Peter Filicia (36:35)
Well, I, when I met him, the first thing I asked about was Drat the Cat, a musical that I admire Tremendously. In fact, when Bruce Kimmel did a studio cast recording, because there was no original cast recording, not officially, there's a bootleg that actually came out. But I. I wrote the liner notes for the studio cast album. So I've always been tremendously fond of it and eight performances. Eight performances. Even though Barbra Streisand was trumpeting it with the song He Touched Me. And if you bought the 45, on the other side was a song called I Like him, which also was from the show. Why was Barbra Streisand so interested in this? Because her husband at the time, Elliott Gould, was the leading man. I mean, it must have been so hard to be Elliot Gould because he was the star of I Can Get A Few Wholesale. And then, you know, she was at a minor part, but she turned out to be the star of the show. And here he is now, he gets a chance to be another lead in a Broadway show and it closes in a week and she gets a hit song out of it. So no wonder, two years later, it was all over. But anyway, it was. It was so painful for Jerry Adler because he was a co producer. There were two over the title in those days. That was enough to get a show to Broadway. But maybe it wasn't because they just ran out of money and they had a tough time out of town because Eddie Foy Jr. Was involved with it and then he wasn't. And so it was very, very tough. And he had no other excuse. The fact that we just couldn't raise any more money. We just could not. And we tried very, very hard. We begged Columbia Records to give us more money because they were going to do the cast album and they wouldn't, and we just couldn't. I mean, the reviews were not bad. They weren't raves, but they weren't bad. And all things being equal, if this were a David Merrick show, it would have run, or Harold Prince show, it would have run. They would have found the money and it would have continued. And I think it would have caught on. So it's really a shame. I mean, I've always felt the title was a problem, too. And I brought that up to him and you could tell that he was listening, but he wasn't really agreeing. But the original title was Cat and Mouse, and I think a much better title, because indeed it is about a cat burglar and a police inspector who is quite mousy. So. So that was the first question I asked of Jerry Adler. But I also asked him about My Fair lady because in the original production of My Fair lady, we're talking 1956 now. And by the way, at that point in time he was already 27 years old. He was born in 1929, so he certainly had a good run. But anyway, I asked about My Fair lady and he talked about the fact when they were on opening night New York, he was standing at the back of the house for that performance. He was the stage manager. But that night he took off and he, he had an assistant that really wanted to do the show and everything was going so swimmingly well that he decided okay. And he said that he was there when Mars Hart thought it wasn't going well. And he said, I know, I knew it, I knew it. This is just a New Haven hit, that's all it is. And, and it certainly didn't turn out to be. But he really panicked that he really thought that that was not going to be. He told me when I asked one of his biggest regrets, he said, well, you know, I worked on of the I Sing the revival. There was a very short lived revival back in 1952. Only two months for a show that originally ran 441 performances. Everybody's very surprised. And it was also an election year and of the icing. So he, he thought this was going to be a big smash hit. And he said he was really surprised that he had so little interaction with Ira Gershwin. Of course, George had long gone by that time, so, so that was a problem. He also talked about how difficult it was to work with Orson Welles. Orson Welles did a stage version of Moby Dick. It did play Boston where I was living at the time. But I was, I wasn't working yet and getting five bucks out of my parents to go see a show was always a difficult thing. So, so I missed Moby Dick and Orson Welles, which I would have loved to have seen. But Orson Welles could be very cantankerous. There's a very, very famous series of commercials he was doing that for wine that indeed there's a bootleg of all the times that he purposely screwed up the lines and showed that he didn't care about this at all. You know, you'd see him make a mistake. Cut, take 23. You know, and he wasn't even trying, so I could easily. That's what came to mind when he talked to me about it. He also talked to me about the Girl who Came to Supper. He was the stage manager of that. And that was a show that originally opened with a song called Long Live the King. If he can. Well, the problem was they were in Philadelphia trying out when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. And suddenly Noel Coward had to come up with a new song which wasn't nearly as good, but as Long Live the King, if he can. But, you know, it had to be done. He said, boy, you know, we were all wondering what was going to happen and we all had to pretend that that song that replaced it was really wonderful. In fact, it was a somewhat of a recycled song from something called Operette that Noel Coward had written before. You know, he said to me, I had so many difficult times with so many people because he was the stage manager and I Had a Ball, which Buddy Hackett was in. And when the show wasn't going well, he would fool around like crazy. You always hear about Zero Mostel fooling around as pseudo less. And even fiddler Buddy Harket did a lot of that too. And he said he was so embarrassed the night that. That he mocked Luba Lisa, who got a Tony nomination on stage. At the end of the show, he. Because he didn't get a Tony nomination and Luba Lisa did get a Tony nomination that he mocked her, which was really quite bad. He had wonderful things to say about time for singing. He worked a lot with Alexander Cohen and that was an Alexander Cohen musical. And that was. The musical was kind of ahead of its time because it was sort Les Misy in a way. It's a musical version of How Green Was My Valley, which was very important property. And speaking of Orson Wells, it be How Green Was My Valley film beat out. Citizen Kane is the best picture of the year. So said the Academy when it gave out Oscars. So. But this was a musical version and it was very full of music. The score had many more songs than one would expect in a musical at that time. So in. In a strange way, eliminating a lot of the book and doing more songs, which became very common practice during the British Invasion, actually started with a time for singing and it didn't last long. And he. He really mourned that. He said, you know, audience was just so confused. And so often something that really tries to blaze a trail fails while the next thing that does the same thing does it because people, the critics are used to seeing first time and now they're up for it. He had nice things to say about Flanders and Swan who when they did at the drop of another hat. Now here's what's interesting to me. If you look at ibdb, you will see that he was production stage manager of the Apple Tree, okay? And he was also production supervisor of at the Drop of Another Hat Again, a two person review of Flanders and Swung, who wrote funny songs. They just sat on stage and did the songs and that was that. That. But here's the thing. I saw the Trio of the Apple Tree at the Shuba Theatre in Boston on a Monday night. I saw at the Drop of Another Hat at the Wilbur Theater the next night. And the following night I saw Mary Martin and Robert Preston and I do, I do with the Colonial. Those were three good days, I'll tell you. But the idea that he was the stage manager of a show while being the production supervisor of a show that was at the same time trying out. I mean I, I guess he was running back and forth from the, the Wilbur to the Schubert, which luckily enough are just across the street from each other. But I'm, I'm sorry to say that I forgot to, to ask him about that when, when I talked to him, I did tell him the story about Little Murders. Little Murders was a Jules Pfeiffer play where Barbara Cook, you know, rare non musical appearance, was brought home her boyfriend, played by the aforementioned Elliot Gould, to meet her parents. And of course they're very interested to find out this guy that she's going to marry. Every, every parent is, you know, this is a big thing. And so if he would. Hill Brune and Ruth White were the parents. And you may not know or remember who they were, but they were very staid people. And so they were disappointed to find out that their daughter was marrying a guy who photographed feces. I'll use the elegant term here. And that's. So that's, you know, at an exhibition you would see various forms of feces. I guess we'd call that unorthodox to say to. Maybe we could call it fecal calligraphy, I don't know. But anyway, so he also insisted Elliot Gould's character did that, that indeed at any ceremony when they got married, the word God could not be mentioned. So anyway, Paul Benedict, I hope you know who that actor was. Very, very funny guy. If there were a musical version of the Archie Comic Strip, he would be perfect Jughead when he was a young man. Because you sort of look like Jughead if you know who that character was. Anyway, so there he is. He, you know, I'm starting to think that wasn't who it was. But anyway, he seemed like that. Anyway, the minister gets up there and he says, I want you to know that of the 200 of or so couples that I've married, only six couples are still together. I mean, imagine he had a wedding ceremony. I mean, wow. You know, so it was a real wild building. Crazy plate. Okay, now at the end of the first act, Barbara Cook is in her apartment and suddenly a car backfires and she faints. And there I am at a Saturday matinee with two matinee ladies next to me. And one turns the other one says, she shot somebody shot her. She was just killed. And I almost said, do you think that Barbara Cook would be in a play? She would, only it was a three act play. Do you think she'd be in a play where she would die at the end of the second act? Don't you people know anything? Why do you even bother coming to the theater? You know, because again, I'm a teenager and I know everything. Everything. Act three started on the day of Barbara Cook's funeral because she had been shot. And boy am I glad that I kept my mouth shut because. But that's what I'll always remember about little murders, even if I don't remember if Paul Benedict played the part. I thought, you know what? It was a year or so later it got done off Broadway. Maybe he did the Off Broadway version. And that's what I'm remembering. And then it was a hit. It only lasted a week on Broadway, but it was a big hit off Broadway. It ran quite a long time. And ironically enough, I saw it on a Sunday, the last Sunday in June in 1969, at Circle in the Square theater downtown, which is now like a flea market type thing, but it used to be on Bleecker street. And I was just a few hours away and a few blocks away from Stonewall. It was that day, ironically enough, that I saw that Little Murders. But, but anyway, Jerry Adler, to go back to Jerry, which is what we were supposed to be doing here. Jerry Adler told me that never thought that this was going to go on Broadway, that he was amazed that Alex Cohen even had anything to. To do with it. He sometimes directed and in fact, when the Unknown Soldier and his wife moved from Lincoln center and Alex Cohen had had terrible problems with the director, John Dexter, who didn't. I mean, really, he was notorious as being a very difficult and ornery man. He was the one who took over and directed the cast and, and. But he occasionally did. I mean, he directed every now and then. He's. He directed Ulysses in Nighttown, a revival of that. He also directed Sammy Khan doing the show. Words and music. And he spoke well of Sammy Khan, you know, when that's A terrible job to have when you're dealing with a guy who's much more famous than you are. Sammy Khan, after all, an Oscar winning composer, certainly had a few Broadway shows, including one hit, High Button Shoes. So, you know, it must be hard when the guy says, no, no, no, we're doing it my way. But he says, sammy Khan really took a lot of advice and it really worked out very, very well. He also spoke well of Peter Usinoff when he was a production supervisor on who's who in Hell, a show that didn't last long, but. And he also said he had his terrible doubts and he tried to. To talk Alex Cohen out of producing. We interrupt this program. This was a show that started off as a drawing room comedy. You know, tennis, anyone, you know, that type of play. When suddenly the doors of the theater sprang open and guys with machine guns entered and set up against the wall and. And you really. That for the first preview, you. You must have really been terrified that this was real. I mean, God almighty, you know, it could be. But when word got out that it wasn't real, I mean, people were enjoying talking back and sassing the guys with the machine guns. There's a very famous performance. A little old lady who knew about it said, go ahead, shoot me. Go ahead. Now you behave. You know, what could they do? They go shoot. I mean, so it was a stupid property, but he really believed in it tremendously so. But it really was mostly his work with Alex Cohen. But you mentioned Taller Than a Dwarf, in which he actually performed. This was a play that Elaine May wrote that indeed Matthew Broadwick and Parker Posey starred in. And yet it couldn't last very long. But, James, do you know that this was actually a rewrite of a play that the Lane made, Had written many, many moons earlier. Do you know about that?
