Box of Playbills Charts Life’s Passion: Theater

When leaving South Coast Repertory’s fine production of Beth Henley’s new play, “Abundance,” last week, I inadvertently left my playbill under my seat. I remembered outside the theater and went back to retrieve it. I have two boxes full of playbills at home going back more than 40 years. They pretty much chart my cultural life--and, I guess, define the parameters of my soul.

When I added my “Abundance” playbill to the collection, I lingered over the box instead of closing it immediately as I normally do. That was both a mistake and a joy. It shot my morning, but it also transported me back to treasures that are still almost as vivid to me as they were at the time I experienced them. Reliving them made me realize, once again, how important the theater has been in my life.

These shows enriched and influenced my early adult years just as the movies of the 1930s shaped my adolescence. And in some mystical way, they still do. My wife and I cleaned out our savings in 1956 to go to New York from our home in Chicago when I was offered a pair of fourth-row seats to “My Fair Lady” early in its run. Today, I wouldn’t sell for all the money in the world the memory of Rex Harrison standing on his doorstep singing “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face.” The playbill of “My Fair Lady” that I hold in my hand looks no different from all the rest, but it is framed in golden memories.

I went to “Camelot,” Lerner and Loewe’s first Broadway show after “My Fair Lady,” looking for the same high--and lost it in the first few minutes of the second act. I saw “Camelot” three times in New York--I have the playbills to prove it--hoping, wondering how these superb craftsmen would finally fix that second act so I could sustain my euphoria. They never did.

Now I’m looking at playbills for two shows that contain musical numbers that still stand out for me more memorably than any others. The first came--totally unexpectedly--in an otherwise unremarkable show called “I Can Get It for You Wholesale” in which a youthful Barbra Streisand had one song (called “Miss Marmelstein”) that stopped the show every night. All of us who had the privilege of watching her in that show knew we were in on the beginning of something very special--and she moved from this bit into the lead in “Funny Girl.”

The other number is from a show called “Fiorello” that I’m astonished hasn’t been revived. Its surgical treatment of the American political process is as appropriate today--maybe more--as it was in 1954. And it is all captured magnificently in the Sheldon Harnick lyric for “Little Tin Box.”

I firmly believe that the lyricists of the American musical theater were our finest contemporary poets, a tradition that Stephen Sondheim carries on today.

I have a very proprietary feeling about Harnick and his partner, composer Jerry Bock, who went on to do “She Loves Me” and “Fiddler on the Roof”--both in my playbill collection. But the Bock-Harnick playbill I treasure most is for their first collaboration, a show called “The Body Beautiful” that never got to New York. I saw it with about 50 other people in a cavernous theater in Philadelphia, where it closed on its tryout run. I was in a cheap balcony seat and the cast waved all of us down to the orchestra and performed for us as if we had packed the house. And I remember thinking that these two young composers were too good to keep doing turkeys. Their next effort was “Fiorello.”

Here are programs for the only two box office flops Rodgers and Hammerstein ever wrote: “Me and Juliet” and “Allegro.” But even in failure, both had the kind of memorable songs (especially “No Other Love” from “Me and Juliet,” based on Rodgers’ theme music for “Victory at Sea”) that seem to be missing from the Broadway theater today.

My playbill for “The Sound of Music” on Broadway was actually the second time I had seen the show. I was privileged to attend the final rehearsal, given for theater folk (I was doing a magazine article on Rodgers and Hammerstein), and the lovely melodies hit me absolutely fresh and washed over me for days afterward.

In the mid-1950s, it became fashionable for famous actors to do readings, sometimes in churches or other public assembly halls. I have two of those programs. A group called the First Drama Quartette (Charles Boyer, Vincent Price, Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Agnes Moorhead) reading George Bernard Shaw’s “Don Juan in Hell.” And Tyrone Power, Anne Baxter, Raymond Massey and Charles Laughton reading “John Brown’s Body.” These artists would stand at lecterns, almost within arm’s length of the audience, and transport us with the vividness of their voices--and the fine words they were given to read.

There’s a special poignancy in the program of the original Broadway production of “Kiss Me Kate.” One of the featured players is Benny Baker. Years later, he became a neighbor of ours in Corona del Mar, and for a brief time, we shared the agony of the Baker family at somehow dealing with the reality of a teen-aged son stricken with leukemia--a tragedy they handled with enormous dignity and affirmation.

There is so very much more: the incandescence of an already ailing Gertrude Lawrence in “The King and I,” the blast of fresh air from a brash newcomer named Carol Burnett in “Once Upon a Mattress,” the incredible lung power of Ethel Merman doing “Rose’s Turn” in “Gypsy,” the sly and sophisticated barbs of “An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May” before they went their separate ways. So very much more.

And as I add “Abundance” to my box, there is also the comfort and satisfaction of knowing that my collection will continue to grow from an Orange County theater scene that gets better every year.