Hello from delicious First Class!
I so love getting my Elite status on Continental because I've been getting fabulous upgrades. Last Sunday night, I flew home from Pittsburgh, and then Monday morning I had to take a 6:45 AM flight to West Palm Beach. I found out Sunday night that I was getting an upgrade, and the only thing that got me up the next morning was looking forward to shoveling delicious first-class food into my gullet. Mmmm. I was flying down to Florida because the Kravis Center asked me to promote the upcoming Broadway musicals that are coming to their theatre over the next year. So, I prepared a special deconstruction show featuring The Addams Family, Les Miz, La Cage Aux Folles, Come Fly Away and Hair. For The Addams Family I played a recording of Doug Sills in The Scarlet Pimpernel to demonstrate how amazing he is (he's playing Gomez in the tour), and then I played the ending of "The Moon and Me" to show how pretty the song and how amazing the Uncle Fester high C is. For Les Miz I played the beautiful high B flat that Cosette has to sing incredibly quietly at the end of "A Heart Full of Love." I mentioned how difficult it is to sing and how it's worth it to see the show just to she if she cracks. Listen to Judy Kuhn nail it! For Hair I told everyone how it was the first Broadway show I saw (at age four) and how James and I took Juli to see it when she was eight (she loved it). I also played a medley of the phenomenal high belting that the character of Dionne has to do. Dionne was originally the brilliant Melba Moore, so I told the story of when she was first offered the show. Galt MacDermot (the composer) heard her in a studio session and wanted her to be in the new Broadway company (Hair had opened Off-Broadway and was about to transfer). He approached her after her session and asked her, very excitedly, "How would you like to do Hair on Broadway?" She glared and responded, "I didn't go to four years of music school to do nobody's hair on Broadway!" Sass! Listen to her brilliance: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mJ_B6yCNbU
PS, I was just handed something by the flight attendant, and it reminds me of a classic story from my family. Many years ago, my Aunt Phyllis went to a nice Japanese restaurant and was excited to get some kind of free appetizer. She knew it was called a Ha tau but didn't know exactly what it was. Well, she decided to be open-minded and eat it without asking for details. Unfortunately, her bravery backfired because what she was served was not for consumption. That's right, she nodded kindly to the waitress, brought the item to her lips and eagerly bit into a hot towel.
Anyhoo, after my Kravis presentation the audience told me how excited they were for the various musicals and, hopefully, they bought tickets for all of them. Speaking of musicals, I've done A Chorus Line a few times, and last week in Pittsburgh I ran into one of my former Maggies. Sharon Schaller (nee Connelly) and I did it at Candlewood Playhouse back in 1993 (or 4, can't remember). We laughed our heads off remembering how she got in trouble because she wore an orange shade of lipstick. The director/choreographer was outraged and told her during an angry note session, "Maggie isn't a clown!" For the rest of the run, we kept riffing on that idea and decided that Maggie actually does show up in full circus regalia to show off her clowning skills. First, we'd demonstrate her trying to do the opening choreography with crazy extra large clown shoes on, (incredibly awkward), then we decided that when she's not dancing, Maggie is perched on a unicycle. So, whenever the dancers are standing in the famous line, she's in the signature Maggie pose, but she has to constantly keep pedaling the unicycle front and back so she can keep from falling off. Then, at the end of the show, when Maggie doesn't get the gig and has to exit with the other dancers, we see them leave the stage in total silence…except for the squeakity-squawkity of her unicycle being ridden offstage.
Despite her LA address, Sarah is a major Broadway lover and, when she was young, had always wanted to play Eponine in Les Miz. Off the cuff, I decided to give her a chance to do her dream role and played the intro to "On My Own." She sang it all! Then we did "I Don't Need Anything But You" (I was Daddy Warbucks and she did the signature Annie harmony), and we closed the show with an angry version of "Aldonza." I was so impressed that she knew so many lyrics! She'll be doing a talkback at Judy Gold's hilarious show this week on Wednesday at the DR2 Theater. And you can listen to a repeat of Seth Speaks tonight from 7-9 PM and Tuesday morning from 11-1 PM on SiriusXM Stars, 107.
(Seth Rudetsky has played piano in the pits of many Broadway shows including Ragtime, Grease and The Phantom of the Opera. He was the artistic producer/conductor for the first five Actors Fund concerts including Dreamgirls and Hair, which were both recorded. As a performer, he appeared on Broadway in The Ritz and on TV in "All My Children," "Law and Order C.I." and on MTV's "Made" and "Legally Blonde: The Search for the Next Elle Woods." He has written the books "The Q Guide to Broadway" and "Broadway Nights," which was recorded as an audio book on Audible.com. He is currently the afternoon Broadway host on Sirius/XM radio and tours the country doing his comedy show, "Deconstructing Broadway." He can be contacted at his website SethRudetsky.com, where he has posted many video deconstructions.)