The 2005 Broadway University Entrance Exam
My buddy Kevin McAnarney is still fuming at a remark he heard years ago. Seems that he mentioned Gene Kelly to some twentysomething theater lad and the response was, “Who’s Gene Kelly?” (I say that’s what Kelly gets for abandoning Broadway for Hollywood. Let the punishment fit the crime!)
Nevertheless, we do expect that all you would-be incoming freshmen at Broadway University know Gene Kelly as a back-up singer to Mary Martin in Leave It to Me, the star of Pal Joey, and the director of the original Flower Drum Song. We also assume that anyone applying for admission will be familiar with the proper names of many theater personalities and fictional characters. If you’re to be accepted into this august program this August, we feel that you should not only recognize such names but that you should also be able to name the songs and the shows from which the following quotations are taken. In case one or two of them slip your mind, the answers will be provided next Wednesday.
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1. “Please take our advice. We aren’t the Lunts. I’m not Fanny Brice.”
2. “I knew Leo G. Carroll was over a barrel.”
3. “When you’re through, Mrs. Pugh comes to take it away.”
4. “I never saw myself as a Solomon or Socrates. I knew who I was: One of your dime-a-dozen mediocrities.”
5. “For Sharon I’m carin’, but Susan I’m choosin’.”
6. “Another thousand dollars, a matinee, a Pinter play, perhaps a piece of Mahler’s.”
7. “Oh, what an actor. Long live Max Factor. ”
8. “Dickens and Disraeli will be singing ‘Aoeli, Aoeli.'”
9. “It isn’t Aimee Semple, or even Shirley Temple.”
10. “For a modern Don Juan and Sir Lancelot, I don’t seem to get out of my pants a lot.”
11. “We all sit ’round King Arthur’s table; Freud, and Cain, and Abel.”
12. “Cagney belting Bogie, Edward G. — nyah nyah — with his stogie.”
13. “We’ll join the Astors at Tony Pastor’s.”
14. “Nobody’s gonna baby ya. Be like Florence Nightingale, or Florence of Arabia.”
15. “The songs were rotten, the book was stinkin’. What he did to Shakespeare, Booth did to Lincoln.”
16. “Answer my weary query, Timothy Leary dearie.”
17. “Speak of Jericho, speak of Job. Speak of Joseph’s colorful robe.”
18. “The newspapers call you the goddess of sex. If you are a goddess, I’m Oedipus Rex.”
19. “Did she lose one of her combs? Gad, he’s changed me from a woman to a lousy Sherlock Holmes.”
20. “As I told Conrad Hilton, it gives us that built-in appeal.”
21. “We all go to church, and we all despise John Birch.”
22. “I feel half Tijuana, half Boston — partly Jane Fonda and partly Jane Austen.”
23. “I get ill from one cigarette. Keep your filthy paws off my silky drawers; would
you pull that stuff with Annette?”
24. “Don’t be a louse like your brother Miltie. He doesn’t know the meaning of
guilty.”
25. “He loves to mow and weed. I cook like Betty Crocker and I look like Donna Reed.”
26. “Or we’d have been left bereft of F.D.R.”
27. “Going to work with Cukor. Paramount is paradise, movies from A to Zukor.”
28. “Ginsberg, Dylan, Cunningham and Cage; Lenny Bruce, Langston Hughes, to the stage.”
29. “And Jacob Rosenbloom thought he was safe up in his room.”
30. “You can start with a bagel and end up with Conrad Nagel.”
31. “Here’s to Tin Pan Alley. A Yankee rally. A show like Sally.”
32. “I have read the great Kabala, and I simply worship Allah.”
33. “You were with someone else but Warren? Was he bashful or was he foreign?”
34. “Sitting pretty in the caddy with P. Daddy.”
35. “I’m gonna Vince Van Gogh ’em and Henry Thoreau ’em.”
36. “You’re Inferno’s Dante. You’re the nose on the great Durante.”
37. “But who needs Albert Schweitzer when the lights’re low?”
38. “Ninety minutes of Doris Day. There was nothing to do but pray.”
39. “Garbo, Hepburn, Miss Lucy Ball. Surely you remember them all.”
40. “I wonder what my chances are. I wish I looked like Teri Garr.”
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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@theatermania.com]
