(upbeat classical music) - [Narrator] Tonight on "Showcase" with Barbara Kellar, Broadway actress Pamela Myers, and Rabbinic Director, Ken Kanter.

Stay tuned.

"Showcase" starts right now.

(upbeat classical music) - Hi, I'm Barbara Kellar, and here we are on our new set, which is very, very exciting.

It's inaugural show of the new set.

Peg Valentine, one of our great, great supporters, helped with it.

And Colin, our producer, put it together with all the guys on the crew.

It's really fun and exciting for our two guests today, who are absolutely two of our very, very favorite guests.

We have Rabbi-Ken Kanter.

Every time where I go, everybody says, "When are you gonna have that Rabbi on again?"

And, Pam, who should be no stranger to any Broadway Babies.

And we're here to talk about Stephen Sondheim, who passed away a year or so ago and his legacy will live on, oh, my goodness, but for now we have two people who can really talk about Sondheim.

We're gonna ask Ken first to give us a little background about who he was and what his kind of work, his body of work.

- Well, lemme just say that Pam and I are very honored to be in this new set with you.

- [Pam] Yes.

- It's really special.

- The first ones to sit in these chairs, okay then.

- [Barbara] Yes.

- When they write the history of theater in the latter half of the 20th century and into the 21st century, the headline will be Stephen Sondheim worked here.

He's one of those men who was able to bridge the Golden Age people because his mentor was Oscar Hammerstein of Rodgers and Hammerstein fame.

He worked with the great composers of the '50s and '60s and '70s.

Wrote lyrics early in his career, finally got to write music and lyrics, and then went on to be undoubtedly the greatest of the influencers of the theater between the 1970s and to the present.

And here he is having passed away almost two years ago, and he has a new Broadway show opening this season.

So it is a remarkable story, remarkable man, a true genius, and a person who was very thrilled to be compared to Gilbert and Sullivan in terms of the wit of his lyrics, in terms of the style he understood from Oscar Hammerstein, who guided him as a youngster in how to write and what to do.

He had an amazing story, but I'm gonna tell you a good rabbinical word, which is the word chutzpah, which means a lot of nerve for me to sit here next to this lady whose career began as such a great star in one of Sondheim's earliest musicals in "Company" it's very special to be here with you again.

- Oh, Rabbi.

- It's the truth, it's the truth.

Now I'm gonna tell you one quick story, because it's my only direct Sondheim story, and the rest of them are all gonna be from Pam.

I was directing a show in college, 1972, and Sondheim was in Boston in previews for "Follies," and we were in Cambridge and we were doing "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," one of his very first musicals, which he wrote both the music and the lyrics.

And we said, "Let's invite him to come to our show," this little college production.

- I never heard this story.

- This sounds like a movie.

- 125 people in a small little black box theater.

Anyway, we said, "He's not gonna come.

He's in the middle of doing this big show."

And so we wrote him.

There was no email yet in 1972, and we get this letter back, said, "I'll be there."

And we figured, well, he'll come to the cast, you know, show up for a few minutes then leave.

He's got better things to do.

He shows up for the beginning of the show, stayed all the way through, and then went to the cast party.

- [Pam] Man.

- Oh, my God.

- It was astounding.

And to have that time that I got to meet with him, my only time in person, and then to sit next to someone who worked with him, knew him, was a friend of his, it's pretty special.

- That is so wonderful.

- That is really, yeah.

- He was very gracious to share the incredible talent.

And by the way, 1972, he wasn't Stephen Sondheim yet.

This was early on, but pretty exciting.

- Yeah, he had just done "Company."

- Yeah, right, and then "Follies" was next.

- They were working on "Follies."

It hadn't opened in New York yet then.

- Right, exactly.

- That's a big deal.

- [Barbara] You're on.

- Well, that's too funny.

My gosh, one thing about Sondheim, though, that I really came to appreciate over the years, he was gracious.

And he answered every piece of mail he got as far as I know.

And lots of people wrote him including myself once in a while.

I didn't bother him very much, but a lot of people became mail buddies with him.

I mean, they would exchange notes and opinions, and everything about a lot of shows I understand over the years.

So everybody has a collection of notes from him.

And good manners.

He always had good manners.

- One of the impressions that I got, which maybe is wrong, was that he was somewhat of a recluse and eccentric.

- I don't know, I mean, I think he was eccentric, but then again, so many people are in the music theater.

- Well, yeah, what's different about him?

- I know.

- You can be an eccentric and a genius versus you can just be weird.

And he was an eccentric genius.

- [Barbara] Eccentric genius, okay.

- Yeah, he was.

Well, the funny part about, I'll talk about my audition and stuff, but the funny thing is, is right after "Company" opened, I'll just jump ahead a little bit.

I moved to the East Side, and it was very close to where he lived in his townhouse on East 49th Street.

And, you know, he lived next door to Katharine Hepburn, and then she lived next door to Ruth Gordon, and who was her husband, the playwright?

- [Ken] Garson Kanin.

- Garson Kanin.

And so they were in a row there, these brownstones.

I being officially from Cleves, Ohio and then Cincinnati went to the conservatory, and I one day just dropped in at his house, just went up and knocked on the door.

I mean, I knew him.

"Company" had opened.

And, Luis, who was his person who was like his housekeeper, house person, who took care of everything.

I think he lived on the top floor.

He came to the door, and I don't know if Sondheim was home or not, but he told me he wasn't home and he invited me in.

He served me cake.

I mean, we just chatted it up right in Sondheim's living room.

He was so sweet that way, I mean, and finally I realized this is probably not done very often.

And, of course, then I found out that hardly anybody ever did that was drop in on somebody's house.

- [Barbara] Right.

- Like we did in our neighborhood in Cleves, but boy, that was so like him, and he had this wonderful, you know, all these puzzles.

He was well-known for having all these puzzles and board games and stuff.

And his mother who has her own reputation, I'm old enough, see, to have met her and been around her a little bit.

And her nickname was Foxy.

And she, of course, has a lot of notoriety in his life.

- Yeah, well, he was estranged from her.

- Oh, it was very actually sad and bad I think for a long time, but, anyway, she made needlepoint pillows, and so his couch was covered with needlepoint pillows.

I guess that's how she made her mark.

- Yeah.

- Okay, let's go back to when I went to New York.

I was there two-and-a-half months, and I had a call for my first Broadway Show audition.

And I went to it not knowing anything, what to expect whatsoever.

And in those days you did audition on a stage in a theater with just the work light, you know, the ghost light as they call it, a light bulb on the stage and it's very dark and they let you in the stage door and they have, like, one dressing room open, or the restroom.

And then it's a dark house with everybody sitting out there and there was usually a piano in the pit.

So I went out there and sang my song.

Now I didn't know what to sing really.

So I sang, I'd been doing these songs.

I had done "Summer Stock" and I had done "Once Upon a Mattress."

So one of the songs I sang was "Shy."

As it turns out it was Mary Rodgers' show.

And they were such good friends, you know, and I think they were floored all of a sudden that I came in and sang that song full out.

And then I sang for my ballad "God Didn't Make Little Green Apples."

Well, that was an odd choice, I guess, because I just didn't have a lot of things at the ready.

I had been learning all these songs my last couple of years in college to sing for entertainments.

I mean, I sang here in town at wedding receptions and parties, and all kinds of just stuff that you do to earn money.

And so "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" and "Little Green Apples" were my two selections I had right then so I sang that.

It turns out Stephen Sondheim thought I wrote it because he'd never heard it before.

It was a pop song, a very big pop song then.

So in any case, I do remember Hal Prince being at the house, and, of course, you couldn't see them.

And Michael Bennett and George Furth, and Ruth Mitchell who was Hal's assistant.

And they started talking immediately about, oh, well, I wasn't even planning on reading and I don't think I even read that day.

So I had to go to Soundheim's book "Finishing the Hat" to really remember how he remembered it, because to me I had nothing to compare it to.

And that's how the entire "Company" experience went.

Not only was it an unusual show, it was way ahead of its time.

And it was one of the first shows to use ensemble as the principals, or the principals were the ensemble also.

And ever since then, and Michael Bennett worked on it, and he took that concept and put it into "Chorus Line" and "Hamilton" and all those shows, you know, since.

So, Donna McKechnie and Beth Howland really were the only dancers in the show.

Donna had to fight for her number.

They weren't even going to have a dance for her.

They couldn't figure out exactly what to do with the three single girl characters.

I was supposed to be a New Yorker at the beginning.

So they changed the entire thing because I was this Midwesterner who was like, you know, Hal Prince, oops, Hal Prince used to just talk about how there was nothing Jewish about me or a New Yorker.

I was so Midwestern he couldn't believe it.

And I think that's one of the attractions they wanted.

And so they rewrote the entire part of Marta, and I became this naive girl with a lot of bravado who came to New York.

And from then on they put a couple of my experiences, actually, into the dialogue for her part.

I'd had a very funny experience on 14th Street when I first moved to town in New York.

I was green as grass.

I mean, they could see me coming and my two roommates from here.

It was a very funny experience.

And George just put it right into the dialogue about 14th Street, you know, it's the center of the universe, and all these goofy things he said.

- Right, what happened to you on 14th?

- Oh, well, I went to the movies with my girlfriends and we didn't know that you wouldn't go to 14th Street to go to a movie.

It was kind of very iffy.

We went in, sat down, we thought it was a real movie.

- Oh, no, that's a caution sign.

- And this man came sat next to me and he, well, he exposed himself, what can I say?

And that was just a shocker to me, but we were so conscious of, we didn't get up and scream or anything.

We were like, well, what do we do?

Well, we paid for the movie and we stayed for the movie.

Now if that wasn't Marta, I mean, just brash.

- That was you.

- That was me.

- That was you for real and you in the show.

- That's right.

- And, you know, Barbara, with the story, as Pam tells it of the original "Company" Cincinnati has a very important role in "Company" later on because it's been revived a number of times.

- [Pam] That's right, yeah.

- One of the most interesting was John Doyle's revival here in Cincinnati.

And it was one of the very first times when the performers were also the orchestra.

That was kind of John- - That's right that was his- - John Doyle's kind of gimmick.

- Thing of doing that.

- Was to do that, yeah.

- Yeah.

- And then Pam, we were just talking a little bit before our program today about the most recent revival, which was a 180 revival meaning the male characters became female and the female characters became male.

Sondheim was part of that writing.

It started in London and was brought over to.

- But not all of them, not all the characters.

- Right.

- That was even, you know, more interesting and a little bit confusing to me because being in the original cast, because some of the parts stayed the same, but my part was then played by a man as were the other two single girls they were now single men because the main character, Bobby, who Dean Jones had originated was now a woman.

And so we were invited to the ones that are left.

You know, we've lost half of our cast over the years 'cause it has been over 50 years, but we were invited to the opening last December a year ago of this new "Company" and that was really interesting, so it was quite, quite, it just had gone from, you know, a whole 360.

It was just amazing, the entire experience.

- [Barbara] Wow.

- And some of my best friends, Donna McKechnie is one of my best friends ever.

And we're still in very close touch.

And it just it was the beginning of my career.

And I have to say, I think doing "Company" it never would've had the same quality to it because when you were in a Sondheim show an original cast, you were very well-respected because first of all, you'd never learn the music.

I mean, especially you don't have any cast albums to listen to.

- Especially your songs.

- Our songs were like, woo, it took us eight hours to get through two pages of the opening number.

- Oh, my God.

- When you have Bobby, Bobby, Bobby babe, Bobby, you got all these different, you know, I'm serious because we were not the most crack musicians in the world.

And picture it, George Ko and Charlie Kimbrough, and Elaine Stritch, and Bobby Bravo.

We had to be cued for everything and it was hard.

It was very hard to learn, so.

And I came in and how I found out I was even cast is we had a callback audition.

And after that callback Sondheim came to me and he said, "I wrote you a song."

And that's, I assumed, well, I guess I'm going to do it.

So the next time I heard it, the next time I saw them was at the first rehearsal at this rehearsal studio downtown in Manhattan.

And he brought another hundred people in.

I have the original manuscript, and it was almost a fourth higher.

He sat down and he didn't play it I don't think.

I think it was the rehearsal pianist.

And they sang through it and I was just staggered because it was so much higher.

- [Barbara] Than your voice.

- Yeah, it was, like, wide, almost up in the way, almost had to be legit.

- [Barbara] But could you do it?

- Well, I could do it, but it didn't sound like I don't think how they wanted it to sound, but he instantly said, "Don't worry, we're gonna change the key.

Don't worry about that."

- Oh, okay.

- So that's how I knew, oh, this is the big time.

He changed the key.

- He wrote the song for you.

- I don't know if he wrote it in the key that he sang it in as a man, you know, when he was writing it.

- [Barbara] Right.

- He just wrote it out, but the minute he heard me trying to sing it he knew that's not the sound I want.

I don't want it to be a soprano, you know.

- And he changed the key instead of the singer.

- That's right.

- That's right, it was for you, absolutely.

You have some props there.

- Oh, I do have a couple of props.

I brought these because I still have them, and they're so interesting.

First of all, our costumes, you know, I had a leather vest I wore.

- [Barbara] This is for "Company."

- For "Company."

And it was hand-painted with flames on it and it was purple and red and silver.

That was the only piece of my costume that remained after we played Boston, and everything changed.

They kept changing our items of clothing 'cause we only wore one costume through the entire show.

So we had this costume designer named D.D.

Ryan.

Now she was a very close friend of Sondheim and Hal Prince.

They were all very close friends.

They lived on the Upper East Side and she was an editor at "Harper's Bazaar" magazine And she was quite exotic.

I mean, she was, well, she looked like Diana Vreeland did then, you know.

- Yeah.

- And she smoked Camel cigarettes all the time.

- We're all laughing, dates us.

- I know.

- We all know who Diana Vreeland was.

- We know who that is, quite exotic.

And she was asked to, because she was quite the dresser, she was always on the best-dressed list and very exotic.

And she was asked to do the costumes.

Well, she wasn't really a costume designer, she was just a clothes person.

And so she had us all in these unusual things, but one day she came to the stage door, we were still in previews, and she had this scarf around her neck tied this silk scarf.

And I came to the stage door to go in and she said, "Darling," and she took off her scarf off her, and put it around my neck and she tied it and she said, "Wear this today," and so I wore it in the matinee.

I think it was a matinee that preview.

And that was the last time I wore it.

It was not okayed by the powers that be, so I got to keep it.

So I've always kept it as this beautiful souvenir.

- For one performance.

- One performance.

- It opened and closed at the same show.

- It opened and closed on the same show.

- Yes, and the other thing are these shoes.

Now, these shoes were, you know, they fit the shoes to you.

They draw your foot and they make custom shoes for you.

And these were quite exotic and unusual then.

So they made these, like, these gladiator sandals for me, and they were in the show for a few performances.

I wore them out of town, and I wore them in New York for a little while, but I was relieved of wearing these shoes.

They weren't the easiest to work in.

- I wouldn't think so.

- But they went to Bergdorf's, and just bought me a pair of silver shoes as they did with a couple of other things.

- Yeah, sounds like a good idea.

- They did that with Elaine's costume too.

Elaine Stritch didn't like her costume.

So when we got back to New York they just went to Bergdorf's and bought her a dress to wear.

So that's really, I think I'm going to donate these to the Broadway Museum in New York, I don't know.

- They're fabulous shoes.

- They're kind of just unique fandom.

- Pam, you have starred as Mama Rose.

- [Pam] Yes, uh-huh.

- And actually we have a little piece of that to end this show.

You've starred as Mrs. Lovett.

- [Pam] Yes.

- In "Sweeney Todd," which is revived now on Broadway.

- Yes.

- But Mrs. Lovett will never have a better Mrs. Lovett than Pam.

- Well, thank you.

I thought that of Lansbury because I saw the original of that too.

- Yeah.

- We were always invited to all the openings of house shows after that Sondheim shows.

- That's great.

- Like "Follies."

- One of the things that's interesting, if you look at Sondheim.

- "Sweeney."

- He never wrote the same show twice.

- [Barbara] Right.

- You can look at Rodgers and Hammerstein, you can look at Cole Porter, you can look at the Gershwins, a lot of their things you could say, oh, I know who wrote that, or, oh, I know that.

- [Barbara] Right.

- Sondheim's were so different.

- [Barbara] Different.

- [Pam] Absolutely right.

- That he went from New York of 1970 to Broadway of 1930s mixed with '70s with "Follies."

Each time was some completely different thing, which is a mark of the talent of this young lady that she could play in all those different roles including a mass murderer who's helping.

- That was my favorite one to play.

- I bet.

- Actually, of all the characters.

- I was gonna ask you.

- It's gotta be.

- What was your favorite role was Mrs. Lovett?

- Well, strangely enough, I actually was cast as Dot to open "Sunday in the Park with George" in Los Angeles.

And that was the Broadway set and costumes and everything.

So I did that, which was so fun for me to play something like that because I was never cast as a femme fatale, you know, and that was glorious to do, but Mrs. Lovett, I'll tell you, that's the most fun to play because she has everything.

That part is loaded, and even better than, you know, everybody says didn't you love playing Gypsy?

Well, yes, I loved playing Mama Rose, but it is brutal.

- As a show I was just gonna say, it is.

- It never lets up.

- You've done so much and you know so much.

And, Ken, you're just fabulous.

And, Pam, we wanna end with Pam singing from her second favorite show.

- Right, it is satisfying.

- I have to tell you that Mama Rose is my favorite.

- [Pam] Oh.

- Because I feel like Mama Rose sometimes.

♪ You can do it ♪ - That's right, that's right.

- Yeah, so we have a clip, Pam singing "Everything's Coming Up Roses," which I hope it is for everybody.

- I do too.

- Well, we'll see you.

- Sondheim will go on and on.

- Yes, you'll sing us out.

- Okay.

- And we'll have a cheers to Sondheim.

- You bet, thank you so much.

- You're welcome.

- Thank you.

♪ I had a dream ♪ ♪ A dream about you baby ♪ ♪ It's gonna come true baby ♪ ♪ They think that we're through but baby ♪ ♪ You'll be swell ♪ ♪ You'll be great ♪ ♪ Gonna have the whole world on a plate ♪ ♪ Starting here starting now ♪ ♪ Honey everything's coming up roses ♪ ♪ Clear the decks ♪ ♪ Clear the tracks ♪ ♪ You've got nothing to do but relax ♪ ♪ Blow a kiss ♪ ♪ Take a bow ♪ ♪ Honey everything's coming up roses ♪ ♪ Now's your inning ♪ ♪ Stand the world on it's ear ♪ ♪ Set it spinning ♪ ♪ That will be just the beginning ♪ ♪ Curtain up ♪ ♪ Light the lights ♪ ♪ You've got nothing to hit but the heights ♪ ♪ You'll be swell ♪ ♪ You'll be great ♪ ♪ I can tell just you wait ♪ ♪ That lucky star they talk about is due ♪ ♪ Honey everything's coming up roses for me ♪ ♪ And for you ♪ ♪ You can do it ♪ ♪ All you need is a hand ♪ ♪ We can do it ♪ ♪ Mama is gonna see to it ♪ ♪ Curtain up ♪ ♪ Light the lights ♪ ♪ You've got nothing to hit but the heights ♪ ♪ You'll be swell wait and see ♪ ♪ There's the bell ♪ ♪ Follow me ♪ ♪ And nothing's gonna stop us 'til we're through ♪ ♪ Honey everything's coming up roses and daffodils ♪ ♪ Everything's coming up sunshine and Santa Claus ♪ ♪ Everything's gonna be bright lights and lollipops ♪ ♪ Everything's coming up roses for me ♪ ♪ And for you ♪ - [Narrator] Join us next week for another episode of "Showcase" with Barbara Kellar right here on CET.

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