50 Years Ago on Broadway

The 1956-1957 Broadway season was one of the most spectacular in history. My Fair Lady, which opened just two weeks late to be eligible for the previous year’s Tony Awards, won Best Musical over Bells Are Ringing, The Most Happy Fella, and Candide, while Eugene O’Neill’s searing Long Day’s Journey Into Night took home the top dramatic honors.

The stage was aglow with the talents of Tony Award winner Rex Harrison and his fair lady, Julie Andrews. Not to mention Angela Lansbury, Ethel Merman, Fredric March and his wife Florence Eldridge, Charles Laughton, Ralph Richardson, Rosalind Russell, Jason Robards, Jr., Kim Stanley, Bert Lahr, Rosemary Harris, Zero Mostel, Elaine Stritch, Chita Rivera, Tallulah Bankhead, and a young man named Johnny Carson, who would never again grace a Broadway stage after succeeding Tom Ewell in Tunnel of Love.

Four other very special performers — Barbara Cook, George S. Irving, Edie Adams, and Lois Smith — also trod the boards that season. This legendary quartet recently spoke to TheaterMania about their experiences.

A half-century after the event, Cook vividly recalls her tryout for the bejeweled Cunegonde in Candide, which was co-written by Leonard Bernstein: “I sang my usual audition piece for Bernstein and I planned to follow it with ‘You Are Love’ (from Show Boat) with a high-C ending. But he said, ‘Don’t, I know exactly how you would sing it.’ I thought: ‘What the hell do I do now?’ Somehow, I had the courage to say, ‘I could do Madame Butterfly’s entrance [aria], but I don’t have the music.’ He said, ‘I know it,’ and then he played the accompaniment. At the end, I decided to take the optional high note, a D-flat, and sang the bejesus of it. Boy, that really interested him!”

Indeed, it did. “He put me together with the conductor, Sam Krachmalnick, and asked me to learn ‘Glitter and Be Gay.’ After working on it for a couple of weeks, Sam said, ‘Lenny’s going to drop in today.’ He didn’t tell me that was the day when they were going to decide to continue with me or not. Obviously, I passed with flying colors. An amazing thing happened: There was a high-C that you were supposed to sing and then stop. It’s after the line, ‘Here I droop my wings.’ What I did was a portamento down. First of all, it was easier to sing, but it also made sense to let the note droop. I was right, and Bernstein changed it. Now it’s written in the score that way.”

Her collaborations with the maestro continued throughout rehearsals. “One day,” Cook relates, “Lenny called and asked how high I could hum. Next thing, he came in with a new opening for the second act. Irra Petina and I were scrubwomen, and she had a contrapuntal melody against my humming. Another day, he called and asked if I could trill. I said, ‘No, but I can fake it.’ He said, ‘That’s fine. Almost everybody does.’ Recently, I said that to Marilyn Horne, and she was horrified! She insists that her students do real trills.”

Cook even has kind words for the notoriously difficult Lillian Hellman, the show’s librettist, saying: “She was a real mensch. I loved her. It was the McCarthy era, and there was a scene that dealt with book-burning. We all knew it was about the witch hunt. I was very proud of that show and I still am.” Somewhat surprisingly, Cook has both good and bad memories of opening night: “Tyrone Guthrie, our director, came into my dressing room and said, ‘Remember, darling, it’s only a play.’ I thought: ‘Are you kidding? It’s my life’s blood!’ Then Bernstein came to wish me good luck and, for the first time, he was insensitive. Just before he left, he said, ‘By the way, Maria Callas is out front.’ I thought, ‘Holy shit. I don’t need to hear that, thank you very much.'”

George S. Irving did two shows that season; the first, Bells Are Ringing, marked Judy Holliday’s Broadway return a decade after her star-making role in Born Yesterday. While Irving was originally cast in one role in the now-beloved Styne-Comden-Green musical, he ended up in another. “It was the damnedest thing,” he says. “One morning, I auditioned for the part of Sandor [the con man], and Jerry Robbins hired me. That afternoon, he called and said, ‘Sorry, you’re out. We got Eddie Lawrence. If you want, you can understudy.’ I needed the money, so I stayed — in a negligible part.”

For most of the run, Irving relates, Holliday and leading man Sydney Chaplin were madly in love: “Judy and Syd shared her dressing room. Much later on, they went on vacation to Switzerland so she could meet his father [Charlie Chaplin], who completely disapproved of the relationship. Poor Judy didn’t know what hit her. She left on the next plane.” Thereafter, Holliday spoke to the Little Tramp’s son only onstage. “At Judy’s memorial,” says Irving, “Syd was seated in the first row. In the middle of the service, he stood up, visibly moved, and left.”

Following Bells, Irving appeared in the short-lived musical Shinbone Alley, based on the Don Marquis stories about archy (a cockroach with a poet’s soul) and mehitabel (a feline with a past) who sipped milk through a straw. Eddie Bracken and Eartha Kitt portrayed the leads, and the stars’ interracial pairing caused them “to receive such awful hate mail,” says Irving. While it’s widely known that Mel Brooks co-wrote the show’s book, according to Irving, “he also helped with the direction.” The show closed after just 49 performances. “Critics disliked the show, but I thought it was good,” he says.

The musical Li’l Abner brought a fourth Tony Award for Best Choreographer to Michael Kidd, who also directed and co-produced the musical, based on characters from Al Capp’s comic strip. The title role was played by six-foot-four Peter Palmer in his Broadway debut, and Daisy Mae was embodied by the lovely Edie Adams — then billed as Edith Adams — who took home the Tony for Best Featured Actress.

“‘I loves ya, Abner.’ That’s all Daisy Mae said for two-and-a-half hours, eight times a week,” Adams jokes. “Daisy had the brain of a three-year-old. At the time, I was studying with Lee Strasberg, and playing Daisy convincingly drove me nuts. If you do Mame, you sing, dance, slide down a banister, and blow a trumpet; that show’s over in 10 minutes. When you play a not-too-bright character, every show seems like two weeks. Also, Daisy was 17, and I was pushing 30. But I always looked younger!”

Executing the show’s choreography was one of Adams’ biggest challenges. “Michael Kidd thought that everybody was a ballet-trained dancer. I said, ‘Look, I can do anything and end up on the right foot, but I can’t turn.’ If they had to turn me, they had to lift me. I still can’t turn.” Adams worked barefoot, which was especially precarious since there were live animals in the show. “Chorus girls would call out, ‘Upstage right…downstage left’ [indicating the location of deposits], but I’d be blindly running across the stage.” Adams lost one of her solo numbers, “I Wish It Could Be Otherwise,” out of town “because it sounded too sophisticated for dear li’l Daisy,” she says.

On the dramatic front 50 years ago, Orpheus Descending was Tennessee Williams’ reworking of his first produced play, Battle of Angels, which had closed during a 1940 Boston tryout. The role of Lady Torrance, the female lead, was written for Anna Magnani. But when she decided that she would only remain in the U.S. for two months, Maureen Stapleton stepped in — as she had when Magnani passed on the Broadway production of Williams’ The Rose Tattoo — and, once again, the great Stapleton triumphed. “Maureen was so warm and earthy and full of life,” recalls Lois Smith, who played the role of Carol Cutrere in the show. (Joanne Woodward got the part in The Fugitive Kind, the 1959 film version of the play.)

And what did Smith think of the playwright himself? “Tennessee, who was a perfectly lovely man, was always around. His dialogue is wonderful; it’s great fun to play, and it lifts you up.” Smith believes that Williams had wanted Marlon Brando for the male lead, Val Xavier; but after A Streetcar Named Desire, the actor never returned to Broadway. So Robert Loggia was signed to play Xavier. “In Philadelphia,” Smith tells me, “they were finishing the set and we were rehearsing in the lobby. Bob’s agent called and told him that Cliff Robertson would be replacing him. That was painful. But it was such a wonderful thing to be in that ensemble cast. Doing the play was a real pleasure!”