How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Remember how, when you returned to school each September, your English teacher made you write a composition on “What I Did During My Summer Vacation?” Well, lo these many, many years later, I’m still in the habit. So here’s some of what I did between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

On Broadway, I saw Big River and Avenue Q, and revisited Cabaret. As for Big River: When this show was first done, it was the best of a sorry season — so sorry that the Best Actor in a Musical category had to be omitted for a lack of real candidates. Too bad, for Daniel Jenkins was wonderful as Huck Finn and probably would have won if he’d had the chance. (Instead, he had to settle for a Best Featured Actor nomination — and he lost the award to co-star Ron Richardson.) Jenkins is still a terrific Huck, though he only now provides the voice for deaf actor Tyrone Giordano. But, as you’ve heard, he also doubles as Mark Twain. Isn’t that enough to make him eligible this season for a Tony as Best Actor in a Musical? Wouldn’t it be something if he were finally rewarded 19 years after the fact?

As for Avenue Q: Much has been written on how sensational this show is, and I definitely agree. I could go on about every person you’ve heard commended but, instead, I’m going to applaud the someone — whoever it is — who hasn’t been cited for one terrific detail of the show. At the top of the second act, a pizza box is opened. What’s wonderfully witty is that the cheese from the top of the pizza has stuck to the bottom of the lid (as it always does whenever a pizza is delivered to my house), so that a string of cheese connects the pie to the cardboard. My congrats to whoever it was that noticed and recreated a little thing like that.

As for Cabaret: All performance long, I kept thinking about 50 marks. Not the 50 marks that Clifford Bradshaw offers Fraulein Schneider nor the 50 additional marks that Fraulein Schneider wants from him, but the 50 marks that are on the bodies of the cabaret girls. I think the make-up of scars and welts has been markedly increased since the last time I saw the show.

Speaking of cabaret, I saw Do Re Milla. That’s what Ludmilla Ilieva calls her excellent cabaret act at Dillon’s, which is still running. A ray of golden sun, this doe-eyed entertainer splendidly performs such little-known show songs as “His Own Little Island” and “Shakespeare Lied.” In between, the lovely lady tells us that she’s been engaged five times without quite making it to the altar. But she’s so terrific on stage that she’ll be engaged again, by many a cabaret booker.

I didn’t see as much as I wanted to at the Midtown International Theatre Festival or the Fringe fest, but I did catch about 10 shows. I noticed that, before each performance, we got the speech about turning off cell phones but not the one about unwrapping hard candy. That’s probably because the audience for these festivals is a decidedly youthful one, and youngsters don’t need to moisten their throats mid-performance as old-timers do. I saw Slut again and enjoyed it once more. (I don’t know if I’ll be wearing the button they gave me with the show’s title, but I held onto it, which is more than I can say for John Simon: At intermission, he rued the fact that he’d not only misplaced the one they gave him before the show but also the replacement he was subsequently handed.)

I also saw Thrill Me — well, most of it. The theater in which it played held about 40 people, but it seemed that every one of them called me the next day to say, “I saw you leave with about 10 minutes to go. Did you really hate it that much?” Hardly — but I had to get to Princeton, New Jersey by train to review The Merry Wives of Windsor, so I had no choice. And wouldn’t you know that I was sitting right in front of director Martin Charnin? Thrill Me was a terrifically eerie afternoon in the theater; I was glad to hear from my pals how this story of the Leopold and Loeb story turned out. And didn’t Christopher Totten and Matthew S. Morris give sensational performances?

On a completely different note, I saw Bye Bye Birdie at a community theater in a small Illinois town. The director — I won’t humiliate him by mentioning his name — thought it necessary to lower the curtain after each scene so that we wouldn’t have to watch the set changes. As a result, we all sat there for two, three, or four minutes in the dark until each new scene was set. After a full hour, we were only as far as “One Boy,” so I decided to take my leave. When I reached the sidewalk, I ran into the actress portraying Mae Peterson, who apparently was going to make an entrance from the back of the house. I looked at her guiltily, but she met my gaze evenly and asked “You escaping?” with no judgment at all in her voice.

Summer reading? Well, I didn’t get to East of Eden but I sure saw a peck of people with John Steinbeck’s classic in hand — because, of course, it was a selection of Oprah’s Book Club. I think Oprah should start an Oprah’s Musical Club and urge a revival of the musical version of East of Eden. It was called Here’s Where I Belong and it ran all of one performance in 1968. But it had a book by Terrence McNally and lyrics by Alfred Uhry, who now have some Tonys and one Oscar between them, so how bad could it have been?

Anyway, among the books I did read were Gonna Do Great Things, Gary Fishgall’s new biography of Sammy Davis, Jr. Well, I didn’t read the whole thing; with any celebrity biography, I limit myself to the sections that deal with the subject’s Broadway shows. For Davis, that means, Mr. Wonderful in 1956, Golden Boy in 1964, and the revival of Stop the World, I Want to Get Off in 1978. About Mr. Wonderful: Arnold Horwitt and Albert Hague were originally supposed to write the score. What I find interesting is that this wasn’t the first time a show with “Wonderful” in the title didn’t work out for Arnold Horwitt; he wrote lyrics to Leroy Anderson’s music for Wonderful Town before Bernstein, Comden, and Green replaced them. Here, he was replaced once again, poor guy. About Golden Boy: Paddy Chayefksy came to Boston to doctor the show that had a score by Charles Strouse and Lee Adams. Given that the songwriters eventually adapted Chayefsky’s Marty (allegedly still coming to Broadway), did they discuss that property’s musical possibilities during lunch or dinner way back then? About Stop the World: Davis’s first inclination, believe it or not, was to adopt Anthony Newley’s original look for Littlechap and do the role in whiteface. I’m glad he didn’t.

Finally, I spent a weekend in the country — last weekend, in fact, when I went to the Berkshires to see Peter Pan, An Enemy of the People, and Assassins. (More on them in upcoming columns.) I was so glad that, while walking on Main Street, I ran into Bonnie Davidson, my co-worker of yore. She and her husband Michael O’Gara were up to see Assassins, too, but what really tickled me was Bonnie’s thanking me for providing her and Michael with an idiom they now use. It happened because I had brought the cast album of Whoop-Up to work and played it there one day. (Now, aren’t you sorry that you don’t work with me?) Bonnie overheard the infamous song “Love Eyes” and was both fascinated and appalled to catch the lyric, “Your lipstick’s wet and waiting for my smear.” She told Michael about it, and he now says that line to her with great frequency — proving that the family that cites Whoop-Up together stays together.

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