Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Girls, Can You Believe It Has Been Exactly Fifty Years, Since This Opened On Broadway?????????????????



                               Yesterday, girls I was talking to my actor friend, James, who played Sergio Franchi's son in the original production!  When he said the show was fifty years old this year, I thought, "Well, that's nice; it opened sometime this year; time to commemorate it.  What I did not realize was that half a century ago tonight--March 18, 1965--is when it actually opened, at the 46th Street Theatre.

                                Years before, Arthur Laurents wrote a moderately successful play, "The Time Of The Cuckoo," with Shirley Booth, that became the even more successful David Lean 1955 film, "Summertime," starring Katherine Hepburn, Rosanno Brazzi, and the entire city of Venice in glorious Fifties technicolor!  Wow! True romantics and Theater Queens swooned, so, when, ten years later, the film was musicalized as "Do I Hear A Waltz?," the same flurry occurred again. Theater Queens just swooned over Elizabeth Allen and Sergio Franchi, not to Madeline Sherwood, Stuart Damon, and Carol Bruce!  When do you see show casts like that, now, darlings????  Well, maybe now, at "On The Twentieth Century," but believe me, THAT is an exception.

                                  The score is lovely, and the title tune has always been a favorite!  Let me see if I can find one for you!

                                   Here it is!  I could not get the Original Cast for you, but Eydie Gorme knew how to sell a song, and she helped make the song a hit!  So, listen to her!

                                     And Theater Queens all over town are going through their unused CD collections tonight, to uncover, and rediscover, this oft long forgotten show!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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