My Rhapsody Over Seth

Every musical theater enthusiast must — absolutely must — see Seth Rudetsky’s Rhapsody in Seth. Not because it’s a terrific one-person show, though it is. Not because Rudetsky is an engaging performer, though he is. But if you’ve followed musical theater since your youth, or if you’re following it now in your youth, you’ll ever-so relate to what he says in his theatrical memoir.

You don’t have to have grown up on Long Island, as Rudetsky did. You don’t have to be gay, as Rudetsky is. All you have to have is a passion for musicals, as Rudetsky always has had and always will. He’ll take you for a nice stroll down Memory Lane — which, for us, is at the junction of Avenue Q, Sunset Boulevard, and 42nd Street).

Many of Seth’s stories triggered remembrances of musical things past for me. When he talked about hoping that Liza Minnelli would show up unannounced at one of his high school performances, I recalled that Thursday in August 1962, the day after I’d seen the heavenly Tammy Grimes in the road company of The Unsinkable Molly Brown at the Shubert in Boston. Okay, I thought: It was a Thursday afternoon, so Grimes wasn’t performing right then. Given that she came from the Boston area, who knows, maybe she had friends in my hometown of Arlington — and maybe if I played the show’s original album loud enough and kept the windows open (it was gonna be another hot day, anyway), she’d hear herself coming from my bedroom window as she drove by my street, tell the chauffeur to stop the car, ring the doorbell, and pay a call. I don’t need to tell you that this didn’t happen any more than Minnelli dropped in on Rudetsky.

When Seth referred to his LP of Annie as “The Red Album” because of its cover, I laughed — not only because he was making an obvious allusion to the Beatles’ White Album but also because he reminded me of what I felt like when I was listening to a different kind of music from my friends. Suddenly, I was back in February 1965, when the TV remake of Cinderella was broadcast. Sure, the soundtrack of the 1957 version with Julie Andrews had been available for years, but I hadn’t yet bought it or heard it at that point. So watching the Lesley Ann Warren version was my first exposure to this Rodgers and Hammerstein score — which, I immediately realized, compared very well to their Big Five Hits.

After the broadcast, I knew that Lechmere Sales, where I bought all my records, would be open for another half-hour, so I begged my father for the car. Soon I was screeching through the streets of Arlington, then Cambridge, in hopes that the new soundtrack album would be there. Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles, it was! I rushed home, appreciating the green lights that would get me home sooner, savoring the reds that allowed me to turn on the inside car light and read the back of the record album. When I got home and listened, as much as I adored the score, it was the instrumental “Gavotte” that truly entranced me. I would sit by the record player, pick up the needle immediately after the song had finished, and put it back down at the beginning of the cut. (This is what we had to do in those days before CDs and “repeat” buttons.) During the 50th or 60th listening, a thought suddenly occurred to me: All my other friends were at the time talking about how much they loved “Heart of Stone” by the Rolling Stones and here I was listening to a gavotte. One from Cinderella, yet! (I felt much the same a few weeks later when I bought Goldilocks, which contained a song called “The Pussyfoot.”)

When Seth mocked himself for believing that he was “a know-it-all show business vet” at a young age, I remembered an exchange with my father that took place in September 1965. We were driving in downtown Boston when the radio suddenly gave forth with Robert Goulet’s excellent recording of the title song of “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.” My father knew I’d bought a ticket to see the show and proclaimed, “That song’s good. That show’s gonna be a hit!” I grumbled in my know-it-all voice, “It takes more than one song to make a show a hit.” Some years would pass before I realized how terrible I’d been to this guy who didn’t care a whit for musicals but was reaching out to me. Even now, whenever I drive up that ramp at North Station near the Boston Garden, I always remember the exact spot where this happened and still feel bad about it.

I couldn’t expect that each of Seth’s memories would spur pleasant ones from me. When he talked about being bullied by tough kids (you know the kind — the ones who don’t know The Man Who Came to Dinner from The Girl Who Came to Supper), I remembered Eddie Considine, who was a foot taller than I but the same weight — though his, of course, was muscle, while mine was decidedly not. Eddie made me feel pusillanimity to the core of my soul, and he knew it. While he never did quite get around to beating me to a pulp, he did savor the smell of fear that oozed out of me. I worked hard in trying to eliminate it and really thought I was getting him to come around to thinking I was okay. Then, one day, after I’d taken an original cast album out of the Robbins Library, I was on my way home and I ran into Eddie, who immediately snarled, “Hey, Filichia, whatcha got there?” with contempt in his voice as he took from my hands the copy of Little Mary Sunshine that I’d just borrowed. This, I knew, was a real setback in my relationship with Eddie. (It would turn out to be worse than I thought. You know how Mike in A Chorus Line says, “One little fart and they called me Stinky for three years”? One little library-borrow, and I was “Little Mary Sunshine” for just as long. He might still be calling me that had we both not been graduated and left town.)

Anyway, I hope Rhapsody in Seth runs now and forever, and that you will see it and reminisce as I did. Oh, how I would love to be at the performance Seth is doing tonight as a benefit for the Hetrick-Martin Institute’s Harvey Milk School for Gay, Lesbian, Transgender, and Questioning Youth’s 2003 graduating class. They will profit from seeing, as the press release so wittily calls the show, “the story of a young man’s journey from humble beginnings as a showtune-belting adolescent in Nassau County, Long Island to cosmopolitan musical director and raconteur to Broadway’s most delectable divas.” That last phrase is a reference to Seth’s weekly Chatterbox show where he interviews the rich and famous, which Seth himself is rapidly becoming. Rosie O’Donnell will be on hand to say hello to the kids after the show, so it should be a real event. I’ll bet the grads’ memories of this night will last a lifetime, just like the memories that Seth and I have from decades of loving musicals.

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