An actor, singer, director, and author, Drake will always be associated with that magical moment when the curtain rose on “Oklahoma!” at the St. James Theater in New York on March 31, 1943, and he made his entrance singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.” The show marked a new and exciting beginning for the American musical theater, and Drake reigned as its leading male star for more than a decade. After singing in the Glee Club at Brooklyn College, he made his stage debut in July 1935 at the Adelphi Theater in New York in the chorus of “The Mikado.” A year later, he was in the chorus again, and also understudied one of the leading roles, in a City Center revival of “White Horse Inn.” In 1937 he introduced the title song in “Babes in Arms,” and was also featured in “Two Bouquets” (1938) with Patricia Morison, an actress who would later share in one of his greatest successes.

From 1939-40 Drake also appeared in three Broadway revues, “One for the Money,” “The Straw Hat Revue” (with Danny Kaye), and “Two for the Show,” in which, together with Frances Comstock, he introduced the future standard, “How High the Moon.” After his magnetic performance in “Oklahoma!,” Drake co-starred with Burl Ives in Walter Kerr’s folk music tribute “Sing Out, Sweet Land” (1944), played Macheath in John Latouche and Duke Ellington’s contemporary version of “The Beggar’s Holiday” (1946), and took the role of Larry Foreman, the union organizer, in a revival of “The Cradle Will Rock” (1947). In 1948 he enjoyed what is often considered to be his greatest personal success in “Kiss Me, Kate.” Drake gave a marvelously witty and stylish performance in the role of Fred Graham, the egocentric thespian who is tormented on and off stage by his leading lady (Patricia Morison), who also happens to be his ex-wife, Lilli. His glorious lyric tenor voice delighted audiences on numbers such as “Where Is the Life That Late I Led?,” “I’ve Come to Wive It Wealthily in Padua,” and “Were Thine That Special Face.” In 1951 he turned down the leading role in “The King and I,” but played it for a time in 1953 while Yul Brynner was on holiday. Two years later he completed a hat trick of great roles when he played Hajj, the public poet in the musical version of “Kismet” (1955), for which he won New York Drama Critics, Donaldson, and Tony awards. He reprised his role in the London production and for subsequent revivals.

Along with the triumphs, Drake had his flop musicals too, as a performer, director, and author. They included “The Liar” (1950), “Courtin’ Time” (1951), “Lock up Your Daughters” (1960), “Kean” (1961), and “Zenda” (1963). He made his final appearance in a Broadway musical in “Gigi” (1973), a lackluster adaptation of the classic film that closed after three months. For most of his career he remained active in the straight, nonmusical theater, and was especially applauded for his Shakespearean roles, which included Claudius to Richard Burton’s Hamlet in John Gielgud’s 1964 Broadway production. He bade farewell to the Broadway stage in “The Skin of Our Teeth” in 1975. Ironically, as is often the case with Hollywood, he was not required to re-create his major stage performances for the screen; Gordon MacRae and Howard Keel took care of those. Drake made only one film, a routine musical called TARS AND SPARS (1946). He appeared on plenty of television productions, though, and there still exists a 90-minute telecast of “Kiss Me, Kate” from 1958, in which he is said to be awesome. In 1990 Drake received his second Tony, a special award for lifetime achievement as perhaps “the greatest singing actor the American musical theatre has ever produced.”

Source: Biographical information provided by MUZE. Excerpted from the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR MUSIC, edited by Colin Larkin. © 2004 MUZE UK Ltd.

Photo credits: Photofest and the Fred Fehl Dance Collection (University of Texas at Austin)

The musical comedy stage of New York was home to George M. Cohan, vaudeville song-and-dance man, playwright, manager, director, producer, comic actor, and popular songwriter. During the first two decades of the 20th century, Cohan’s style of light comedic drama dominated American theater, and the lyrics he composed are still remembered at the end of the 20th century for their flag-waving patriotism and exuberance. His hit song “Over There” embodied the wartime spirit of World War I, and “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “Grand Old Flag,” have been passed from generation to generation as popular tunes celebrating the American spirit.

Born on July 3 in Providence, Rhode Island, Cohan spent his childhood as part of a vaudevillian family. Living the typical vaudeville life, Cohan and his sister traveled a circuit of stages, slept in boarding houses and backstage while their parents performed, and only occasionally attended school. At nine years old, Cohan became a member of his parents’ act, reciting sentimental verse and performing a “buck and wing dance.” By the age of 11, he was writing comedy material, and by 13 he was writing songs and lyrics for the act, which was now billed as The Four Cohans. In 1894, at the age of 16, Cohan sold his first song, “Why Did Nellie Leave Home?” to a sheet music publisher for 25 dollars.

In his late teens, Cohan began directing The Four Cohans, which became a major attraction, earning up to 1,000 dollars for a week’s booking. Cohan wrote the songs and sketches that his family performed, and had the starring roles. At 20 years of age, managing the family’s business affairs, he was becoming a brazen, young man, proud of his achievements. When he was 21, he married his first wife, Ethel Levey, a popular singing comedienne, who then became the fifth Cohan in the act.

 

Within two years, seeking the fame, high salaries, and excitement that life in New York theater offered, Cohan centered his career on the Broadway stage. His first Broadway production, “The Governor’s Son,” was a musical comedy that he wrote and in which he performed in 1901. It was not the hit he hoped for, but after two more attempts, Cohan enjoyed his first Broadway success with “Little Johnny Jones” in 1904. In this musical, Cohan played the role of a jockey and sang the lyrics that would live through the century: “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy, / A Yankee Doodle, do or die; / A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam’s / Born on the Fourth of July.” Among the other hit songs from the play was “Give My Regards to Broadway.” In Cohan’s 1906 hit “George Washington, Jr.,” he acted in a scene with which he would be identified for life: he marched up and down the stage carrying the American flag and singing “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” the song that would become one of the most popular American marching-band pieces of all time. Other of Cohan’s most famous plays are “Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway” (1906), “The Talk of New York” (1907), “The Little Millionaire” (1911), “The Song and Dance Man” (1923), and “Little Nelly Kelly” (1923).

In 1917, when America entered World War I, Cohan was inspired to compose “Over There,” the song that would become his greatest hit. Americans coast to coast listened to the recording made by popular singer Nora Bayes. Twenty-five years later, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt awarded Cohan the Congressional Medal of Honor for the patriotic spirit expressed in this war song.

Cohan achieved immortality through his songs and performances, and the 1942 film YANKEE DOODLE DANDY perpetuated his image. In it, James Cagney portrayed Cohan with all of Cohan’s own enthusiasm and brilliance. The film told the story of Cohan’s life and included the hit songs that made him an American legend. The film was playing in American theaters when Cohan died in 1942. President Roosevelt wired his family that “a beloved figure is lost to our national life.”

Source: Excerpted from ST. JAMES ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR CULTURE. 5 VOLS., St. James Press, © 2000 Gale Research. Reprinted by permission of The Gale Group.

Photo credits: Photofest, the New York Public Library, and the University of Texas at Austin

An actress and singer with a style and appearance that are difficult to define, she has been described as “a blonde, wide-eyed, long-legged, husky voiced, scatty personality” — among other things. The daughter of a Christian Science teacher, Channing moved with her family to San Francisco at an early age, and later attended Bennington College in Vermont, where she majored in drama and dance. In 1941 she appeared in Marc Blitzstein’s labor opera “No for an Answer,” but only for three Sunday nights. In the same year she served as an understudy in “Let’s Face It!” on Broadway, and had a small part in “Proof Through the Night” (1942). After playing nightclubs around New York, she returned to San Francisco in 1946 and won a part in the Hollywood revue “Lend an Ear.”

Her performance in the Broadway version of the show led to her triumph as Lorelei Lee in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” in which she introduced several memorable numbers, including “A Little Girl from Little Rock” and “‘Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” In 1954, she replaced Rosalind Russell in “Wonderful Town,” and in the next year, had her first big flop with “The Vamp.” In the late ’50s her nightclub act was so successful that it was turned into a one-woman revue entitled “Show Girl,” which played on Broadway in 1961. Three years later, she had her biggest success in “Hello, Dolly!”, as the matchmaker Dolly Levi, with a Jerry Herman score that included “So Long, Dearie,” “Before the Parade Passes By,” and the insinuating title song. She won a Tony Award for outstanding performance, but Barbra Streisand was preferred for the movie version. Channing’s larger-than-life personality is perhaps more suited to the stage than film, although she was hilarious inTHOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE (1967). Other film credits include PAID IN FULL, THE FIRST TRAVELING SALESLADY, SKIDOO, and SHINBONE ALLEY (voice only).

In 1974 she was back on Broadway in “Lorelei,” which, as the title suggests, was a compilation of the best scenes from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” It lasted for 320 performances and had a reasonable life on the road. At that stage of her career, with suitable musical comedy roles hard to come by, Channing continued to work mostly on U.S. television and in nightclubs, but in 1987 she co-starred with Mary Martin in James Kirkwood’s aptly named show “Legends!”. A year later she embarked on a concert tour of locations such as Kansas City and San Diego, accompanied at each stop by the local symphony orchestra. In 1990 she appeared at the Desert Inn, Las Vegas, and two years later toured with Rita Moreno in “Two Ladies of Broadway.” In 1995, Carol Channing received a special Lifetime Achievement Tony Award, and was back where she belongs, on Broadway starring in a major revival of her greatest success, “Hello, Dolly!”

Source: Biographical information provided by MUZE. Excerpted from the ENCYCLOPEDIA OF POPULAR MUSIC, edited by Colin Larkin. © 2004 MUZE UK Ltd.

Photo credits: Photofest

When Cantor met Ziegfeld for the first time, he was bucking to get a one-night shot in the Frolic. “I’m marvelous!” he told Ziegfeld. When the producer wondered why he should believe him, Cantor shot back, “Why, Mr. Ziegfeld, I wouldn’t lie to you.” Cantor’s gig at the Frolic stretched to 27 weeks and by 1917, he was performing downstairs in the “Follies” and would become practically a ward of Ziegfeld’s state. A fatherless waif born Edward Israel Iskowitz in 1892 and raised by his grandmother in dire poverty on the Lower East Side, Cantor began as a street-corner entertainer, just like Irving Berlin, and broke through the ranks of vaudeville with a brash confidence that bordered on unmitigated gall.

A hyperkinetic comedian, dancer, and singer, Cantor performed in blackface for his early “Follies” appearances, but gradually gave it up to cultivate a more accessible persona as a neurotic wisenheimer who could punctuate a corny line with a roll of his inimitable “banjo” eyes. Adopted offstage as the “third musketeer” by his older colleagues W. C. Fields and Will Rogers, Cantor developed into a versatile and popular comedian under Ziegfeld’s guidance and eventually starred in several vehicles of his own for the producer in the 1920s. Cantor’s specialty numbers, like “Margie” and “Makin’ Whoopee,” made him a successful recording artist, and he found a second career in movies and radio in the 1930s.

Source: Excerpted from BROADWAY: THE AMERICAN MUSICAL by Michael Kantor and Laurence Maslon. Published by Bulfinch Press.

Photo credits: Photofest and the New York Public Library

A boyishly affable, stage-trained lead since the 1980s who has displayed gifts for both comedy and drama, Matthew Broderick became established in NYC theater before scoring a big-screen success as a young computer wiz caught up in nuclear intrigue in WAR GAMES (1983). He has enjoyed significant collaborations with two major playwrights — Neil Simon, who provided the young actor with memorable comic roles, and Horton Foote, who allowed him to hone his dramatic skills. Broderick debuted on stage at age 17 in a workshop production of Foote’s “On Valentine’s Day” with his late father James Broderick and went on to win acclaim for his portrayal of David, the adopted gay son of drag queen Arnold Beckoff (Harvey Fierstein) in the Off-Broadway production of “Torch Song Trilogy.”

Broderick’s career accelerated with parts in two Neil Simon projects: “Brighton Beach Memoirs” (1982-83), the first in a semi-autobiographical trilogy wherein Broderick created the part of Eugene Jerome, a character based on Simon as a youth, and the feature MAX DUGAN RETURNS (1982). He won a Tony Award for the play and positive notices for his feature debut. Broderick reprised the role of Eugene in “Biloxi Blues,” the second installment of the trilogy, for both the 1984 Broadway production and the 1988 film adaptation helmed by Mike Nichols. The actor also worked on various Foote projects, appearing in the 1986 film version of “On Valentine’s Day” (broadcast on PBS as STORY OF A MARRIAGE, PART 2), “1918” (1985), and Off-Broadway in “The Widow Claire” (1986-87).

He may be best known, however, as the charmingly manipulative titular character of John Hughes’ popular teen comedy FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF (1986). Yet his subsequent transition to adult leads has been fitful and uneven. Broderick’s first romantic lead was opposite Harvey Fierstein in the film version of “Torch Song Trilogy” (1988), this time not as his son but as his lover. He was impressively convincing as the young commander of the first black Union regiment in the acclaimed Civil War drama, GLORY (1989). Broderick joined forces with Dustin Hoffman and Sean Connery for Sidney Lumet’s FAMILY BUSINESS (1989), a critical and commercial misstep. Reverting to a comic juvenile part, he fared better as THE FRESHMAN (1990) opposite Marlon Brando. Sporting a beard, the baby-faced actor next joined an ensemble of bright young talents for the romantic comedy THE NIGHT WE NEVER MET (1993), which failed to make much impact. Ironically, Broderick enjoyed his greatest screen success (to date) in relative anonymity as the voice of the adult Simba in Disney’s cartoon blockbuster THE LION KING (1994) — he would reprise the role for the direct-to-video sequels THE LION KING 2: SIMBA’S PRIDE (1998) and THE LION KING 1/2 (2004).

Broderick returned to his theatrical roots for the acclaimed 1995 Broadway revival of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” In the original production, Robert Morse interpreted what would become his signature role as an outwardly simple soul who lucks into good fortune. In contrast, Broderick made his character a bit more knowing and openly ambitious yet still emerges as a likeable sort. His vocal mettle found official confirmation as he walked off with the Tony for Best Leading Actor in a Musical. Broderick took a leave from the show to film THE CABLE GUY (1996), playing the hapless customer whose life becomes nightmarish after encountering Jim Carrey’s title character in Ben Stiller’s black comedy-thriller. When he returned to the Broadway musical in early 1996, he was teamed with his future wife Sarah Jessica Parker in the female lead.

In 1996, the compact, dark-haired actor switched gears and stepped behind the cameras to helm INFINITY, a biopic of Nobel laureate Richard Feynman that featured a script by his mother. Although the film was not widely seen, Broderick proved effective in his first outing as a filmmaker. He also starred as Feynman and shared a nice chemistry with his leading lady, Patricia Arquette. The following year, he began to portray a string of darker characters ranging from the jilted boyfriend out for revenge in ADDICTED TO LOVE (1997) to the schoolteacher determined to stop an overachiever from becoming student body president in ELECTION (1999). He continued in the same vein, playing a blustery bank manager who engages in an adulterous affair with one of his employees, in the Sundance hit YOU CAN COUNT ON ME (2000), written and directed by childhood pal Kenneth Lonergan.

As the ’90s wound down and into the new millennium, Broderick continued to alternate between the screen and the stage, squeezing in appearances on Broadway as a baby-faced killer in the National Actors Theater revival of “Night Must Fall” in 1999, a newlywed opposite Parker Posey in Elaine May’s comedy misfire “Taller Than a Dwarf” (2000) and as Leo Bloom, Nathan Lane’s sidekick, in the 2001 musical adaptation of Mel Brooks’ hilarious movie comedy “The Producers” — the later role became something of a sensation, earning the actor a Tony nomination and securing him a role in the planned movie adaptation (or readaptation, as the case may be). That musical-comedy success also led the actor to take on the enduring role of Professor Harold Hill in an ABC television version of the perennial favorite THE MUSIC MAN (2003). Broderick returned to the big screen for the Frank Oz-helmed remake of the cult classic THE STEPFORD WIVES (2004), a more satirical-minded take that cast the actor alongside Nicole Kidman as an upwardly mobile couple whose lives are suddenly overwhelmed by the all-too-perfect community of Stepford.

Source: Excerpted from Baseline. BaselineStudioSystems — A Hollywood Media Corp. Company.

Photo credits: Photofest and the New York Public Library

 

 

In 1909, an 18-year-old comedienne named Fannie Borach came to Irving Berlin with a problem. Her career hadn’t been going so well — George M. Cohan had fired her from the chorus of one of his shows two years before, and she was reduced to performing from one burlesque hall to another. She needed a specialty number for a benefit performance the next night; she had lied to her producer about having one. Berlin took the girl to the back room of the Ted Snyder Music Publishing House and played her a tune he had, about a Jewish girl who improbably joins the stage to play one of history’s most famous vamps.

Sadie Cohen left her happy home
To become an actress lady,
On the stage, she soon became the rage,
As the only real Salome baby.

It became Fanny Brice’s passkey to fame.

Brice grew up in far more comfortable surroundings than Berlin had, moving from her native Newark to Coney Island to Harlem, and from a young age, she was taken by her mother to every show they could catch. Quitting school to perform on the low-down burlesque circuits outside of Manhattan (burlesque being a form of satirical physical comedy, not the strip joints of later years), Brice did not specialize in any particular brand of comedy. When he played “Sadie Salome” for her, Berlin insisted a Yiddish accent was needed to put it over. Fannie had her reservations — she didn’t know any Yiddish — but it soon became her trademark dialect.

I breathed and ate and drank and lived theater — in my neighborhood were all the nationalities of all of Europe. That is where I learned my accents; the Polish woman with her intonation rising up like chant. I saw Loscha of the Coney Island popcorn counter and Marta of the cheeses at Brodsky’s Delicatessen and the Sadies and the Rachels and the Birdies at the Second Avenue dance halls. They all welded together and came out staggeringly true to type in one big authentic outline.
— Fanny Brice, 1936

When Fanny got a telegram to come down to see Florenz Ziegfeld a year later, she thought it was a joke. She had a friend, a secretary named Helen Ziegfeld, and every time they had a date for lunch, Fanny would say, “Ziegfeld wants to see me.” This time it was no joke. Impressed by his scouts’ reports of Brice’s success in local burlesque houses, Ziegfeld signed her for two years — at $75 a week, then $100. Fanny ran down the street with the signed contract, showing it to everyone on the corner of 47th and Broadway. It grew so tattered, Ziegfeld had to draft a new one. He didn’t mind; Ziegfeld never had much of sense of humor himself, but he knew his audience went for comics and, once again, he gave the public the best his money could buy.

Under her new stage name — Fanny Brice — she proved her comic versatility, slaying the audience in her “Follies” debut with another Yiddish number and even a blackface song — both by Irving Berlin. She always credited Ziegfeld with her success: “I’d rather work for him than any person in the world. If he’s the only person in the room, I can sing to him as if I had an audience of ten thousand!” Over the next two decades, she was a fixture in the “Follies,” appearing in seven different editions, and two more after the Shubert Brothers appropriated Ziegfeld’s name in the 1930s. She was at her best spoofing the grand pretensions of middle-class art — classical ballet, the Barrymore acting style, ragtime, and even herself. When her husband was convicted of gambling, her bad luck made it into the act. But Ziegfeld saw something else in Brice, beyond her goofy elasticity. On a trip to Paris, he bought the rights to a heartbreaking chanson called “Mon Homme” and had an English lyric made for his 1921 “Follies.” Fanny thought she would play it for comic effect, but Ziegfeld would have none of it.

Brice became the first crossover performer of the new century, eventually conquering not only Broadway but films, and most successfully radio, where she played the character of an aggressively precocious child, Baby Snooks, until she was well into her fifties. That Broadway and America would have adopted such an obvious ethnic type into their hearts is an immense tribute to Brice’s talent.

In anything Jewish I ever did, I wasn’t standing apart making fun. I was the race and what happened to me on stage is what could happen to my people. They identified with me, which made it all right to get a laugh. – Fanny Brice, 1936

In 1964, she would be immortalized in a lavish stage musical and film based on her complicated life, starring Barbra Streisand, but a fellow member of the “Follies,” chorus girl Dana O’Connell, understood the simplicity of her appeal: “Fanny Brice was just a delightful individual; we all got to know her quite well and we just loved her — the way she said things and moved with them, she was just funny. She was just a funny girl.”

Source: Excerpted from BROADWAY: THE AMERICAN MUSICAL by Michael Kantor and Laurence Maslon. Published by Bulfinch Press.

Photo credits: Photofest and the New York Public Library

Ray Bolger knew he wanted to be a performer when, as a 16-year-old from a struggling Irish Catholic family in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester, he attended a matinee of “Jack O’Lantern” at a Boston theater in 1920. There, bouncing around onstage, was the acrobatic comedian Fred Stone. “I’ve never forgotten it,” Bolger later said. “He bounded on a trampoline out of a haystack, looking just like a scarecrow.” In order to support himself, Bolger took a job as a bookkeeper for a dance academy and gradually started taking lessons with the other students. He took his dancing so seriously that it made the other kids crack up, and he discovered that dancing was a way out of the Dorchester slums. Soon, his rubbery, gravity-defying hoofing made him a success in a vaudeville double act, “Stanford and Bolger: A Pair of Nifties,” then as a single in “The Passing Show of 1926.” He was perfect revue material, and made a wonderful comic partner for another former vaudevillian, Bert Lahr, in the 1934 revue “Life Begins at 8:40.” Bolger, however, was evolving into something more than a specialty dancer. “What is dance?” he asked in a 1942 interview. “I am dancing all the time. Every gesture, the body line of every pose, the way I get from place to place, the movement in the acting — none of it would be the way it is if I weren’t a dancer.”

In 1936, Rodgers and Hart gave him the lead in “On Your Toes,” where his sensational character-driven footwork in the Balanchine ballet “Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” solidified his stardom. At the end of the show’s run, Bolger signed a film contract with MGM and fulfilled a long-held dream of playing the Scarecrow in THE WIZARD OF OZ — his idol, Fred Stone, had played the part in a 1902 stage version.

Bolger returned to Broadway in 1942, winning accolades as the lead in Rodgers and Hart’s last musical, “By Jupiter,” and in 1949 he became the second leading musical actor to win a Tony Award for his sprightly, infectious turn in Frank Loesser’s “Where’s Charley?,” a role which he repeated in the 1952 film. His star turn as the Scarecrow in THE WIZARD OF OZ perfectly exploited his loose-limbed stage persona and made him a legend, but Bolger always had the brains to know what made him click with audiences: “I just play the little guy, except I play him through dance.”

Source: Excerpted from CONTEMPORARY MUSICIANS, VOLUME 4, Gale Research, © 1990 Gale Research. Reprinted by permission of The Gale Group.

Photo credits: Photofest and the New York Public Library

The dancing partner who made Fred Astaire famous isn’t the one most people remember. Fred, born in 1899, and his sister, Adele, a year his senior, were the children of an Austrian immigrant named Austerlitz who had settled in Omaha, Nebraska. Their mother had a notion that they should learn to dance, so they journeyed east to New York in 1903 and began a long vaudeville career as a boy-and-girl specialty duo. The transition to adulthood was an awkward one for the Astaires; it was not until 1917 that their charm and dancing specialties reached a Broadway audience. They were featured in several revues from then on, and it was the gamine Adele, not her more serious and disciplined brother, who usually got the better notices. He didn’t mind; he’d rather spend his time crafting new numbers or innovative steps for them to master.

One of the steps, incorporated into most of their shows, was the “oompah trot” or the runaround, where Adele and Fred, side by side, would ape riding in huge circles on an imaginary bicycle. Audiences went wild for this particular antic, especially in London, where the bright-eyed, exuberant Americans were welcomed even more enthusiastically than in their own country.

Fred had known George Gershwin since 1916, when he went to the composer looking for a vaudeville number. They had vowed they’d work together some day; that day came on December 1, 1924, when the Astaires headlined George and Ira’s first full-length New York musical, “Lady, Be Good!” Playing a brother-and-sister dance team down on their luck, the Astaires had found the perfect vehicle for their talents. George not only provided them with some of their best tunes, he suggested a couple of dance steps to help Fred with the ending for “The Half of It, Dearie, Blues.” Fred got his first solo, while the romantic end of things was held down by his sister and the leading man. It proved to be such a felicitous match that critic Alexander Woollcott later wrote, “I do not know whether Gershwin was born into this world to write rhythms for Fred Astaire’s feet or whether Fred Astaire was born into this world to show how the Gershwin music should really be danced.”

The Astaires followed up that success with another Gershwin smash, “Funny Face” (1927), where Adele got to introduce “‘S Wonderful.” When the show made its inevitable visit to London, Adele met a stage-door Johnnie from the B-list of the British aristocracy and was soon engaged to be married. Mindful of her incipient retirement from the stage, the duo made sure their 1931 appearance in “The Band Wagon” would be an appropriate finale to their partnership. It was one of the finest revues of the period, with an impeccable Schwartz-Dietz score including “A New Sun in the Sky,” in which Fred dressed for a night on the town in an attempt to beef up his stage presence so that his transition into a solo career would be easier. That transition occurred in 1932 with Astaire’s introduction of “Night and Day” in Cole Porter’s “Gay Divorce.” “Fred struggled on without [Adele] for a while,” wrote Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse,” but finally threw his hand in and disappeared. There is a rumor that he turned up in Hollywood. It was the best the poor chap could hope for after losing his brilliant sister.”

Source: Excerpted from CONTEMPORARY MUSICIANS, VOLUME 4, Gale Research, © 1990 Gale Research. Reprinted by permission of The Gale Group.

Photo credits: Photofest and the New York Public Library