All tagged Beatrice Arthur
Not every Broadway musical is a runaway hit, but then not every musical is a calamitous flop. Over the years, there have been many musicals, also-rans, that lasted a season and offered many wonderful things that make it a worthwhile second look. One of those musicals is the 1955 Plain and Fancy. Set amidst the scenic locales and the denizens of Pennsylvania’s Dutch Country, the musical is a gentle story of two cultures clashing cultures and the connections we can make if we just open our minds and hearts.
I happen to be an enormous fan of the musical Mame. I find it so incredibly joyous and tuneful, full of bright humor and characters that are so much fun. My love affair with Mame, believe it or not, started with a high school production I saw back in the 1980s. I knew nothing about the show at all (I was 16 at the time and just starting on my journey into the world of Broadway musicals). When I left the theatre, I knew I had to own the original cast album as soon as possible (unaware that I was that it starred the incomparable Angela Lansbury and my favorite TV actress (Maude AND The Golden Girls) Beatrice Arthur in a scene-stealing supporting role. A few days later, I went with my stepfather to a used record store (he was a D.J. at a local radio station and always looking for old records). I, as I usually did, wandered off to the “Movies and Shows” section of shop. There I found, not one, but two records of Mame: the original Broadway cast album and the Lucille Ball movie soundtrack. We won’t get into the latter (perhaps a discussion for another day), but the former soon became my most played album for at least a year.
Many sitcoms endure and still many others fade away. There are certain things about a sitcom that give it a longevity or a shelf-life that allow it to resonate with generation after generation. How surprising it is, then, that an unlikely comedy about four 50 + women living together in Miami, tackling contemporary issues and asserting the vitality of life long after to empty nest syndrome, had continued to appeal to television audiences more than three-decades after its debut.
With the Tony Awards just around the corner and that shaping up to be a ho-hum night (thanks to forgone conclusions of a Hamilton sweep), no exciting new musicals on the immediate horizon (the Cats revival excites me like a case of distemper) and, just in general, no inspiring theatre news to get me riled up, I turned to one of my other favorite hobbies: TV Theme Songs (yes, I wrote a book on the subject). I like to go to Youtube.com and watch the opening sequences and clips of shows from days gone by. The other night, while doing this, I found so many Broadway performers in short-run sitcoms, stinkaroos that didn’t last for very long. Some of these shows were awful, but some of them were actually quite good. Here is a sampler of some of your Broadway favorites in sitcoms that just didn’t fly.
