"In addition, I find it intersting that today on ATC there was a thread started that put down Pattis performance,, that was almost word for word as a thread started a few days ago."
Well, if her performance has deteriorated and is fairly consistent in the way that it's deteriorated, why would it be surprising that more than one person would post similar things after those two people having attended different performances? Obviously, not everyone agrees that it's deteriorated but then not everyone liked it in the first place. People have different opinions, and we accept that. What's so strange if two people have more or less the same opinion?
Someone posted, "Merman was just as unliked. If not way more."
Someone responded, "lj889: I'm not saying it isn't so, but can you give any examples of Ethel Merman being greatly disliked? By whom? Why? Caused by what on Merman's part?
"In GYPSY, she is known to have disliked Sandra Church and I guess the feeling was mutual. However, she got along very well with Jack Klugman. And during rehearsals, Stephen Sondheim said that she was very cooperative. In the recent biography by Brian Kellow, there was no mention of such dislike except toward the end of her life when she was ill and got to be very difficult. Once a diva, always a diva."
Well, Paula Laurence certainly didn't get along with Merman. And Fernando Lamas. And it does seem as if some others probably didn't like her too much.
In the cases of both Laurence and Lamas, it may have been more their fault than Merman's. Still, Kellow does tell the story of the night Lamas saved her from great embarrassment onstage and rather than thanking him, she yelled at him as if he'd caused the problem.
The Kellow book does say that Church and Merman eventually patched things up. In fact, I think the saddest story in the book is about the encounter between Church and Merman near the end of Merman's life, when Merman was deteriorating and Church came up to her in a restaurant, and said, "Hi, Ethel, it's Sandra Church." And Merman looked at her a long time and finally said, "You're not Sandra. You couldn't be Sandra Church. I don't know who you are." And it was just that Merman's mind wasn't functioning properly, it wasn't that she was trying to be unpleasant.
"remember when part of the St. James theater fell on someone in the audience and people here complained that Patti didn't stop the show to find out what was going on? can she really never win?"
That happened in the balcony. My memory is that people didn't complain so much about LuPone not stopping, but that the house staff should have stopped the show. Someone should have alerted the stage manager that there was an emergency. LuPone apparently heard some noise and that something going on. I don't recall people complaining that she should have stopped. If someone did, I think others came in and said that it was really the house staff's responsibility since LuPone couldn't have known exactly what was happening.
"Have you not heard the story Elaine Stritch tells about how Ethel once walked all the way into an audience to throw a drunk audience member who was yelling at her all the way out onto the street?"
Yeah, Stritch tells that story, but other people who were in the cast remember it differently. According to them (and this is much more plausible), Merman did walk offstage in mid-number, but what she did was go to the house manager and tell him to get the guy who was creating the disturbance out of the theatre.
"Once during the winter of 1975, in a performance as Tristan in Dallas, Vickers was upset that excessive coughing from the audience was destroying the mood by drowning out the soloists. He found his moment in Act 3 - the wounded Tristan, who was supposed to be on his deathbed and unconscious, shouted: "Shut up with your damn coughing!" at the top of his lungs."
Yes, and you can hear it on this page:
http://www.handelmania.com/dristan.mp3
