A Trip to the Library

Though the main event of any trip to the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Connecticut is, of course, whatever musical that the august company puts on its stage, there is a side benefit for those who drive up the road a piece: An unassuming little building on the right proves that big things come in small packages.

It’s the Scherer Library of Musical Theatre at Goodspeed and it’s a real treat for those of us who care about this art form. Up the far aisle, you’ll find magazines from Theater Week to Theatre Arts. How I enjoyed
rummaging through nine years of the former to revisit articles by me and others, though that rush was eclipsed by perusing the latter publication to see if I could find
an item for which I’ve been searching for decades. Theatre Arts used to publish a complete play or musical in each issue. While I have the ones with West Side Story, The Most Happy Fella, Little Mary Sunshine, and — I swear it — My Darlin’ Aida, I was missing the one that contained Once Upon a
Mattress. I didn’t even know the date of the issue, but there it was: July, 1960, with a red, white, and blue cover that featured the Broadway production of The Best Man.

I sauntered over to the aisle where CDs are located. To be frank, I was interested in seeing what the library has that I don’t. There’s Cry for Us All, the next Mitch Leigh musical to reach Broadway after Man of La Mancha. No, it’s never been commercially released. But I suspect this copy came from Leigh himself and isn’t just something that a fan burned in a basement for, on the
photocopied black-and-white cover, it says that the show is on the “Man of La Mancha label.”

There’s the unreleased original cast album of The Capeman and also Captive, which is described as “the Off-Off-Broadway musical about Mary Jamieson.” (I applaud the powers-that-be behind Captive for saying “Off-Off” because plenty of shows that have actually played Off-Off have aggrandized themselves as having played Off-Broadway. I admire truth in advertising.)

There’s the Paper Mill cast album of Children of Eden but not the original London cast album — though perhaps it wouldn’t matter if they did have it. (I’m told that all copies had a defect which, over the years, eroded the music off the disc. Anybody know if this is true or false? I know that mine doesn’t work anymore.) There are albums with which I just haven’t yet caught up, such as the Los Angeles cast of Reefer Madness and Pinafore, the gay version of H.M.S. Pinafore. There are demos from shows I’ve never heard of (such as Joe, which was recorded by Brian D’Arcy James and Kristin Chenoweth) and some that I have encountered (such as Dracula, dated July 2002, probably Wildhorn’s.) There’s Fanny Hill, with a note on the back from Goodspeed executive director Michael Price: “Few shows have had as great an effect on their audiences as Fanny Hill when we presented it in 1999.” I’d like to think that, after such a reception, it might get a second chance.

Next to the CDs are cassettes: one of the notorious Carrie; two demos from Kean, the 1961 musical with the heavenly Wright-and-Forrest score; and three of Grover’s Corners, the Harvey Schmidt-Tom Jones musical version of Our Town. (That last named show should have had a life but it didn’t get on in the time allotted by the Wilder family and is now presumably lost to future audiences. At least there’s a recording of it to be found at Goodspeed.)

Over to the aisle where the musical scripts are kept. So, that’s what the dust jacket for One Touch of Venus looks like: white, with each letter of the title in a different color from the one before it. My copy, alas, lost its jacket long before I found it in a used bookshop. There’s a Fireside Edition of Olympus on My Mind (how sad that this company no longer exists to provide us with such items); a Samuel French actor’s edition of Trixie True, Teen Detective, a 1980 musical that was damned good; and a manuscript for Subways are for Sleeping that I sure could have used when I wrote the notes for the cast album’s CD reissue.

There are programs (even from the New Haven tryout of Copper and Brass, the 1957 Nancy Walker flop), flyers (e.g., one from the On Your Toes revival in London), and even a box that’s marked “Assorted Marketing Tchotckes” in which, I’m sure, will someday be stored the old-fashioned View Master with seven scenes of Wonderful Town that the management of the current revival just sent to Tony voters.

Turn the corner and there are tons of sheet music, including more than 30,000 titles that the NBC Department of Music Services donated. You can take home a souvenir, for sheet music can be copied for 25 cents a page. Those who can’t get to the library can mail-order, and there are plenty of requests. “Do you have the score for Smith?” asked one potential customer, referring to a short-lived 1973 Broadway musical. Says Will Rhys, who doubles as the theater’s education director and its librarian, “I’m always being asked, ‘Do you have the score for such-and-such?'”

The Scherer is not a lending library but a research one; peruse to your heart’s content but don’t expect to take anything home, other than those copies of sheet music. There is a way to hear most every recording on hand for the place has a turntable, a CD player, and a cassette player. Says Rhys, “What we don’t have is an 8-track tape player, though we do have some 8-track tapes.” If you have such a player and care to donate it, or if you just care to surf through all these treasures, make an appointment by calling Rhys at 860-873-8664, ext. 373.

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