Profile for Roland von Berlin

You're wrong to say that no book besides Mandelbaum's discusses Breakfast at Tiffany's.Ethan Mordden's book on sixties musicals spends a few pages on it. He saw the show inPhiladelphia, when it was called Holly Golightly, so you get the flavor of what the work waslike in performance.

Robert and ElizabethDeep RiverVanity FairSong of Norway

If there's a London cast recording, it isn't posted on Amazon.USA or Amazon.UK.Is this some sort of indie thing, available in some out of the way manner?

Rick Besoyan--The Student Gypsy.And, on off-Broadway, the better known Little Mary Sunshine.Also English Sandy Wilson, whose The Boy Friend was done here (also Valmouth, again onoff-Broadway).

I don't know how mixed that one up. Utter carelessness.Imagine the sweetheart Bigley trying to sing that naggy line with Levene.Good thing I'm not on Jeopardy. I'll take Musicals of 1950 for $100, Alex.

Sue Me, from Guys and Dolls.It was originally sung by Isbel Bigley, who could sing, and Sam Levene, who couldn't. It was carefully written not to expose him much.It's a comic piece for lovers having a spat, very cute.

Doesn't Elphaba need a more energetic performer?

The book takes a while to get to the musical, because it starts with the city and then the twenties as a decade. Then there's the Chicago play and the two movies.But once it reaches the musical, it really gets into it--the writing, the backstage, Fosse's anger, Verdon's last hurrah on Broadway. There's an analysis of the show that moves from scene to scene and song to song that sort of recreates it for you, explaining all the underpinnings, character motivations, Fisse staging tricks, etc.The...

The Kralahome in The King and I, though he was in two numbers till they were cut out of town.

Mordden's on an upcoming Theater Talk show, discussing both Carousel and the musical Chicago, because of his new book on it. He quotes some more of those cut lyrics from the Bench Scene, which makes you wonder what other poetic bits Rodgers and Hammerstein shows lost in their Boston tryout.This seems to have affected Rodgers especially. George Abbott cut "Wait Till You See Her" from By Jupiter, because he couldn't find a good place for it and the show played fine without it. Yet it's the only...

The notion that "integrated" starts with anything in the twentieth century is absurd. There were shows with wholly story-attuned scores in the 1990s--Reginald De Koven's Robin Hood and John Philip Sousa's El Capitan, for instance. And that's speaking only of the American theatre. In England, the musical--meaning a dramatic work with dialogue and song that is more or less in the popular rather than the classical idiom--dates back to The Beggar's Opera, in 1728.The Black Crook, so often called ...

A good friend of mine who has done a lot of interviews over the years says Haskins and Riedel are the best hosts of all, because they knew how to throw the show to the subject and keep the whole thing lively. If you're appearing to plug your musical or your book or whatever, you want a show that not only informs but entertains.Some interviewers want the show to be about them, which just frustrates the viewer and keeps the subject from loosening up and hitting a homer. Haskins concentrates on ...

I, too, saw Davis in The Night of the Iguana. As I remember it, Davis didn't have that much to work with, while Leighton's role really took off (in a subtle and magical way, albeit) in Act Two. All the wonderful Tennessee Williams poetry is written for the Leighton and O'Neal characters. Even the old Nonno is more interesting than Davis' part.I can see that Ava Gardner, through sheer life-loving charisma, got more out of Davis' role in the film version. Also, it may have been rewritten to giv...

I think the best thing about On Sondheim is its fresh approach to what is becoming very familiar material, like all that background on the Italian literary movement that gave birth to the novel that Passion is based on, or the casting of the original Do I Hear a Waltz? This is stuff the other Sondheim books don't have.I also like the choice of illustrations. Instead of the usual stage shots and so on, you get all sorts of things you couldn't have expected, for instance when the picture of Mer...

Some of you may know this already, but these are called "Mondegreens."The derivation is a misheard line from way back in some poem or other. The original words were "And laid him on the green," meaning "set his corpse down in that place."But someone thought it was "And Lady Mondegreen."

Very imaginative!I loved Question 11.

I saw it in Philadelphia, when it was called Holly Golightly. The show has the reputation of being the worst flop of all time simply because it was so prominent, so anticipated, and then was shut down when still in previews. But it actually wasn't that bad. The problem was that its spirit and style didn't suit the Capote original at all: it had been turned into a conventional musical comedy with a dark side, when it needed to be as unusual and flavorsome as a Sondheim-Prince kind of show.In o...

Philadelphia used to have an odd habit of getting enthusiastic over shows that would then fail when they got to New York.That was true of Flahooley, and when Oh Captain! played the town, they had to call the cops out to keep order outside the theatre for crowd control, so keen was the demand for tickets.

That Follies so-called "overture" occurs after a lengthy prelude and even a shortish book scene, so it's not an overture in any real sense. The overture is by definition the first thing heard. Otherwise it isn't an overture.It is called one in the score, because it's a medley and there really isn't any term for what it is except "Potpourri" or "Arrival of Guests," etc. It uses cut numbers, but many musicals have included cut numbers in their incidental music. You can hear the start of "Say a ...

Finian's Rainbow is especially interesting because it starts with the first phrases of the VERSE to How Are Things in Glocca Morra, whereas you almost never hear the verse of a song in the overture to anything. Finian's Rainbow's overture also ends oddly, in a kind of fade-out as the curtain goes up, without a big finish. At least, it did so in 1947, in the theatre. The recording used a concert ending, and even Lehman Engel's LP of overtures played a different conclusion.