This is a wonderful, almost 7-minute scene and song from the musical The Rothschilds, performed on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1970.  Written by Harnick and Bock (who did Fiddler on the Roof), it won a Tony Award for a lesser-known Hal Linden as Best Leading Actor in a Musical and is pretty much what helped make him a star.  The show had a respectable run of 507 performances, which is over a year, about 15 months.  It has a very nice score, though I think, for my taste. stronger in the first act.  It also won a second Tony Award, that for Keene Curtis as Best Featured Actor in a Musical, playing several roles.  (People might best recognize him for a periodic role on Cheers, as 'John Allen Hill,' the totally bald proprietor of the restaurant upstairs who continually gave 'Sam' a hard time and pretty much always, if not always, came out ahead.)

The number here is “Sons,” a clever piece that sort of serves as a montage of patriarch 'Mayer Rothschild' with dreams of breaking down walls to get his family out of the Frankfurt ghetto by building a dynasty.  And for anyone who only knows of Linden from  the TV series Barney Miller, this will show his impressive singing.

Interestingly, in 2015, Harnick and the show's book writer, Sherman Yellen, adapted the musical into a one-act production, Rothschild & Sons, which played off-Broadway and had a cast album recorded.  It focused the story somewhat more on the family -- which was the core of the original show's strong first act -- rather than following the sons as much when they went off to build fame across Europe, during which period the character of 'Mayer' died.  (Always one of the hurdles the original musical had, losing its leading man early.  They kept trying to come up with ways of putting off his death as much as possible, but at a certain point it couldn't be put off.)  Several Harnick and Bock songs for the original production that had never been used were added back into the score.

By the way, the second Rothschild son who appears, 'Solomon,' who wears glasses and is studious, carrying around his book, is played by a young Robby Benson. 

A week ago, I posted several videos about the great Broadway composer Jule Styne.  I came across one more after that – but it’s as much a wonderful video to celebrate Angela Lansbury with, after her passing three weeks ago just shy of her 97th birthday.
 
It’s a 12-1/2 minute montage of footage from her 1974 Broadway performance in Gypsy, which had a score by Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim.  The footage is taken from the audience, of course, but the quality for such things is totally watchable – and parts are almost excellent.
 
A few comments about the material.
 
Early on, she sings the song, “Some People,” where at one point she asks her father for $88 to help her act for her children.  Knowing how much she scams people, including himself, he says he wouldn’t even give her 88-cents.  When the original cast album was made in 1959 with Ethel Merman, the actor playing the father wasn’t available for the recording session.  (Or perhaps no one thought of asking him to be there, since it’s his only line, and it’s spoken.)  Realizing that they needed someone quickly, the show’s young, 29-year-old lyricist filled in, playing gruff and old.  So, if you have the cast album, yes, that’s Stephen Sondheim.
 
Later, in the song, “Together, Wherever We Go,” there’s a wonderfully whimsical line, “And any IOU I owe, you owe. / Who, me owe? / No, you owe / No, we owe.  Together.”  Sondheim has said that the line is an homage to his mentor Oscar Hammerstein, and the line Hammerstein wrote for the title song of Oklahoma! –
 
And when we say
Yeeow! Ay-yip-io-eeay!
...Oklahoma, O.K. -- 
​L-A-H-O-M-A.  Oklahoma!

But finally, and most importantly, this has the only footage I’ve yet been able to find about her famous interpretation of the big, renown “11 o’clock” number – “Rose’s Turn,” which comes along at the 9:20 mark.  This is the character having a breakdown when everyone in her life, and now her daughter, have left her, who she’s unrelentingly pushed to be a star, when what she’s actually wanted all along was to be the star herself.
 
Her performance of “Rose’s Turn” was incredibly gutsy.  That’s because after the song finished, as the audience cheered, she bowed and bowed...and bowed, and it almost got to the point of mugging, as the applause continued.  Until after the applause finally ended – but she kept bowing.  And bowing, in a now-silent theater.  And that’s when the audience realized that she Angela Lansbury hadn’t been bowing to their applause, but that as Rose she was bowing and bowing and bowing to her imagined applause.  It risked looking utterly foolish, but from all accounts, it was galvanizing.  This video unfortunately doesn’t have the full performance and all the bowing, cutting off a bit early, but it has a lot of her bowing and bowing and looking high up into balcony, though the video stops just as the applause ends – where the bowing still went for a while longer.  (At which point the audience got it).  But especially seeing the expression on her face, you’ll get the point, that she’s playing Rose as she’s deeeeeeply bowing and bowing.  It’s absolutely fascinating. 

I’ll keep trying to track down the full end of the number, but for now, this (as much of it there is) is a wonderful record to have.

Back in the 1980s, Sylvia Fine wrote and hosted three PBS specials on musical comedy, Musical Comedy Tonight.  (For accuracy's sake, the first was actually 1979.)  They were wonderful, and happily you don’t have to take my word for it because they won a Peabody Award and got two Emmy nominations.  Fine was the wife of Danny Kaye and wrote much of his specialty material, and is credited for having a major impact on his career.  (He appeared in the second of of the three specials.)  She also had two Oscar nominations for Best Original Song, “The Five Pennies” and “The Moon is Blue.”
 
The specials were somewhat adapted from a class she taught at USC, but with the significant bonus of using major stars to help make her points.  So, as hugely entertaining as they were, there was actually scholarly aspect to them.  At least one of the specials was done in a small theater in Los Angeles, which I know because I went there with a friend to watch it recorded.  I have some vague recollections of it, and checking the iMDB, that appears to have been the first one.  If so, that's where this clip is from.
 
This is a round-about way to continue our Ethel Merman Anything Goes, folderol, but from another angle, because this comes from the first of those specials.   It’s medley of three classic songs from Anything Goes, beginning with Ethel Merman performaing a solo version of “I Get a Kick Out of You” and then, after a interesting conversation with Fine about the creation of the Cole Porter show, they're joined by, of all people, Rock Hudson who sings a duet with Merman of “You’re the Top,” accompanied by Sylvia Fine at the piano.  It's then followed by Merman in a production number re-creation of the title song.

By the way, Anything Goes had quite a remarkable score by Cole Porter.  Written in 1934, it had five songs that became standards -- the aforementioned "I Get a Kick Out of You," "You're the Top" and "Anything Goes," along with "Friendship" and the ballad "All Through the Night.  That's seriously impressive.
​

Last week, I posted a couple of videos from a 1954 TV adaptation of Cole Porter's musical Anything Goes, where Ethel Merman recreated her famous starring role of nightclub singer 'Reno Sweeney' from the original 1934 Broadway production.  

The show was a huge hit playing 420 performances (about a year), which was major for that era.  In fact, it was the fourth longest-running musical of the 1930s, and had one of Porter's great scores.

As I had noted, Merman had one of her rare starring roles, repeating her role of 'Reno Sweeney,' in a 1936 movie version.  And here below is a scene from that, with her singing of the score's famous songs, "I Get a Kick Out of You."  You'll note Bing Crosby who co-starred.

The staging is a bit weird, to say the least.  But it's the song that's a joy.  I did notice one lyric that got changed for the movie.  The line, "Some get a kick from cocaine" was apparently too much for the ears of day's movie audiences, so it got rewritten as "Some like that perfume from Spain."  Even if the line doesn't complete sense (whatever "that" perfume is from Spain...), it makes enough sense by sounding exotic, and actually perfectly (and cleverly) fits the original line that follows -- "I sure that if / I took even one sniff / that would bore me teriff -- ically, too."

​Following up on yesterday’s post of Ethel Merman recreating her 1934 Broadway role for a 1954 TV adaptation of Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, here’s another video from that production.  This time, it’s a duet of another of the show’s great songs, “You’re the Top,” and notable for being with one of the productions co-stars, Frank Sinatra. 
 
There’s a bit of lead-in dialogue, and their performance is enthusiastic and fun, even with Sinatra mugging his way through it.  And knowing it would get a good reaction, they built in a reprise.