Come and Get It
If you’ve ever perused the index of Ken Bloom and Frank Vlastnik’s Broadway Musicals: The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time, you’ve probably put a forefinger and moved it slowly down the list, counting off the ones you’ve seen. The York Theatre Company’s Musicals in Mufti series will do many of you a favor this weekend, when I Can Get It for You Wholesale, a show that hasn’t been easy to see, will arrive on Jim Morgan’s stage. It should be a good production, what with Josh Prince (dynamite in Little Me at CCM) as Harry, Jana Robbins (my all-time favorite Mazeppa) as his mom, and Christopher Totten (marvelous as Nathan in Thrill Me) adding support.
The 1962 musical, with a book by Jerome Weidman (based on his own novel) and a score by Harold Rome, is set 25 years earlier on Seventh Avenue, where, as one of Rome’s lyrics has it, “the dress business can make a wreck of you.” It tells of Harry Bogen, who’ll do anything to get out of the Bronx and into showgirl Martha Mills. As the musical begins, though, Harry’s a $12-a-week shipping clerk who’s ready to betray his fellow workers by breaking up a strike. He doesn’t care, for he doesn’t want to be “ashamed to go home and see my mother — the way my father was.”
Yes, Harry’s mother is a very important part of his life, and he wants to succeed for her as much as he does for Martha. Perhaps his mother is partly at fault for making him the monster he becomes: When he starts doing well and says, “Ma, we did $10,000 last month,” she matter-of-factly replies, “$10,000 is ten less than $20,000.” But odds are that Harry would have turned into a shark in any case; along the way, he betrays his friends and business partners Tootsie Maltz, Teddy Asch, and Meyer Bushkin. (The last-named will go to jail if Harry doesn’t admit that he framed him.)
In addition to his mother, there’s another woman who loves Harry: Ruthie Rivkin, the haimish girl from the neighborhood who loans him money and then, when repaid, invests with him — all in the hope that, one day, he’ll come to his senses. After all, their astrological signs are compatible; he’s a Gemini, which she pronounces “Geminee,” while she’s a Capricorn. In 1991, when director Richard Sabellico was readying a revival of Wholesale at the American Jewish Theatre, I asked him if his Ruthie would say “Geminee” or “Gemineye.” He said, “Geminee, because that’s the way my mother said it.” But when I saw his production, I found that he’d changed his mind. We’ll see what he does in the Mufti presentation, which he’s also directing.
The reviews that emerged on March 23, 1962 ranged from raves (“What a good show” — Kerr, Tribune) to pans (“as uningratiating an evening as you could well find” — Watts, Post). With a hateful character at its center, Wholesale was a tough sell. Its brutal honesty and cynical ending, in which Harry isn’t destroyed (though Ruthie may be), was too bitter for audiences. They agreed with John McClain in the Journal-American, who wrote, “We don’t finally care too much about the fate of this young hustler in his relentless pursuit of the easy dollar.” Three years earlier, The Sound of Music had made a fortune, but Wholesale — with a song titled “The Sound of Money” — didn’t make any. It closed on December 8, 1962 after only 300 performances and lost most of the investment that producer David Merrick had raised.
The show has a wonderful, Semitic-flavored score, though that’s not the reason why it is now and forever will be remembered. The reason is simple: This was the musical in which one Barbra Streisand made her Broadway debut as Harry’s secretary, Yetta Tessye Marmelstein. Notice that she’s not mentioned anywhere in the plot I’ve just described; Miss Marmelstein was a minor character, but Streisand sure made a major impression. “The evening’s find,” proclaimed Howard Taubman in the Times.
Norman Nadel, in the World-Telegram & Sun, wrote: “Brooklyn’s Erasmus Hall High School should call a half-day holiday to celebrate the success of its spectacular alumna.” How did he know the name of her alma mater? She had put it in her Playbill bio, right after the statement that she’d been “born in Madagascar and reared in Rangoon.” Streisand was such an odd-looking lady — actresses were more white-bread attractive in those days — that most everyone believed her. Not until Theatre Arts magazine called Streisand’s bio “Playbull” did most of us learn that she was actually born and reared in Brooklyn. Back then, Playbill bios were straight-arrow lists of career achievements; Streisand opened the door for the fanciful stuff you read today. (Her insouciance was one reason why Elliot Gould, who played Harry, married her.)
Wholesale director Arthur Laurents had toyed with casting Streisand as Ruthie and Marilyn Cooper as Miss Marmelstein, but then changed their roles. Would Cooper have had Streisand’s career had she landed the much-noticed Miss? To quote a title of a Wholesale song that Cooper sang, “Who knows?” Ironically, though, Cooper would win a Tony (19 years later, for Woman of the Year), Streisand never won one in competition and had to “settle” for an honorary trophy. Her Miss Marmelstein lost to Phyllis Newman’s Martha Vail in Subways Are for Sleeping, and her Fanny Brice fell to Carol Channing’s Dolly Levi in 1964.
Speaking of Fanny, there’s an interesting Streisand omen in the Wholesale script. At one point, Ruthie shows us how much she loves Harry by remembering which day he moved out of the neighborhood: “March 26,” she says proudly. That would be the 1964 date on which Funny Girl opened on Broadway.
This weekend, will you agree with Bloom and Vlastnik that I Can Get It For You Wholesale is one of Broadway’s greatest musicals? There’s only one way to find out. If you attend on Saturday afternoon, I’ll be there to participate in a post-show panel discussion, and I’ll talk about my experience of seeing the original production during its Boston tryout.
********************
[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@theatermania.com]
