Iva Withers: I didn’t even blink.
Interviewer: There we go. Let’s start with a general Broadway question. Describe the feeling when you first set foot on a Broadway stage.
Iva Withers: When I first set foot on a Broadway stage, it was on a rainy, rainy day, and I was going into audition for the replacement of a chorus of Oklahoma. And I had prepared a medley of Oklahoma songs with my wonderful teacher Estelle Liebling. And it was suggested that I go for the audition by Joan Roberts, who was playing Laurie. So they told me as I went in, oh, Miss Withers, you will. Probably be stopped, but don’t let that bother you. They’ll know in a minute if they want to. So I went on the stage and I started my medley of five songs. They let me finish all five songs.” At that point, a little man came down the aisle. He looked up, he said, we’ll use you, leave your name and address. I came off the stage, and I said to the stage manager, that, my name is Iva Withers, and my phone number is so and so. And who was that gentleman? Well, that was Richard Rodgers. Who’s he? He said, he happened to write the music. Oh, and then I walked away and went home and waited for the phone call, which I got.
Interviewer: That’s great. So Agnes Camille is a good friend of yours.
Iva Withers: Well, Agnes was the choreographer, as you know, and eventually she became my maid of honor when I married. And I did three shows with her, Oklahoma, Carousel, and Gentleman. And when I first met her, when I was actually playing Laurie at the St. James Theater in New York, and we just finished doing the Many a New Day Ballet. And I came off the stage and it was glowing, I said, I’ve done an Agnes DeMille ballet, and she was standing right beside me. Oops, oops, but we became very good friends, very good friends. She’s a wonderful person. And you know, the more I look back at the work she did, the more I appreciate what she did. She was really quite incredible. She would learn from the dancers the steps required for say, a particular movement. In other words, when she was doing Rodeo for the Ballet Rouge de Monte Carlo at the Met, she asked the answers. Freddie Franklin, Kokich, and Yuskevich, how would you pretend you were riding a horse? So they showed her this particular step, and it was in the Ballet Rodeo. It’s also in the ballet of Oklahoma. Tried to present herself as knowing all. She was glad to use the knowledge that these Russian dancers had brought with them to New York and a lot of their work is in Oklahoma and Carousel.
Interviewer: You know, I had heard that Agnes DeMille was a big champion for dancers’ rights, that would sort of go along with that, is that true?
Iva Withers: Oh, yes. Well, we were all working then. When I was hired first for Carousel in the chorus, our rehearsal pay was $15 a week for five weeks. And then we were given the magnificent sum of $75 a week to go on the road. But to get back to Agnes DeMille, when Agnes was trying to get established as a ballet choreographer, she used to go and stand outside. The stage door at the Metropolitan Opera House with her portfolio and one night Kokic, Kazimir Kokic who was the husband of Alexandra Danilova, the prima ballerina, said why are you always here young lady and she said well I have an idea for a ballet and he said what she said, well I’d like to meet Mr. Denham. He said well come with me. So he took her into Danilovin’s dressing room and asked her name. She said my name’s Agnes the mill and. I have this idea for a cowboy ballet, which I think would be very funny for the Russians to do. So Kokic went and brought Mr. Sergei Denim into the dressing room, and Denim said to Agnes, what is it you have to do, and she said, well, I think it’s funny for the Russians to do a cowboy ballet. So he said, what do you want to do? She said, I’d like to rehearse with some of your dancers, and he said well, we’re on tour. You can come with us. You pay your own way. You can rehearse with the dancers when they’re not busy. And if I like what I see, we might mount it. So she traveled with the Ballerus on their final tour of this country, because that was 1941 into 42. And their tour ended here. So they came back to the Met, and they staged Rodeo. Kermit Love did the costumes, Korinska did the actual making of the costumes and it was a tremendous hit. It took 20 odd curtain calls the first night. But during the ballet, there’s a moment when Agnes is alone on the stage and she’s waiting for Kokic to come on as the head wrangler and he’s still being sewed into his costume because it wasn’t ready. We finally came on so the ballet goes a little bit down and then it picks up again. But she used Kokic as a head wrangler because he had been the one to introduce her. So when, later on, Kokic went to war with Igor and spent three years in the South Pacific, Philippines and so forth, Guadalcanal, Tulagi, New Caledonia. When he came back, he called Agnes and he said, I need a job, I’m back from the war. And now he had his American citizenship, he could work here. So she said, well, I don’t have anything, but if you’d like to join the company of Carousel, they’re in Chicago.
Interviewer: So Agnes DeMille, what Michael was saying, what did she mean to Broadway? Start with Agnes deMille.
Iva Withers: Well, Agnes DeMille really did the most important thing for dancers on Broadway. She brought them into the story, and she used them to further the story. And when she did Oklahoma, she did have a dream ballet. We had dancing doubles. At that time, I was playing Laurie at the St. James Theater, and you would just make a gesture, and your duplicate double would come on behind you, make the same gesture, and go into the ballet. But she integrated the ballet in Carousel in Oklahoma, and she did wonderful things in Gentleman for Blondes. I think she was a prime mover in the effort to get the producers to understand that ballet could tell more of the story in just such a way that the audience would love it, and they did. When we opened in London in Carousell when I was playing Julie, Bambi Lynn did the If I Loved ballet and she stopped the show cold. It’s the first time that they had to bring a dancer back for a special bow in a musical. And it was really, Bambi said, was I that good? She said, I did this in Broadway, but I didn’t get this kind of response on Broadway. But Agnes was wonderful. So as I say, I had the three associations, Oklahoma Carousel and London Carousels, and then Gentleman for Blondes, and then when I got married. She was a wonderful, wonderful person because she would use. What the dancers could contribute of their own, what they were comfortable with. I think that’s a thing that she thought was very important, that they didn’t have to always style themselves as she wanted. She would try to get them to use what they were able to do and bring that into the ballet.
Interviewer: Great, excellent. I’ll ask one more Agnes question and then we can move on. So you had mentioned Rodeo. I’m just curious how Rogers and Hammerstein came to hire her for Oklahoma-based. There are.
Iva Withers: There are many stories about how Agnes was asked to do Oklahoma. As it was told to me, she came back from Hollywood where she’d done several movies, because her uncle was Cecil B. DeMille. And she could have stayed in Hollywood and done a lot of movies, but she wanted to be a choreographer of ballet. So she had this idea, and she would go nightly to the old Metropolitan Opera at 39th Street. And wait as the dancers would be going in for the performance. And one evening, Kazimir Kokic, who was a member of the company, saw her and said, why are you always here every night? And she would say, well, I have an idea for a ballet for the Russian company, and I would like to meet Mr. Sergey Denim, who’s the head of the Company. So Mr. Kokic said, well come with me. And he took her into this. And Terry Hellburn, who is head of The Theater Guild, had this idea to do Green Grow the Lilacs into a Western, and they were thinking of somebody who was familiar with Western-style dance. So it was either Terry Hellburn or Lawrence Langner, who was also the attorney of Theater Guild, to go and see this ballet. So then they decided they might take Rogers and Hammerstein to see it also, because they had decided they would do the score. So they all went to see Rodeo, and it had a 22-curtain-call evening, and they were very impressed. And they then contacted Ms. DeMille and asked her if she would do Oklahoma. So that’s how it came about that Agnes really got into her ballet world which made her very happy, very happy. The first time I saw Agnes DeMille was down in one of the ballet studios in the village where she was auditioning dancers for Oklahoma. On a set of benches to one side sat Richard Rogers, Oscar Hammerstein, Terry Hellburn of the Theater Guild, Armina Marshall, Lawrence Langner, Ruben Mamoulian who was to be the director. They were all sitting there watching Agnes. Chosen dancers through their paces, and they were little, but they’re so overly balletic. They’re so, well, can’t we get prettier, younger, a little more, I can’t use the word, into the ballet that you’re planning. She said, no, I have to have these girls. They were strong dancers. There was Jemzy DeLappe. There was Dona Krupska. There was… Joan McCracken and Katharine Sergave and a lot of the dancers, Jenny Wartman and Dusty Worrell, I mean I can name them all because they all became my very best friends, but she had to insist that she be alone, the one to decide what type of dancers were going to do her ballet. And when Rodgers and Hammerstein first saw the ballet, I’m sure they were a little it taken aback and then sort of realizing. What she had done to bring the story together through these dancers, that they were completely overcome and they loved it because she used the postcard girls, Judd’s postcard girl. Now, Judd was the strongest person in the ballet because he was the menace of Curly and Laurie’s romance and he had this marvelous, strong, passionate moment trying to get Laurie away from Curly. And I think at the end of the ballet, he does carry her off. And that you’re less wondering what’s going to happen with Judd going to take her. But Judd and his postcard girls were just so fantastic. The girls would come out wiggling their skirts in this whole sort of can-can type of thing. And Rodgers and Hammerstein were absolutely stunned. And it was one of the things they didn’t have to change. They took out one song, I believe, in Boston. But everything Agnes DeMille just stayed, because it was powerful. Really was the best part for me to watch these dancers, although I didn’t have much time to watch them because you had to make a costume change from what you were wearing at the beginning of the ballet and then at the next scene. But when I did see them, I was very impressed with them, very, very. Because I’ve always been a ballet lover. First time I saw ballet was in my hometown of Winnipeg, Canada when the ballet was came and I said, oh, that’s dancing. That’s dancing, because I’d been dancing at Vaudeville. As a hooper, the tap dancer. I said to my father, I’m never going to dance again. That’s dancing. And it was the same thing that happened when Agnes did Oklahoma. That’s dance, you know? Because it blended with the story, and it brought people into appreciating ballet that would not go to a ballet company’s performance. They would say to their wives, I don’t want to go and see the ballet. And their wives would say, oh, yes, you must. But then when they saw it in Oklahoma. Then they said, yes, ballet is okay. It’s okay. It really is. During the time that I, as I say, the first time I met Agnes DeMille was when I was watching her audition her dancers for Mr. Rogers and Mr. Hammerstein. And as they watched these girls do the grand jete’s across the room and double pirouettes and leaps and so forth, they were more of a mind of Broadway musical comedy. Although Oklahoma wasn’t basically a comedy, it was a light-hearted musical about the West, and they couldn’t see this particular type of ballet dancer in their musical. They wanted younger girls, they wanted prettier girls, and they wanted sexier costumes, but Agnes was very firm and said, no, I must have these particular girls because they are strong and that’s what I need.
Interviewer: You have the honor of being the only person. Well, I’ll let you tell it. Your shuttler story. How did that come to be? I mean, tell us that they’re playing across the street from each other, name the shows, and just go.
Iva Withers: We have to go back a bit. Before Kara went in to rehearse, well, excuse me. Before Carousel went into rehearsal, I was told, instead of being a replacement in the chorus of Oklahoma, I was going to be put into the chorus of Caroussel, and I said, what is Carouscel? They said, well, that’s our next musical. Theater Guild is planning. So I went to rehearsal and signed a contract with the Theater Guild to be a member of the chorus. And when we were rehearsing… Clayton, who was to be the leading lady, was not able to come to rehearsal because she’d been in a taxi accident here in New York. So Mr. Mamoulian asked me to read her lines so the other actors could get their blocking and start to learn and memorize. So I had the advantage of working with Mr.Mamoulian early in the rehearsals before Ms. Clayton could join us. Then when Jan did join us, we became very good friends. She whispered to me, what do I do here? And I said, we do this. Okay, what do I do there? We do that. So we became very, very close friends. We were almost identical in size and coloring. And when we went to Boston, the show was scheduled to open at the Colonial Theater in Boston. My father had called me from Canada and said, stay in a good hotel. It’s your first time staying in a hotel. You stay in the very best hotel. So I booked into the Ritz-Carlton. I loved you. So at the end of that moment, Ms. Helburn said, well, You will be the understudy for Miss Clayton.” So that was great with me. I dogged Jan. She didn’t breathe that I didn’t know when she would breathe. She didn’t sing that I don’t know what tune she was singing or what key she was thinking in. I didn’t make myself a nuisance, but I was observing everything. So after we came to New York and we ran April, May, June, July, August, five months, Mr. Rogers came to me one night backstage at the theater and he said, We want to see you play the part one day. You’ll go on a Thursday matinee. Without an orchestra rehearsal, without a costume fitting, without a company rehearsal. I had only worked with understudies. I was thrown into the lead of Carousel for a matinee. So it’s August the 9th, 1945. After the performance, Richard Rogers, Oscar Hammerstein, Terry Hilbert and all these people came back into the dressing room and Oscar Hammerstine was crying. He had tears running down his face. I just looked at what’s happening here. So they come to the guild tomorrow. So the next day I went to the theater guild and they signed me to a three-year contract for either Carousel or Oklahoma. Well, I needed the money, so I signed the contract. I went back in the course of Carousels and Mr. Rogers came to me one night. He said, we want you to go across the street and learn the lead in Oklahoma. I was very upset because I loved Carousel. And I wasn’t really in love with Oklahoma. In fact, I had never seen it, so I had no opinion of it. So he said, you go start going across the street tomorrow and you will rehearse with so-and-so, Mr. Mill and Mr. Rodenko and so forth, and we’re going to put you into the show. You go to Van Damme and get your pictures taken in the costumes and so-forth. So suddenly, here I am playing the lead in Oklahoma with my pictures out front, programs, souvenir books. I said, oh, I like this, this is great. This is a wonderful show. This is fun. This is real fun. And I’ve always been a girl who loved a lot of fun. So while I’m doing Oklahoma, I was supposed to do it just for one month because they didn’t know if I could do eight performances a week. I was a chorus girl and I’d done one performance, but can you do eight performance as a week? So after two weeks, I was called back to Carousel because Jan Clayton was suddenly ill. I said, who’s going to do Oklahoma? And they said, that’s OK. We have another understudy in Oklahoma. So you come back to Carousel. So I had done Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday Oklahoma. Thursday matinee, Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday matinee Carousal, and Saturday night back to Oklahoma. I did them both in one day. I said I guess that proves I can do eight shows a week, because I can two shows in eight shows. Anyway, that was when I was definitely assured that when Jan left the show. I would take over the lead in Carousel. But I was called a shuttler of Broadway because I kept going from Oklahoma to Carousels, back to Oklahoma. I split month of September and I split the month of October doing both shows. The only girl who’s ever done that and the only one who would ever do it because the union called me and said, are you getting two salaries? So they brought a new law in that you can do any number of roles in one show. In fact, you could play every female role in one show under study. But you cannot do the female lead in two hit musicals in two different theaters ever again. So that’s my only claim to fame.
Interviewer: Would you say that being a Broadway performer is a glamorous job? No, no. Remember to use the subject in the answer.
Iva Withers: Most people think that working on Broadway is really glamorous, and it’s not, it’s a job. People say to me, oh, but you’re a Broadway star. I said, no, I’m working. It’s my job. If I could do your job, I’d do your job, but this is my job, I’ve been in Vaudeville since I was 10 years old. This is my jobs, and you get ready in the morning by going over your script, vocalizing, getting over your song, taking a dance class. Then having a very light supper, about 4.30 or 5 o’clock, get to the theater at seven, even though half hours, well, it used to be eight o’ clock was half hour, then it was moved to 7.30 was half an hour. So you get there and you do the whole thing in your head over again, you go through the whole show. Sometimes you go down on the stage and you’d walk your role. You’d say, yes, in this scene I go here, this scene, I go there, and I back up, I’d go down. Map out the whole thing all over again. And it’s a job. It’s not glamor. It’s a jobs. And by the end of the evening, you’re so exhausted. All you do is go right home and go to bed, or take a shower and wash your hair and get ready for the next day. It’s an eight-hour day job. People don’t realize that. They think, oh, you just go to the theater and perform. No, no, no. Not that at all. Not that all. And not only that, you never sure you’re going to be I’ll do. Pull off the same performance because you’re working with a cast that have they prepared as well as you prepared and you hope so. We had one experience where one performer came in and was on drugs and it just drove everybody crazy because you don’t know how to deal with this. And in one of my very, very late shows I worked with Jean-Jacques Gabor and she would make up lines and you’d say, yes, of course. That’s right. I was just going to say that. But she was a wonderful person. I shouldn’t say anything against her because she was a wonderful, funny, funny lady. But in Carousel, it was a very, very difficult show to do emotionally. Because it was not a lighthearted show like Oklahoma. When Oklahoma opened, it just. 1945 was just when the war was, oh no, it opened in 1943. The war was over in 45. When I went in, it was 1945. So the show had been running for two years. And they used to give tickets to the servicemen who would be coming home from the war. So during that month when I was a shuttler on Broadway, some of the servicemens were given tickets to both Carousel and Oklahoma. And there was an article written by, I think, George Sheen Nathan. It said that, if any of our servicemen went to see Carousel Matinee at Oklahoma evening and think they saw the same leading lady, they did. Now, let them figure out how that happened. But John McClain, one of the writers of the column in the New York Sun used to say, Iva must be an atomic success by now, because the atomic bomb had just stopped it. I came on Broadway. I resented that because I had lost my own brother. He was a pilot with the Royal Air Force and I’d lost my young, my fiance who was a pilot in the Royal air force. So I was very, very anxious that no slight remarks be made about the war or our war effort because as a Canadian, we lost more Canadian men in World War II than any country. We lost all our young men. That’s probably why I stayed in New York. There were no young men at home.
Interviewer: Question about Oscar Hammerstein. You had mentioned that he would take his lyrics very seriously, as he should, and was not receptive to people changing.
Iva Withers: When Oscar Hammerstein gave you a lyric, that was it. You could not change an ah, the, or so. Or there was one instance in the wonderful song, what’s the use of wondering in carousel? The last verse, anywhere he leads you, you will walk. The last note you were singing was walk. And he wanted to hear the kuh, because it was rhyming with the previous line. We used to say, Mr. Hammerstein, couldn’t we get a better final word, say an open vowel, like you will go instead of walk? No, it had to be walk. He was very persistent. Absolutely what he wrote had to what you sang. Now there are many versions of people singing, you’ll never walk alone. And it starts out when you walk through a storm, Keep your chin up high and don’t be afraid of the dark Well, you’ll hear Louis Armstrong say, when you walk through a storm, hold your head up high. No, Oscar wrote, keep your chin up high, and I want the whole world to remember that. Oscar said, keep you chin up, high. It’s very important that you do exactly as he wrote because it has a deep, deep meaning. Oscar was the most wonderful lyricist that ever was. As far as I’m concerned, and I’m sure the whole world feels this way about him. He was a strangely quiet man, tall, severe, didn’t brood funny, idle things. He was very dedicated to his work, and that made all of us feel the same way, that if Oscar wrote it, that’s what we say, that what we do. And then, If I Loved You, the line… If I loved you, he insisted that he hear the D. And you’ll hear many, many singers sing it. If I love you. And it’s not. It’s if I loved. That D was a big problem with all of us. It had to be there. And it has to be because it changes the meaning of the song. If I Love You is one thing. But if I Loved You, it’s different. I respected Oscar Hammerstein. I respected him. I respected them both. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Rogers, I would never have had a career. Well, let’s face it, if it hadn’t been for Joan Roberts, the original Laurie, I wouldn’t have had a career! But everything happens. Everything happens. One thing leads to another.
Interviewer: I suspect you would have found a way without John Roberts. One last Oklahoma Rogers Hammerstein question. Why do you think Oklahoma was such a big success? I mean, sort of think of the context. It’s wartime. You know, there’s these servicemen coming in to see the show. And it just, the show gets this amazing response. Why do think people responded to Oklahoma the way they did?
Iva Withers: It presents basic American values, the land, the people, the relationships of people, that things can be good if people get along. And even though they introduced Judd as the menace, it still was done with great care. Good will prevail. And I think that was the message, that good will prevail. Even in the final scene when Laurie and Curly are supposed to be going off on their wedding honeymoon, they want to have a court. And Judge, did Curly kill Judge? No, it was an accident. Well, say it’s an accident! Let them go on their honeymoon. And it is true. Good will prevail. And I that’s what the show was saying. To me that I know it meant a lot to me because I’d been through all that sadness and didn’t want to go through that kind of sadness again. It lifted my spirits. It really did. There was a moment when Mr. Richard Rogers came to me in carousel and he said to me, How can you play a death scene in the middle of a musical so convincingly? I said, well, I’ve just been through that. I’ve just been through that. And he was very impressed. Then there was another funny incident. Charles Lawton was at a party celebrating both Oklahoma and Carousel at the Pierre, no, at the Plaza. He came over to me and he looked at me and said, how can you stand so still and do so much? And I loved that. I’ve never forgotten that. There are certain things that happen to you in life, little phrases people will say, to stay with you forever. And now that I’m 85 years old, I remember something one of my very dear friends said when I was a youngster. Iva, there isn’t a lazy bone in your body. And I remember that. And when I think, oh, I’ll wash those dishes later. No, I go wash them now. Even as I sit here, I get a chill when I just mention the word Oklahoma. How it became the title song and how it became the title of the show was really exciting. When Laurie and Curly finally get married, and everything seems to be right, and you go into this da-da-da, da-dada-da. Oh, Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping down the plain, and the waving wheat can show its smells. Suddenly you get chills, all of your body is. Well, after I stopped working on Broadway, I heard people talking about Broadway of the 40s and 50s as the golden age of Broadway. Well, they may have felt it was the golden age, but it was really. Not quite that golden to us, because it was a job, as I say. And I learned very early on to dress very, very simply, not to dress to attract any attention to myself as I walked to and from the theater. Because they said, that’s the way you protect yourself. Because it was not easy to walk from where I lived on 55th Street down 7th Avenue to 45th Street. It was a matter of very undesirable characters on the street. They would approach you, there’d be beggars. And finally, we did get some policemen on the corners, but it was always a bit of a rat race walking to and from Broadway. So it was not limousines and dressing up in gowns and furs and stuff like that. Never, never. We just dressed like the birds in the forest do, to hide. It’s dressed like people on the streets. Because you were afraid. I was afraid. When I would come out of the theater at night, I’d sneak out the back doors and rush up 8th Avenue, but 8th avenue was just horrible. It was all peak joints and girly girly shows and things like that. And Times Square itself was very seedy, really was. Today’s Times Square is so garish, it’s so well lit. It’s just, I can’t believe it. I drove down here today and I said, Look at all these signs, all that electricity. It’s incredible. It’s like daytime. Even in the middle of the night, it looks like daytime.” So when my daughter says, mommy it’s dangerous to walk down there, I said no, no, no, because now it’s entirely different. It’s entirely difference.
Interviewer: But how did he tell you to prepare for the role of Adelaide?
Iva Withers: When I came back from London after Carousel… The big hit show coming up, being cast, was Guys and Dolls. And I had been asked to audition, but they, when I called to send an audition, they said, no, we’ve already signed our soprano. So I waited, and I went to see the show. And when I saw Guys and dolls, I fell in love with Vivian Blaine playing Miss Adelaide. And I said to myself, that’s the part I want to play. So I got the records and the music, and I prepared myself at home. A lot of the work you do for theater is you… You do yourself. I mean, you have teachers and technicians, but you have to know that you can do this yourself. So I learned Vivian’s songs, and I called their office, and I spoke to Cy Fuhrer and Ernie Martin. I said, I would like to audition for Guys and Dolls. They said, but, you’re a soprano. We’re looking for, I said well, I want to audition Miss Adelaide. They said oh, but your a soprana. I said please, would you hear me? So they did hear me. And I went to the theater, and I sang the lament, which was so different than my own personality. And I had learned it in the key that’s on the record. And that is a tone lower than Miss Vivian Blaine was doing it in this show. So this little voice calls from the audience. I was auditioning for Führer and Martin, Abe Burroughs, George Kaufman, and Frank Lesser. There’s a little voice. Now I have a sing it in Vivian’s key.” And I said, I can’t do that. Why not? Because if I do it in Vivian’s Key, I’ll become a soprano again. I’ve just already changed my voice from a lyric soprano down to a chest singer. And so he said, well, try it. So I tried a few bars. He said, okay, keep it in your key. Because he knew right away, there’s a, the woman’s voice has three registers, low, medium, and you go from low into here, but if you go from this into the high, you become a Soprano. So. They gave me the job. And I said, you’re it. So when Vivian did leave, I took over in February of 53 and played it for two years. Went on tour with it, enjoyed it. I loved that show. One of my very favorite shows. But after that, I never sang lyrically again. I did all character singing, which is a little bit more lucrative than the little pretty sopranos.
Interviewer: Can you tell me quickly, you had mentioned that Frank Lesser told you to speak New Yorkese.
Iva Withers: Oh, yes, that was my biggest problem. I could learn the songs with the same quality that Vivian had, but I could not speak that way. And Frank Lesser used to say to me, talk New Yorkese. And I said, not yet, Frank. I can’t. I really, I haven’t got it pinned down yet. He said, well, you have to when you go in the show. So I would go home and I’d say, how do I say this? I heard Vivian in the last scene. You got a boyfriend named Isaiah, huh?” I said, da-da-da, da, da. So from that one phrase, I was able to work back. When Nathan said, you still were, yes, that slave driver Charlie, he was working this all day. Finally, I said look Charlie, I have to go out and get something to eat. He said, You don’t want to eat, you just want to sneak out and meet that cheap bum Nathan Detroit. Well I said I’ll meet whoever I want. You know, I had to work really hard on the speech because it was not. Natural to me being a soprano.
Interviewer: You know, we interviewed Cy Fior and he said that Adelaide’s Lament is the single best piece of comedy material he has ever heard in any show. So how did it go?
Iva Withers: I think the whole world knows Guys and Dolls. They say it’s produced in more places by more groups than any, any, well, maybe Oklahoma gets produced more. But I think everybody knows the song that Vivian sang called Adelaide’s Lament because she always had a cold. She had a call in her nose and she was always sniffing and. Have this wonderful scene with Nathan Detroit, and you’re mad because he’s running the crap game again. You sit down and pick up this little book that your doctor has given to you because he said your cold might be psychosomatic. You haven’t got that, have you? No. So you pick up his little book and you start to read. No, your doctor’s told you this. It says here, the average unmarried female, basically insecure. Due to some long frustration, may react. Cosomatic symptoms. Difficult to endure. Affecting the upper respiratory tract. In other words, just from waiting around for that plain little band of gold. A person can develop a cold. You can spray her wherever you figure the strep to cock. I like. You can give her a shot for whatever she’s got. But it just won’t work. If she’s tired of getting the fish eye from the hotel. Clank. A person. Can develop a cold. And it went on and it was, it’s just so funny, really it is. A person can develop a bad, bad cold. And the house would just go crazy for this song. Yeah, I loved it. Crazy. But once you learn to sing that way, it is goodbye. Out of my dreams and into your arms I long to fly. Sure. Love this man regardless of what he was and that’s what real love is. If you love someone it doesn’t matter. As she said, if I loved you it wouldn’t make no difference what you did. And I think people forget that. That’s a basic love story and that is why the first scene that’s called the bench scene is so important. It’s as Barbara Cook once said to me, it’s like a play within a play. And it is, it’s just this girl is in love with this man, and that’s the way love is. You see someone, you know, that’s it. There’s no other way to say it. And that’s what’s sad about New York, you get so little chance to meet the right person. It’s just basically a love story. It’s not dark, this happens in life. You lose people you love, but you go on. And that’s what’s important, you go on. You’ll find this drink somewhere. You really do. It’s a well-known fact. New York produces the best musicals. Unfortunately, we’ve been getting a few from England that are proving us. Maybe not true, but America needs the musical theater. It’s really important, and it’s different to opera. I mean, opera singers have tried to move back and forth. Basically, it’s Alpinza into South Pacific or Helen Trowbell into pipe dream. Erapatina into Song of Norway, but it’s never been successfully do one show and that’s it. Broadway performers are different breeds.
