Welcome to today’s edition of ShentonSTAGE Daily, live from New York once again.
My main reason for scheduling my current trip to NYC was a 50th anniversary concert of (some of) the surviving cast members of Pippin, one of my favourite Broadway shows of all time, that took place last night at 54 Below (and is being reprised again tonight, so I’m be there again tonight, too!) I first encountered it as a young teenager in South Africa, where a husband and wife director and producer team Des and Dawn Lindberg brought it to Johannesburg in the late 70s. They recorded a cast album, which I still own today. The title character was played by a young American actor Hal Waters, whose obituary I would read in the 80s in Variety (like so many, AIDS claimed him).
I just loved the songs, especially Pippin’s great opening anthem, “Corner of the Sky”, in which he expresses a profound yearning to find his place in the world. I’m sure my 14 year old self couldn’t have been aware of it yet, but this would become my struggle, too.
Everything has its season
Everything has its seasontime
Show me a reason and I’ll soon show you a rhyme
Cats fit on the windowsill
Children fit in the snow
Why do I feel I don’t fit in anywhere I go?
Rivers belong where they can ramble
Eagles belong where they can fly
I’ve got to be where my spirit can run free
Got to find my corner of the sky
I soon found my own corner of the sky in the theatre. But the show also describes what would become another lifelong struggle for me: with depression. Pippin keeps yearning for something outside himself to make himself complete, and so did I. (He also has a hugely dysfunctional relationship with his overbearing father, the King, as I did, with my own, who though far from a king, was such a raging narcissist he thought he was).
There’s a stunning song, ‘No Time At All’, in which Pippin’s grandmother articulates her own statement of intent for swerving depression, which she openly acknowledges:
Oh, it’s time to start livin’
Time to take a little from this world we’re given
Time to take time, cause spring will turn to fall
In just no time at all….
So when the drearies do attack
And a siege of the sads begins
I throw these regal shoulders back
And lift these noble chins
This song was superbly appropriated at last night’s reunion not by Berthe, but Pippin himself, in the form of the evening’s host, the show’s original understudy Pippin Walter Willison, for whom Schwartz had personally adjusted the lyrics just the night before.
\This was some extraordinary evening for one extraordinary show, with John Rubinstein, the original Pippin (centre above), leading the cast once again. He was utterly glowing — and not just in the morning — to quote another favourite song, Morning Glow (you can watch part of his performance of that last night here).
It was just wonderful to see such valiant original troopers as Candy Brown, Gene Foot and Pamela Sousa joining him, plus the wonderful Joy Franz (pictured above) and Linda Posner. Superb musical direction was provided by Broadway buff Michael Lavine (who has the best collection of sheet music I’ve ever seen, as I saw when I once stayed at his apartment on the Upper West Side many years ago).
What an exhilarating evening of sheer theatrical nostalgia — remembered by people who were actually there. I’ll be back for another helping tonight!
54 Below righty dubs itself “Broadway’s Living Room” and this show exemplified it. I will also be back there for two other shows this week: on Thursday, Rachel Tucker and Lewis Cornay (pictured above) will reprise their performances in the 2021 Southwark Playhouse production of Andrew Lipppa and Tom Greenwald’s JOHN & JEN; I saw it twice at Southwark, and can’t wait to see it again here.
And on Saturday, I’ll be back yet again to see Lorna Luft — kid sister of LIza Minnelli — in a show she’s called “70, Girl, 70”, as she approaches her 70th birthday later this year.
SHOWS AHEAD IN LONDON, SELECTED REGIONAL THEATRES AND ON BROADWAY
My regularly updated feature on shows in London, selected regional theatres and on Broadway is here: https://shentonstage.com/theatre-openings-from-w-c-february-6/
As I’m in New York, I’m missing this week’s London openings of THE LEHMAN TRILOGY (with Sam Mendes’s production, originally seen at the National, re-cast to re-open tomorrow at the Gillian Lynne Theatre) and a new production of PHAEDRA (opening at the National on Thursday, with Janet McTeer in the title role of Simon Stone’s staging).
See you here on Friday
I will be back on Friday. If you can’t wait that long, I may also be found on Twitter (for the moment) here: https://twitter.com/ShentonStage/ (though not as regularly on weekends)