Kathie Lee Gifford in "Putting It Together"
Kathie Lee Gifford in "Putting It Together"
#1Kathie Lee Gifford in "Putting It Together"
Posted: 9/15/13 at 10:50pm
I love the whole recording of Carol Burnett in the role of the Wife in Putting It Together, but I'm curious as to what Kathie Lee Gifford was like in the role, and the dynamic that it might have changed. Also, how did she sound?
Anyone have any insights?
nasty_khakis
Broadway Legend Joined: 3/15/07
#2Kathie Lee Gifford in
Posted: 9/15/13 at 10:57pmI remember hearing a story that she refused to say "god damn" in "Could I leave you?" because she is a good Christian lady so Sondheim agreed to changing it to "f*cking," which she happily said.
#2Kathie Lee Gifford in
Posted: 9/16/13 at 9:36am
I saw her. She was superb. The role was a real departure for her at the time--she was still on Regis, still very much seen as the good little Christian conservative housewife. So seeing her as a boozy, disillusioned woman of a certain age was more of a stretch than it would be now. Anyway, she sang the songs beautifully, and really inhabited the role of "The Wife." Particularly, I remember her reading of "Like It Was" as being so simple, plaintive and haunting.
To this day, it remains one of my favorite Sondheim interpretations.
I never saw Burnett live, but I did watch the DVD several years after the actual run, and I preferred Gifford.
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
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