A musical!

The answer to the question: What is my favorite type of show

I grew up with the musty fragrance of 33 1/3 RPM vinyl playing on a large, portable record player, the smells and sounds inextricably connected. The records were my mother’s Broadway show soundtracks—South Pacific with Mitzi Gaynor, The Sound of Music with Mary Martin, My Fair Lady with Rex Harrison. Those albums were my intro to Broadway and to this day a special link with my mom.

My mother fashioned herself a performer denied the stage by life’s circumstances. Her own mother worked, leaving her daughter to tend to her younger sister and brother and with no time to participate in school shows. Nor did my mom have the money to travel to auditions. Esther Axelman’s last known public appearance was as Miss Cornhusker when she was nine.

As an adult, my mom indulged her unrequited passion for performance by seeing Broadway shows on Broadway, often with her Mah Jongg posse (they saved a small portion of their winnings each week and once a year went to New York City). She also theatrically sang along to show tunes. She retained this talent well into the throes of Alzheimer’s, remembering lyrics one of the last abilities she lost.

I still have her albums.

The first musical I remember seeing was Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun, starring Lee Remick, performed at the Camden County Music Fair in New Jersey (a cousin of the Valley Forge Music Fair not far from our home in Pennsylvania). I think I was 9 years old. It was a very big deal for my parents to take my sister and me on an outing like this, given that, to them, going over the bridge into New Jersey was akin to leaving the country. I was completely smitten with the show. For the consummate television baby of the 1950s, live performance was an entirely new and exciting experience. There might have been an Ice Capades or a Ringling Brothers circus early in my youth, but nothing has ever topped seeing a live Broadway show.

Right around the same time as my first live Broadway musical experience, our elementary school (Louis H. Farrell in Northeast Philadelphia) was producing Gilbert and Sullivan shows—The Mikado, HMS Pinafore, The Fortune Teller—a tradition that continued for years. That provided me the opportunity to participate in, not just watch, musicals. In sixth grade, I was cast in the chorus of The Fortune Teller and understudied the lead, played by Phyllis Heller. I vividly remember my costume—a white ruffled blouse and black velvet skirt with a red crinoline that I swished can-can style as I danced across the stage. Farrell also brought in professional troupes for after school performances I relished attending. Those were the years when teaching the arts was not subject to budget cuts.

Sadly (for me, not any potential audience. I can carry a tune, but the suitcase is somewhat tattered), elementary school was the end of my performance career. I tried out for just about every show from eighth grade on but could never land even a part in the chorus. Not everyone just “got in” as occurs today; you were awarded roles based on your artistic gifts. So I chalk up my lack of stage experience to the amount of talent at George Washington High School.

I didn’t carry a grudge. Besides being an eager audience participant, I was happy to indulge my love of musicals by writing my high school senior term paper on the American Musical Theater. Did you know shows that combined acting and singing (i.e., musicals) were performed in ancient civilizations? And that musical theater performances evolved through the centuries to incorporate popular genres, such as burlesque and vaudeville? Although the book (script) was written by an Englishman and the music composed by a German, The Doctor of Alcantara—a comic opera—is acknowledged by historians as the first American musical. The show premiered in Boston in 1862, followed 4 years later by The Black Crook. I really wish I had saved that project, typed on erasable bond paper well before the days of online research and iCloud storage.

Through our many years together, Bruce and I have seen numerous musicals at various venues in Philly and the suburbs, including theater in the round at VFMF. I have a shrine to the musicals we’ve seen on our basement wall. We subscribed to the VFMF children’s summer series where the kids and I saw a show about Pecos Bill, the memories of which now elicit much laughter. Missy got to see her General Hospital heartthrob, Jack Wagner, star in the VFMF production of West Side Story. Bruce and I saw Mickey Rooney in Sugar Babies. We also had the pleasure of seeing Jekyll and Hyde at the Three Little Bakers Theater in Delaware with Missy and Eric. It’s a shame some of these smaller venues are no longer with us.

We are fortunate to live near a big city with several theaters. Our Philadelphia musical theater experience includes Miss Saigon, The Producers, Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables, Rent, The Lion King, Aladdin, Bye Bye Birdie, Spamalot, Kinky Boots, Avenue Q, Newsies, Rogers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella (I did not care for the updated, politicized version), Oklahoma, Carousel, and The King and I seen at the Forrest, Walnut Street, and Merriam Theaters. We enjoyed Baby Case, a lesser-known show about the Lindbergh kidnapping, at the Arden Theater. We saw Richard Chamberlain in Camelot. We saw Richard Thomas in Twelve Angry Men (Okay, not a musical, but I had to throw it in because I am a big fan of The Waltons). I saw Wicked and Hamilton (finally!) with our cousin Susan. I quoted a great deal of Hamilton in my eulogy for my dad, who had been anxious for me to see the show. I saw Dirty Dancing on a business trip to Toronto. My seatmate was a colleague whose first language is Spanish. It was funny trying to explain the plot with limited words. Bruce and I also attended a few shows at the Bucks County Theater in New Hope (one on a school trip); I believe we saw The Music Man there (more on that show in a moment).

Each production was a unique and wonderful experience—well, except for two: Aspects of Love (I got tickets based on the title song, and it turns out I am not much of an Andrew Lloyd Webber fan) and Urinetown, which I found to be a silly spoof on musicals and Bruce abhorred. Most recently, we saw Groucho, the Musical at the Walnut. As the New Jersey casinos came into their own, there were/are the shore shows. We recently saw an energetic production of Jersey Boys at Hard Rock.

But nothing beats seeing a Broadway show on Broadway. I cannot recall which was my first actual Broadway Broadway show. I saw Annie, starring Shelly Bruce and with Danielle Brisbois (who later went on to play Stephanie on All in the Family) with my friend Marlyn on an ORT trip when I was pregnant with Ali (I also won $25 on a scratch off ticket!). I saw Annie again with a very young Missy when the national tour came to Philly. Our Broadway on Broadway shows include Bette Midler in Hello, Dolly (my dad was taken to the hospital while we were on the train en route to NYC, so I watched the show with my phone in my lap) and How To Succeed in Business… with Daniel (Harry Potter) Radcliffe. Bruce and I saw Cabaret in an actual cabaret when it was performed at Studio 54 in New York. Unfortunately, Bruce tested positive for Covid the night before we were to see The Music Man with Sutton Foster and Hugh Jackman; instead, a trip to NYC became a very special mother-daughter outing for Ali and me. As a present from the kids for our 50th anniversary, we just saw A Beautiful Noise, the Neil Diamond musical.

And then there is Ragtime. I fell in love with the show watching the opening number of the 1998 Tony Awards show (it won for Best Musical, among other awards) and made it my mission to get tickets. I was (at first, unexplainably) able to snag incredible seats for a September 30 performance. Turned out, it was Yom Kippur, so no wonder great seats were available. While on a New York business trip, Bruce switched the tickets out for the January 13 performance, despite some concern about going to New York in the winter. He had been assured that our new seats were even better than the old ones (Row CC is better than Row J?! I thought double-lettered rows were in the back). When we were being seated at the theater, the usher kept walking toward the stage. We were third row, center. I cried from the time I found my seat until the end of the show. I had already memorized the show numbers and 1) could not believe my good fortune at actually seeing Ragtime and 2) that I was so close to the front. We saw Ragtime again when it came to Philly. Ragtime and The Music Man are my two favorite musicals.

Which partly explains why one of the best shows I’ve ever attended was held in a somewhat warm, crowded, at times noisy high school auditorium. The apples in our family didn’t fall far from the tree—our kids, too, were bitten by the performance bug and were cast in their school productions. They performed from grade school through high school. Missy had a part in Grease in ninth grade and in Man of La Mancha in tenth. Ali’s first high school role was in Pippin. I never enjoyed watching a show more than when our kids were in it.

So you can imagine my ecstasy when Ali was in tenth grade and cast as a Pickalittle Lady in The Music Man. More fun came when the show’s producers went to the elementary schools to cast the boys band and Rob got a part. The first night of rehearsal, I arrived at school to pick up Ali and heard Wells Fargo Wagon; after that, I found an excuse to attend almost all of the rehearsals and certainly all of the performances. Two of my babies on stage at once. I was in my glory.

And now there are grandkids. Thanks to Emerson and Harper, I have again experienced Newsies (once in school, once at the girls’ WolfPAC camp) and most recently Matilda, with the promise of more to come. I watch them perform and get goosebumps. I love seeing them on stage and admiring their stage presence. I try not to get too caught up in taking photos and just let myself enjoy, appreciating that the productions are that good. That THEY are THAT good.

Musicals have come a long way since I discovered them courtesy of Irving Berlin and Rogers and Hammerstein. Our grandkids will have the chance to enjoy and be cast in a broader variety of productions. The girls’ dance experience even may someday earn them roles in shows like this year’s Tony-nominated, no dialogue Illinoise. Right now, I am thinking that despite all of my exposure to the creme de la creme of American musical theater, my best shows may be yet to come, not necessarily in the Big Apple but courtesy of my little apples.

My shrine to the musicals we’ve seen: our basement Wall of Playbills.