Snapshot is an irregularly-scheduled series featuring reminiscences of places and experiences in my life. To read all my Snapshot posts, please click here.
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All Playbill™ images are from my original copies.
I visited New York City almost every year for 50 years. In that time (from roughly 1971 through 2021), I saw 15 different plays on “The Great White Way” AKA Broadway. This is Part 3—the final installment—of my look at those plays, utilizing my original Playbill magazines (and some actual ticket stubs) that I’ve kept all these years. To read Parts 1 and 2, featuring the first ten plays/performances I saw, please click the link above for all my Snapshot posts.
Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps
Cort Theatre (Seen September 23, 2008)
It would be 11 long years before I once again saw a Broadway play. In 1998, I moved to San Diego and money was so tight, it was ME that squeaked when I walked, not my shoes. After the horror of 9/11, I still visited New York City pretty much each year, whenever I was able to find a cheap flight and a cheap hotel room. For a while, I stayed at the Belvedere Hotel in Midtown, an older building with the city’s slowest elevators (or so it seemed), but a really reasonable price: about $150 per night, which was dirt cheap for a big, clean room in Manhattan at the time.
I first saw The 39 Steps when I made my very first trip to London in 2006. The play is based on the Alfred Hitchcock film from 1934, his first major international hit, which starred Robert Donat and Madeleine Carroll, and which I love to this day. That film in turn was based on John Buchan’s 1915 novel of the same name, a bit of a ground-breaker when it came to spy novels. It’s an espionage thriller involving a man wrongly accused of murder—a classic Hitchcock theme—after he meets an attractive female spy one night. He embarks on a long journey fleeing from the coppers, from London to the highlands of Scotland, to prove his innocence. The London version of the play had only four actors in it: the two male and female leads, and two male actors who played every other part. A portion of the play takes place on a train, and they had a toy train at the front of the stage with lighting that projected its shadow onto the backdrop, and used hand-held windows to mark the lead’s escape from the train. It was just wonderfully and imaginatively staged, and had the added plus of being in the Criterion Theatre, located in Piccadilly Circus, a theater so far underground it was used as the headquarters for BBC Radio during World War II, such was the built-in bomb protection.
Two years later I was in New York City and stumbled across a cast signing at the big Borders bookstore in the Time Warner Building at Columbus Circle (only one of those three locations still exists). I got a poster signed (for the life of me, I can’t read any of the signatures, but it still occupies a place of importance above my toilet) and mentioned I saw the original play in London; they told me I had to come see “their” version. To be honest, I found the New York version extremely dumbed down, opening with an incredibly lame Alfred Hitchcock lookalike contest before the play started. In London, the play was called just The 39 Steps; in the U.S. it was called Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps. It maintained the same staging and four-person cast, but it wasn’t the same. I saw the play in the Cort Theatre, a rather ramshackle, rundown space, which used to be the home of The Merv Griffin Show when it was owned by Group W (Westinghouse), my former employer when I worked for KDKA-TV in Pittsburgh. I still enjoyed this version of the play, but the London one was truly special, partly because it was my first time in that city and my first play there. The 39 Steps ran on Broadway for 771 performances (with 23 previews) from January 4, 2008 through January 10, 2010. It eventually moved to the American Airlines Theatre.
Wishful Drinking
Roundabout Theatre Company, Studio 54 (Seen October 22, 2009)
In the fall of 2009 I was roaming around a very crowded Times Square one night when I spied a young woman dressed up as Princess Leia from Star Wars. She was very tiny, and as I approached her and got a better look at her, I noticed that she was wearing a sandwich board in addition to her white gown and ear-muff wig. The board was an ad that said something like “Follow Me to a Galaxy Far, Far Away,” and the front side said something like “Ask Me About Discount Tickets for Wishful Drinking starring Carrie Fisher.” I asked her and got a card for a ticket to Studio 54 the next night.
Wishful Drinking was Carrie Fisher’s one-woman show, recounting her life in great and often hilarious detail. It had a bit of a multi-media flavor to it, with a large screen behind her where images—photos, headlines, gossip magazine covers—were projected and a comfy living room set where Carrie made herself at home, bare feet and all. Fisher was warm and engaging and funny as she went through the complicated history of her life, including her family ties to Debbie Reynolds (mom) Eddie Fisher (erstwhile dad), and—tangentially—Elizabeth Taylor (one of the other women), and, of course, her career in that galaxy far, far away, including the very important fact that there are “no bras in outer space,” according to one Mr. George Lucas. At one point, while talking about the 1970s and the building we were in, the former famed discotheque Studio 54, she pointed directly at me in the balcony and said something like, “And right up there, I got laid!” I felt so honored.
A recorded version of Wishful Drinking is still available on HBO Max, or just plain ol’ Max or whatever that idiot CEO from Discovery has decided to call it by the time you’re reading this post. (A book version is also available, and it’s very enjoyable.) Wishful Drinking ran on Broadway (or—to be honest—way, way off Broadway) for only 133 performances (with 15 previews) from October 4, 2009 through January 17, 2010), so I saw it within the first two weeks of its opening. I’m sure glad I caught it. I miss Carrie Fisher very much.
Photo by me, 2009.
The Addams Family
Lunt-Fontanne Theatre (Seen October 20, 2010)
I’ve always liked the work of cartoonist Charles Addams, and as a kid, I watched the TV sitcom version of The Addams Family, starring John Astin and Carolyn Jones, the latter of whom I found devastatingly sexy as much as a 9-year-old can conceive devastatingly sexy to be at that age. The Broadway play based on Addams’s characters was a huge hit and starred Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth and I was lucky enough to see them both the night I attended in October 2010. This production had the most amazing set design I’ve ever seen in a Broadway show, and it’s almost impossible to describe, but I remember it as being able to see the whole Addams Family house at some points and it rotating to reveal various rooms. Lane was in rare form that night, setting his sights on one cast member and just generally f-ing with him throughout the performance, trying to make him break character and laugh. He was successful a number of times, much to my–and the audience’s–delight. The Addams Family ran for 722 performances (with 35 previews) from March 8, 2010 through December 31, 2011. At one point, Lane and Neuwirth were replaced by Roger Rees as Gomez and Brooke Shields as Morticia, which makes me very happy I saw the original cast!
Chaplin The Musical
Ethel Barrymore Theatre (Seen October 18, 2012)
This was a major disappointment for me. I love old movies and I thought a play about Charlie Chaplin (never one of my faves, to be honest … I’m more of a Buster Keaton guy), would be right up my alley. I just remember the music being forgettable and the acting sub-par. I was also incredibly disappointed that they didn’t reproduce Chaplin’s signature scene from The Great Dictator, where, dressed as a Hitler-like despot, he dances around with an inflatable globe. I don’t know if it was a rights issue or just an oversight, but that whole scene would have made this play infinitely better.
Chaplin the Musical ran for 135 performances and 24 previews from August 21, 2012 through January 6, 2013, so evidently I wasn’t the only one who found it disappointing.
Hecht and MacArthur’s The Front Page
Broadhurst Theatre (Seen October 2016)
This is the last play I’ve seen on Broadway and it was an amazing one to go out on. I have always been a fan of The Front Page as a movie, mainly the Cary Grant-Rosalind Russell version from 1940, His Girl Friday. It’s a classic tale of a muckraking newspaper and a murder case involving an escaped death row inmate. Throw in an ace reporter and editor’s fractured relationship and you have, in essence, a love story. The cast of this revival was amazing: Nathan Lane as editor Walter Burns, John Slattery as reporter Hildy Johnson, John Goodman as Sheriff Hartman, Jefferson Mays as Bensinger, Holland Taylor as Mrs. Grant, and Robert Morse as Mr. Pincus. Other names you may or may not recognize include TV actors Joey Slotnick, Dann Florek, and Lewis J. Stadlen (who played Groucho Marx on Broadway in Minnie’s Boys). I remember watching this and wondering where the hell Nathan Lane was until the end of the first act when he was revealed to have been there in the courthouse reporters’ room all along, standing back and observing all the chaos going on. I had no idea when he slipped on to the set. I was also—once again, as with The Addams Family, also starring Lane—lucky enough to see this on a night when all of the major cast were performing.
One bad thing about this play: Just moments before it started, a young woman pushed past me and plopped down in the seat next to me. She popped her gum through the entire first act and during the intermission, she talked on her phone to someone, bragging about how she got a $25.00 ticket, and she didn’t know what the play was about and it was okay, she guessed, but it was kinda boring. As the second act started, she started, too … to pop her gum again, and I leaned over and politely but firmly said, “Can you please stop doing that?” and she glared at me and promptly got up and walked out. The guy behind her seat on the next row leaned over and said, “Thank you!” to me and I felt I had done my good deed for the day, garnering the eternal gratitude of New York theatre-goers everywhere. Not sure how she got a $25.00 ticket (I didn’t … unfortunately, I don’t have my stub for this show, so I don’t remember how much I paid, but it certainly wasn’t 25 bucks!), but this star-studded show was certainly wasted on her. I loved every minute of it.
The Front Page ran for 117 performances (with 32 previews) from September 20, 2016 through January 29, 2017.
And there you have it: “My Life on Broadway.” 15 plays in almost 50 years is not a great record, but I enjoyed almost all of them (except for that dog, Chaplin). As I said in my first installment in this series, seeing an original Broadway play is like no other production. Partly it’s the theaters the plays are performed in–real houses of history–but It’s also the caliber of the casts and the production values. You can go see Miss Saigon in San Diego or Pittsburgh or the Portland of your choice (east coast or west), but I guarantee—even if it’s great—it’s not going to compare to the original Broadway production. I’d love to see another play or three on Broadway, but I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon, sad to say.
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