Little Me

I love it, too. I got to see all three Broadway productions, and loved them all.

Sorry I don't have any anecdotes for you. I wish "The Truth" had not been cut from the revivals. It's a wonderful song, with great lyrics.

The truth is a wonderfully clever lyric, and a very catchy tune, but it suffers from the being a "topical song" of the most topical kind- a name drop song.

It's also of note that of the three Broadway versions, only the first used Patrick Dennis (the author of the original faux-memoir) as narrator figure, coaxing the story out of Belle by proxy- other revivals have done away with him and simply used Belle as autonomous narrator, each one making her steadily more and more cynical as opposed to the original Belle, who even as a middle-aged dame is as much a bubble-headed slut stereotype as possible, albeit one with a veneer of culture. Perhaps the name Patrick Dennis no longer really held cultural cache enough to be made a major character in the show, post 1980s.

(Interestingly enough, the Australian production and the Charles Busch version, which mashed up all three extant versions of the show, both included "The Truth." And while I believe the Busch included Patrick Dennis, the Australian had a nonspecific "gossip reporter.")

^

I don't know why they did it, but it worked just fine.

The show is one of the funniest musicals ever. Actually, I prefer Neil Simon's work for musicals (The Goodbye Girl excepted) more than I do any of his plays after The Star-Spangled Girl.

It is one of the funniest musicals (while, I agree with After Eight too!) A brilliant book.

I've always wondered about Swen Swenson's claim in All His Jazz that his strip tease to I've Got Your Number caused such a sensation that women would run to the front of the stage...

It's always more fun, but to be fair, the role was rewritten to make it work better that way- dropping a few of the more minor cameos and adding a few additional parts.

A revival company called 42nd St. Moon is staging a production of LITTLE ME in San Francisco next month.




42nd Street Moon's LITTLE ME

Updated On: 4/14/13 at 05:11 PM

Fans of the show will be happy with City Center next year.

I loved the 98 revival! Do you still have the libretto? I have a "reconstructed" copy taken from notes, transcriptions, etc, but not an actual "official" draft version.

If you look up "Little Me I Wanna Be Yours" on Youtube, there's a clip of James Coco singing one of the bonus songs from the first revival, as eccentric billionaire Mr. Worst.

I saw all of them too, and although I love Garber and Coco, the show isn't nearly as clever when you break up the original concept. Caesar was great in the original, but I liked Martin Short even more (equally outrageous, but a much better singer and all-round musical performer). It's a fun show, great score, and yeah, Swen Swenson was HOT doing "I've Got Your Number" in a much tamer time.

Little Me is a special kind of show to me. I have always felt it belongs on a very short list of musicals that are meant to be "performed" and not really "acted". (Forum is about the only other one of this ilk that comes to mind.)

As originally written (and the script is in Volume II of The Collected Plays of Neil Simon) it feels like a series of vaudeville/nightclub turns. I saw a Music Fair production with comics Jack Carter and Kaye Stevens as Young Belle that worked in ways that later productions have not. Martin Short and Faith Prince, as good as they were, never gave the show the lunacy that I feel it calls for. (Also in that production were Harold Lang and Ethel Merman's best friend, Benay Venuta. What a cast and in a stock tour no less.)

For instance the title song in the revise is thrown away at the top of the show. In the original, it is a duet sung by Young and Old Belle to each other and is slotted near the eleven o'clock position.

[And find a copy of the novel by Patrick Dennis. Talk about a hoot.]

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