirls
-type ballad to bring the house down with, but then realized that it takes place in the ‘30s, so I wouldn't be "Steppin' to the Bad Side." However, I soon had to accept that not only would I not have the 11 o'clock number, but I wouldn't have
any
number. I will instead try to bring the house down with my baritone harmony parts in two group numbers. The best part is that my friend Christopher Gattelli is the director. We started working together on the opening number of the 1998 Easter Bonnet competition, and we've done seven numbers since then. I'm so proud of him for getting a Tony nomination this year for
South Pacific
.
He finally won a few years later for NEWSIES!

Last Monday night, I hosted the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS salon. This is the one where every ten minutes, some celeb gets up and sings. Well, almost everybody sang. Chris Noth got up and chatted to the crowd… and was fun-nee. He introduced Ron Pobuda, who donated the gorgeous apartment, by saying, "Ron, like David Duchovny, just went to rehab for sexual addiction." He then said that Ron didn't finish his time because he wanted to keep his wild sex life. I found it hilarious… and so did the many ten-year-olds from the
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm
reading who were there. Just kidding, they were all home, probably reading
Twilight
. The other non-singing guests were the cute David Steen and TV legend Rue McClanahan. I interviewed them and they talked about their current TV show, LOGO's
Sordid Lives
, where David plays a man with no legs and Rue plays his lover. They told us that the love scene they recently filmed that a) broke the bed they were on, and b) was boycotted from LOGO because it was too graphic. Seriously. I then said, since we're talking about sexy, what's up with Bea Arthur? Rue said that they're still in touch and speak all the time, which I loved hearing because it's nice to know that the friendship on
Golden Girls
was real.