Free Seth's Broadway Diary, Volume 1: Part 2 by Seth Rudetsky Page B

Peterson. They wanted Jack Lemmon or Steve Lawrence. It was Chita's agent again, Richard Seff, who was also Dick Van Dyke's agent, and kept pushing for them to see him again, even though the creative team thought he wasn't quite right. Then, when Dick finally got the role, his big number, "Put on a Happy Face," was bombing. Charles immediately set out to write a new song. But Marge Champion, who was married to the director (Gower), thought that the staging of the number wasn't right. It originally took place at the Ed Sullivan show while they were setting the lights, and she thought of the idea of setting it in Grand Central and making it about two young girls who were depressed. Suffice it to say, it worked!
     
    Of course, I had to obsess about Annie . Martin Charnin asked Charles to write it because Charles had written It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's Superman , and this was another musical based on a comic. Charles thought the idea was awful but liked Martin and Thomas Meehan, who was writing the book, so he went along with it. Charles told us that the original concept was for Annie to be played by… Bernadette Peters! All I can say is "what the-?" The first song he wrote was "It's a Hard Knock Life," which was also the only song in that show that had the lyrics come first. He said the fun of writing a musical is not knowing what's gonna work and what isn't. In Act One, there’s a scene where Annie meets Sandy the dog for the first time and then Annie gets thrown back in the orphanage. There was a clever scene change with a sliding panel, but it needed time to get set up, so Charles wrote a song to cover it. When the change happened for the first time, the audience cheered, and Charles went to the back of the house to tell Martin that they really loved that clever scene change. He didn't realize until months later that the audience was actually loving the song he wrote to cover the change, "Tomorrow"! All these stories and more can be read in his excellent memoir, Put on a Happy Face .
     
    OK, everyone, get ready for next week’s Tonys!! I cannot wait to see all those performances. As Patti LuPone ad-libbed at the end of the Tony opening number I wrote in 1998, "Go, Tony!!!"
     
     

    When You Got It, Flaunt It
    June 16, 2008
     
    Hello! Happy post-Tony Awards. I'm actually writing this before watching it, so I can't give you my opinion of the show. I can, however, give my estimated opinion of the show. Please stop with the Hollywood celebs and bring on the Broadway! I want longer performances from every musical, not four minutes and we're out. Remember Dreamgirls in 1982? We got to see the fight scene leading to "And I Am Telling You" and all of "And I Am Telling You"! These days, they'd skip the fight scene and we'd only get a truncated version of "And I Am Telling You" to make room for a headache-y TV star to present.
     
    Ladies and gentlemen… Dreamgirls !
"And I am telling you… you're gonna lo-o-o-o-ove me-e e-e-e-e-e!" 
And now… Patricia Heaton.
     
    Since I can't (yet!) recap the Tony Awards, let me recap my week. On Tuesday I performed in a benefit that Judy Gold put together for the public school her son goes to (which is the same one Juli goes to). Andrea McArdle and her daughter Alexis performed and sounded fabulous. They're both doing Les Miz in the late summer with Andrea as Fantine and Alexis as Eponine. I love it! Triumph The Insult Comic Dog puppet performed and was hilarious. He talked about Judy Gold being a gay mom and said that while Andrea and Alexis are doing Les Miz , Judy and her sons are doing Miss Lez. He followed that with, "I'm not saying Judy is raising her sons gay, but Andrea McArdle is backstage right now singing, 'Your son'll come out… tomorrow.'" I wish I could tell you some of the jokes he said about me, but Playbill.com is a family site.
     
    While leaving Caroline's on Tuesday, the weather seemed crazy — super quiet, but windy and on the verge of something