Monthly Archives: December 2024

In 1979, Robert Klein and Lucie Arnaz starred in a musical called They're Playing Our Song — Book by Neil Simon, lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager and music by Marvin Hamlisch. It opened on Broadway on February 11 of that year and closed (with a different cast) on September 6th of '81 after 1,082 performances. That's a pretty good run especially when you consider that the original production of The Odd Couple only ran 964 performances. They're Playing Our Song was produced and produced and produced all over America after it closed in New York.

I'm not sure but I think it was the first time one of Mr. Simon's plays did outta-town tryouts in Los Angeles. I saw it downtown at the Music Center before it went to New York and what I saw was at least somewhat different. Throughout the play, there is constant talk about a never-seen ex-boyfriend of Lucie Arnaz's character named Leon. In the version I saw, Leon died at the end. In the version that opened in Manhattan, he survived.

Anyway, what I saw was, to me, a real lightweight and predictable romantic comedy that was made somewhat enjoyable by Neil Simon's one-liners, Lucie Arnaz's great performance and Robert Klein being absolutely incredible. I had many opportunities to see other productions of it but no interest. Then in 2010, the now-defunct Reprise Theater Company, which was definitely funct at the time, put on a pretty good, improved rendition of it with Jason Alexander and Stephanie J. Block. I wrote about that here.

But getting back to that original production: The show, the book, the direction and Klein were all nominated for Tony Awards but they were beaten out that year by Sweeney Todd, Sweeney Todd, Sweeney Todd and Len Cariou, who played Sweeney Todd. All of the characters who died in Sweeney Todd, by the way, stayed dead.

Klein and Arnaz performed the title song on the Tony Awards telecast that year. A long time later — in 2010, apparently — they performed it again somewhere. I know not where…but someone took a video of the Tony Awards performance and a video of the 2010 performance and merged them together. This is a little spooky but kind of fun to watch…

I'm still very busy so I'm going to refer you to some other folks…

I'm not writing political stuff these days because I'm not reading as much political stuff as I usually do because the political stuff I do see is running madly off in all directions. However, if I wrote a post about Joe Biden pardoning his son, it would say pretty much the same things that Kevin Drum says here. And while you're there, Kevin's remembrances about what was said about COVID match mine.

I never knew (or knew much) about screenwriter Marshall Brickman, who just left us. So I'll send you over to what my pal Paul Harris had to say ahout him.

And folks keep asking me I know what Laraine Newman felt about the Saturday Night movie. I haven't spoken to her lately but I did read this article and so can you.

I shall return…and by that, I mean I shall return to posting more on this blog, not that I shall return some of the odder things I've bought on Amazon lately, though I'll probably do that too.

The great Broadway director-producer Hal Prince died in 2019. The last show he directed for Broadway was a retrospective of his work called Prince of Broadway featuring scenes from previous shows of his including Fiddler on the Roof, Company, Phantom of the Opera, Sweeney Todd and many others.

Despite a terrific cast and (of course) terrific material, Prince of Broadway only ran for 76 performances. It was a show that had great trouble being properly funded and it looked…well, cheap. That was the main problem with it. But my lovely friend Amber and I saw one of those performances and we both liked it a lot.

One thing I liked a lot but didn't mention in the above-linked diary entry was a song that was not from one of Mr. Prince's past successes but was written for Prince of Broadway by the fine Broadway composer Jason Robert Brown. It was called "Do the Work" and it was made up of directives from Hal Prince…advice he'd given over the years to (mostly) writers. I liked it as a song and I liked its message. It's somewhat inspirational to people who do what I do for a living. If you're a writer and you find yourself losing the urge to write, give it a listen.

Below are not one but two videos of it, neither from the cast of Prince of Broadway. If you'd like to hear how it sounded in that show, you can hear the number from the cast album here. I'm giving you three versions of it because if you're a writer or you want to be a writer, it's something you ought to hear many times. It's something I sometimes hear in my head when I'm sitting down to tackle or even re-tackle a script…

So it's like a game on YouTube now. They upload full, uncut movies and specials (like the Caesar's Writers) video and they're free to view…and then suddenly, it costs money or they have ads…and then they're free again…and I'm sure they'll switch back. The last few days, Caesar's Writers went from without ads to with ads and at this moment — maybe not three minutes from now but now — it's without ads, at least on my feed. So watch it when you can and you can decide for yourself if you want to pay or sit through commercials.

Here — on the same basis, I assume — is the 1971 movie version of Fiddler on the Roof, a very good adaptation of what may be the most often produced stage musical in history. That was quite an achievement for a show which, when first announced, everyone said of it, "It'll only appeal to Jews." And then when it opened, they said, "It'll only attract an audience while Zero Mostel is starring in it." One of the folks who reportedly said that second thing was Zero Mostel and to add to all the things he was outraged about in his world is that after he left, it went on and on and on without him. It also defied predictions that it would never mean anything in other countries.

This is a good (though a bit too lonnnnnngggg) movie and it probably would have been even better with Mr. Mostel playing Tevye…but Chaim Topol only suffers from that comparison. Otherwise, he and everyone else in it are quite fine. The whole magilla was produced and directed by Norman Jewison, who was not Jewish, and I think it's funny that he also gave us The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, which could have been an alternate title for this film…