Twice as Big as Life

I’ll be at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Thursday, March 24 at 2pm, not for a special matinee of Movin’ Out but for something far more significant: “A Celebration of Jerry Orbach.”

Alas, Orbach’s performances in The Threepenny Opera (1959) and The Fantasticks (1960) were before my theatergoing time, as was his stint in Carnival (1961); I had to settle for Ed Ames’s portrayal of Paul, the bitter puppeteer, on the musical’s national tour in 1962. Then, during the 1964-65 season, I wasn’t in New York for the two months during which Orbach did The Cradle Will Rock or the two weeks when he portrayed Sky Masterson in the City Center Guys and Dolls. I’ll bet he was good in the latter, but I know he was great in the former; the two-record set of The Cradle Will Rock is one of my desert-island discs, partly because of Orbach’s riveting performance as the courageous Larry Foreman.

The first time I ever saw an Orbach performance was in August, 1966 at the National Theatre in Washington. He was playing the supporting role of Charlie Davenport, who convinces Annie Oakley that “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” in Annie Get Your Gun. Of course, Ethel Merman’s return to one of her two most famous roles was what really caught my attention, but I can still see Orbach, stage-right, wearing a cute derby and singing his heart out in the musical theater’s national anthem. I have no doubt that he was living, breathing, and believing every word.

In 1967, I saw Orbach in a preview of Scuba-Duba, the now totally forgotten Bruce Jay Friedman play that was an amazing hit back then. (When it closed in 1969, it was the fifth-longest-running non-musical in Off-Broadway history.) This was an au courant farce about a husband (Orbach) whose wife leaves him for a black man. Orbach showed the requisite outrage as well as a demeanor that earned sympathy from the audience, and he’s pretty much all I remember about the show.

I wasn’t in New York on March 11, 1967, so I missed the opening night (which was also the closing night) of The Natural Look. However dim-witted the comedy, I would have liked to have seen Orbach interact with Gene Hackman and Doris Roberts — not to mention Andreas Voutsinas, who’s Carmen Ghia in the film of The Producers. But I sure didn’t miss Orbach in his next role: Chuck Baxter in Promises, Promises. Up till then, I’d thought of him — even in his role as cuckold — as a street-smart guy. But here, as a junior-junior executive who was too shy with both bosses and women (especially one Fran Kubelik), Orbach was unexpectedly adorable from the second when the curtain went up on him and he said, “The main problem with working as a $112-a-week accountant in a 72-story insurance company with assets of over $3 billion that employs 31,259 people here in the New York office alone is that it makes a person seem so God-awful puny.” Neil Simon’s script often had Orbach breaking through the fourth wall, and the way he did so would have made him a welcome visitor in anyone’s room. Yes, musicals are ideally about big characters; yet Orbach’s sweet demeanor made him not “Half as Big as Life,”
as he claimed in his first song, but twice as big. He made us identify with him in the dear way that he said, “If you’ve noticed, I’m the kind of a person that people don’t notice.”

Untrue! For his performance, Orbach won the Tony as Best Actor in a Musical. As much as I loved him in the part, he should not have won: William Daniels in 1776 should have. But the Tony nominators, following the rule that anyone billed below the title was merely a Featured Actor, put Daniels in that category. In response, Daniels withdrew his name from the race (which he would have easily won) and helped initiate the all-too-slow changing of that strange rule. After all, a lead is a lead is a lead.

The funny thing is, when Orbach was nominated as Best Leading Performer in a Musical for Chicago in the 1976 race, he paid the price for winning in 1969. He was up against Mako in Pacific Overtures, as well as Ian Richardson and George Rose in the first Broadway revival of My Fair Lady. Rose won for playing Alfred P. Doolittle — hardly a leading role, but Rose was billed above the title, so he was deemed a Leading Actor. Believe me, had Orbach lost to Daniels in 1969, he would have won seven years later for his Billy Flynn.

My heart broke 21 years later when James Naughton won for the same role, because he portrayed Flynn as a caricature with a side-of-his-mouth delivery. When Orbach’s said, “Believe me, if Jesus Christ had lived in Chicago today, and if he had had $5,000 and had come to me, things would have turned out differently,” you could tell that his Billy Flynn believed that to the core of his soul — which was much funnier than hearing the line delivered as a wisecrack. Even Orbach’s performance in the boulevard comedy 6 Rms Riv Vu in 1972 showed that he played all of his roles with honesty, knowing that the best comedy is true comedy.

Orbach did one more Broadway show: He was there on the immediately legendary night of August 25, 1980, when 42nd Street opened to cheers and then David Merrick came on and announced that Gower Champion was dead. It was Orbach who assumed leadership of the company and demanded that the curtain be brought down. Little did we know that his performance in the long-running show would be his final Broadway venture, but he certainly went out with a winner — and he got to say that wonderful, very true line about the two most glorious words in the English language being “musical comedy.”

Orbach himself was glorious, as I learned one day in June 2002. The New Jersey Shakespeare Festival had just opened a production of Carnival in which the director had decided that, instead of having Paul manipulate puppets, she’d have real people portray them. In my review, I not only mentioned that this made the “puppets” look gargantuan and grotesque but that it also deprived the actor playing Paul of the opportunity to provide all of the puppets’ voices, as Orbach had done.

The next day, my editor told me that she’d received a phone call from a reader who said that Orbach hadn’t done all the voices in the original production. I told her that, when I got home that night, I’d check my original cast album and see if this was true. As it turned out, I didn’t have to, for while walking north on Eighth Avenue, I saw Jerry Orbach walking south. “Excuse me…,” I said meekly. Orbach immediately gave me a big smile and came over to me. I’ve since told this story to hundreds of friends and acquaintances, and many have said, “Look, he was glad that you were asking him about a Broadway show instead of Law & Order.” I always rebut, “No; at that point, he had no idea what I was going to ask. It could have been, ‘Hey, what’s Benjamin Bratt really like?’ ” Orbach gave me the impression that whatever I had to say, he’d give me his full attention and do his best to respond. What’s more, he made eye contact with me throughout. Trust me: I’ve been in plenty of situations where I’ve asked a question of a celebrity who has looked away from me and down the street, as if to say, “I’ll sure be glad when this is over.” But Orbach gave me a smile all the way through and said that he did voice all of the puppets in Carnival — except, of course, in “Beautiful Candy,” where Pierre Olaf provided the necessary harmony. Needless to say, I’ll remember this forever, as I will all of the wonderful performances that I saw Jerry Orbach give.

********************

[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@theatermania.com]