Thespis Journal

The name and career of Ethel Merman are synonymous with American Musical Theater. Miss Merman’s legendary charisma, allure, and glamour have created a near century long fascination with her singing and acting career. From the time that I became aware of Ethel Merman through her recording of the 1966 Lincoln Center revival of her biggest hit, Annie Get Your Gun, I knew that Miss Merman was a significant, distinct, and remarkable Broadway performer. I have long enjoyed other recordings and stories of Miss Merman’s performances, but none more than her dramatic and vivid original cast recording of her greatest Broadway triumph, Gypsy.

Actor Jack Klugman tells the story of the opening night of Gypsy on May 21, 1959. When Ethel Merman made her “designed for a star entrance” from the back of the house and down the aisle on house right of the Broadway Theater, the house, according to Klugman, went “crazy.” “I had no idea that they loved her that much.” They certainly did love the Merm that much, and the strong adulation continues today more than twenty years after her death, and nearly one hundred years since her birth in 1906.

Ethel Merman: The Biggest Star on Broadway is a wonderful new book by Geoffrey Mark, and once again ignites discussion and interest in the career and singing of Miss Merman. As inspiration for this book review/article, I have also been listening to Ethel and Mary Martin as they sing their way through The Ford 50th Anniversary Show from June 15, 1953. Within Ethel Merman’s voice, one can hear the clarion tone, and reverberant timbre that shook Alvin Theater (currently known as the Neil Simon) on October 14, 1930 when she first took the Broadway community by storm with her thrilling rendition of George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm” in the world premiere of Girl Crazy. Although Miss Merman attempted to make a legend of they myth that she came to Broadway as a complete unknown, it is well documented that she had been singing in nightclubs for four years prior to this stunning debut on Broadway. The New York Times review the next morning only hinted at the great career ahead for Ethel Merman. One can safely assume that no one had ever heard anything like this distinctive voice.

“Another is Ethel Merman, whose peculiar song style was brought from the nightclubs to the stage to the vast delight last evening of the people who go places and watch things being done.”

According to the author, Mr. Mark, the opening of Girl Crazy was a career making moment for Ethel Merman, and she never looked back. Her particular delivery of the song “I Got Rhythm” lives as a legend today, and her holding of the A above middle C for sixteen bars over lively Gershwin arranged orchestral accompaniment was well appreciated by the audience of 1930. Cole Porter once said that you better give Ethel Merman a good lyric, because without a doubt, the patrons in the second balcony will hear it as well as everyone else in the theater. This notable projection became a calling card for many of Ethel Merman’s roles as a brassy broad in numerous productions.

Nearly every Ethel Merman book or article produces a new set of stories about the celebrated star. There are a few of these stories which really stand out. In the long original run of Annie Get Your Gun, Annie Oakley’s gun failed to go off one night, but the “dead bird” fell from the rafters anyway. Merman looked at the audience and said, “I’ll be damned, apoplexy!” Merman walked out on a show in the 1940’s due to bad song lyrics. Ethel’s “goon look” upon seeing Frank Butler stopped the show every night on Broadway, and is often imitated by actors playing Annie Oakley. Bernadette Peters had her own stunned, “goon look” when she won the Tony Award for playing Annie Oakley in the 1999 Broadway revisal of this classic Irving Berlin show. Ethel was known for playing all of her lines to the audience and sometimes ignoring other actors. Miss Merman did not forgive Producer Richard Rodgers for 25 years for forcing her to stay with Annie Get Your Gun longer than she had planned. Finally, a warm glow must have settled over Broadway when Ethel finally agreed to appear in the original Broadway production of Hello Dolly as the closing Dolly Levi. While Ethel was in the show, it became the longest running Broadway musical of all time for a period of years. Jerry Herman restored two songs to the score that he had written for Ethel, and she received a super star’s welcome from the Broadway audiences. Originally scheduled to play a limited run of three months (Ethel was already 64 years old). Ethel extended her run to nine months after receiving more than nine current calls on opening night and several standing ovations every night.

There are many personal stories of four divorces, suicide, drug abuse, dishonesty, deceit and tawdry relationships in the life of Ethel Merman. Despite heart wrenching adversity, she kept performing with her characteristic strength and brilliance.

In an uninterrupted string of over fifteen Broadway musical hits, spanning forty years, Ethel Merman established herself as not only the star of Broadway, a superstar of Broadway, but as “the biggest star on Broadway.” It is important to remember that Ethel Merman had a much longer time in the spotlight and more than twice as many genuine hit songs when compared with the fabled Al Jolson. She had more hit shows than Tallulah Bankhead and Helen Hayes put together. (Note to the reader: we already have the Helen Hayes Theater). Mr. Mark even asserts that although Mary Martin was richer than Ethel Merman, Merman was “better.” His book proffers the indisputable evidence throughout his book that Merman was the first lady of Broadway during much of the twentieth century.

Defining the exact characteristics that made Merman a star is a difficult challenge. Her big expressive eyes, out-sized personality, and immense smile lit up the stage. It is widely known that he demeanor as an actor and her style of delivery were well suited to the live Broadway stage in days when there was no amplification of voices. These same characteristics seem to have doomed any hope that Ethel Merman had of being a big movie star. During the decade of the 1930’s, Merman bounced back and forth between Broadway and Hollywood always having a great success in New York, and very little success in the movies.

Undeniably, Miss Merman’s claim to artistic fame was her matchless and unrivaled voice. She continued singing well into her eighth decade of life. Like all performers her voice aged, and sometimes not well. However, there are many recordings that demonstrate that her pipes were still working well for her, even in later years. Opera singer Birgit Nilsson assured Merman that she could have made it as an opera singer, and her luminous voice never failed to thrill a Broadway audience. Ethel did not seem to have a break in her voice, and although many voice experts state that Ethel was the first “belter,” this term fails to capture the breadth and scope of Ethel’s voice and the unique way in which she used her voice. One must listen to early recordings of Ethel singing her hits from the 1930’s and early forties to understand the vocal journey and talent of Miss Merman.

With so many great hits including and especially Annie Get Your Gun, Gypsy, Call Me Madam, Anything Goes, Girl Crazy, Panama Hattie, and her legendary performances in the Jerry Herman musical Hello Dolly in the waning months of the original Broadway run, it is time for the theatrical powerhouses in New York City to insist that a Broadway theater be renamed the Ethel Merman. It is a glaring and unacceptable oversight not to have this recognition for Miss Merman, and she is much more deserving than some recent theater community people who have achieved this status and honor. The span of her career, the illustrious shows that rode on her talent, the eminent songs of Porter, Berlin, and Styne that she brought to fame, the prominent critics, colleagues and audiences which thrilled at her work, and her abundant allocation of shear fortitude and spirit have earned Ethel Merman a lasting recognition of her efforts on Broadway. It is past time to name a Broadway theater for Ethel Merman.

Ethel Merman never missed a performance of Call Me Madam. She rarely missed a performance of Annie Get Your Gun and Gypsy which each had long runs on Broadway. She was an agent, producer, artistic director, actor, singer, casting director, and musician of the first degree. Merman was the greatest exponent of that which made Broadway tick: onstage and off stage, Ethel Merman shot directly from the hip.

Today, those who saw her in Gypsy still talk about her performance as one of the memorable theatrical experiences of their lifetime. Mary Martin won the Tony Award that year for The Sound Of Music, yet no one talks about that performance. The supreme, goddess-like stamp of Ethel Merman will forever lie on the role of Mama Rose. Writing in the New York Times review of the opening night of Gypsy, Brooks Atkinson states all of the following. (Note to the reader: we already have the Brooks Atkinson theater.)

“But trust Ethel. She concludes the proceedings with a song and dance of defiance. Mr. Styne’s music is dramatic. Miss Merman’s performances expresses he whole character: cocky and aggressive, yet sociable and good-hearted. Not for the first time in her fabulous career, her personal magnetism electrifies the whole theater. Ethel Merman is a performer of incomparable power. Gypsy is a good show in the old tradition of musicals. For years, Miss Merman has been the Queen.”

Please join the effort to name a theater for the great one: Miss Ethel Merman!

During a family event yesterday, there was the unfamiliar sound of unanimous agreement that the number one news story of 2005 is Hurricane Katrina: the personal tragedies, the failure of the mainstream media to cover this huge story in an accurate and fair manner, the outrageous and irresponsible statements of national political figures, and the total breakdown of the local and state elected officials in Louisiana. The misreported, frenzied, hysterical, and derisive coverage of Katrina by the mainstream media drove me to begin part-time bogging in September 2005 in order to express my extreme dissatisfaction with the entire news apparatus.

Everyone involved in our discussion today knew of individuals impacted by Katrina and the on-going life transitions and often-dire circumstances faced by these displaced and shattered people. Countless families and individuals remain homeless and jobless today. Many hard-working citizens still face choices for jobs, homes, careers, schools, and other life-altering moments. Our hearts and prayers go out to all the people still looking to put the pieces of their life back together, and to move on with life in a productive and meaningful manner.
Before Katrina hit the news media smelled the story of the year. Every time that the city of New Orleans is threatened, television “journalists” are whipped into a fury, an almost jubilant ambience that comes across on TV. The wildly hysterical news media then went into overdrive immediately after Katrina hit. First, Shepherd Smith of the Fox News Channel told us that New Orleans had dodged the bullet again. Soon Geraldo Rivera, Chris Matthews, Anderson Cooper and others were claiming massive death, rape, starvation, and agony at the New Orleans convention and the Louisiana Superdome with. As we will soon examine evidence of rapes, murders, and other crimes failed to materialize in the truth-telling aftermath of the storm.
While almost everyone in the mainstream media attempted to blame President Bush, two important elected officials who were closest to the disaster area escaped criticism. Let’s set the record straight once and for all.

The mayor of New Orleans Ray Nagin should be held accountable. He knows the city. He knows the danger. He knows that during Hurricane Georges in 1998, the use of the Superdome was a disaster and fully two-thirds of residents never got out of the city. Nothing was done. He declared a mandatory evacuation only twenty-four hours before Hurricane Katrina hit. He did not even declare a voluntary evacuation until the day before that, at 5 p.m. At that time, he explained that he needed to study his legal authority to call a mandatory evacuation and was hesitating to do so lest hotels and other businesses sue the city.

Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco was an dismal failure. It’s her job to call up the National Guard and get it to where it has to go. Where the Guard was in the first few days is a mystery. Indeed, she issued an authorization for the National Guard to commandeer school buses to evacuate people on Wednesday afternoon — more than two days after the hurricane hit and after much of the fleet had already drowned in its parking lots. Time Magazine has succinctly stated the unparalleled failures of Governor Blanco when the named her one of the nation’s worst Governors.

Failures aren’t born. They’re made. Before Hurricane Katrina, it wasn’t the job of Louisiana Governor Kathleen Babineaux Blanco to plan for the evacuation of the elderly and poor from New Orleans. Afterward, she wasn’t in charge of the federal response. But it was her job to give her constituents heart by looking decisive, steadfast and capable. Even if she wasn’t.
When it mattered most, Blanco appeared “dazed and confused,” says Bernie Pinsonat, a bipartisan political consultant in Baton Rouge, La. When NBC’s Matt Lauer asked her whether it was hard to find words to reassure the public, she tried to muster optimism, then circled back to despair. “You know, our people out here are so fearful. They’re so worried … It’s a nightmare.

A google search entitled “Kathleen Blanco Failures” yields more than two hundred thousand results.
This account at News Busters by NBC’S Lisa Myers demonstrates that even liberal NBC got with the program about Governor Blanco.
Bob Williams, former Louisiana legislator takes Blanco and Nagin to task for their failures in a Wall Street Opinion Journal column.

Mona Charen has an outstanding column in the Washington Times this week regarding Katrina being the misreported story of the year.

Katrina was a monster, and the misery it caused was heartbreaking. But the instant analysis was beyond tendentious. We were told poor people died or suffered because they had no way to escape the storm and were offered none by local, state or federal officials (most of the press reserved its severest scorn for the federal response). But according to a careful examination of actual storm victims by the New York Times, most of those who stayed behind either owned cars or were offered rides by others and chose, for a various reasons (some good, some stupid), to remain

.

Bryan Preston of the fabulous Junkyard Blog summed up much of the failures in New Orleans in the hours immediately following Katrina.

“Most of the death and mayhem was entirely preventable. That’s worth a whole lot of righteous fury. But be angry at the people who failed your city. Their names are Nagin and Blanco, not Bush and Chertoff. And be angry at yourselves for wasting the year after Ivan not holding your local politicians’ feet to the fire to get the disaster plan updated to reflect the lessons learned after that near disaster.

New Orleans is dead because before the storm it overdosed on “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” an attitude that it’s now clear extended beyond city hall to include the great newspaper that is supposed to challenge officials and be a voice for the voiceless. The whole city’s elite class is complicit in turning the Crescent City into Thunderdome. They failed their own people, and failed the most vulnerable the most horribly.”

The New Orleans Times-Picayune editorialized about the false rumors widely reported as truth by the mainstream media in the hours and days immediately following Katrina.

Nearly a month after the storm, officials have come up with no hard evidence to back up stories of murder, rape and other violence that supposedly happened among those who took shelter in those places. No matter how convincing the eye witness accounts, the bodies that back up their stories aren’t there
The toll, after careful inspection, is as follows: four dead in the Convention Center, one by violence: six dead in the Superdome, none by violence. While there were reports of 30 to 40 dead in the Convention Center and 10 to numerous in the Dome, the actual tally has to be given more credibility than unconfirmed reports by traumatized people. During the chaotic week that followed Hurricane Katrina, four confirmed murders took place in New Orleans, a number that’s not at all surprising or even unusual for a city that expected to see as many as 200 homicides this year.

Peggy Noonan, columnist extraordinaire and Reagan speechwriter, summarized the thoughts of many common sense conservatives.

Last week I quoted Gerald Ford: “The government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” I was talking about money. But it applies also to personal freedom, to the rights of the individual, including his right to do something stupid as long as it’s legal, like swimming.
Government has real duties in disaster. Maintaining the peace is a primary one. But if we demand that our government protect us from all the weather all the time, if we demand that it protect us from rain and hail, if we make government and politicians pay a terrible price for not getting us out of every flood zone and rescuing us from every wave, we’re going to lose a lot more than we gain. If we give government all authority then we are giving them all power.

Among the more preposterous of the comments from politicians competing for media attention came from Sheila Jackson Lee, democrat of Texas. Jackson-Lee is often critical of President Bush, and tends to see issues only in terms of race.

“The Bush administration’s slow response to Hurricane Katrina may be the result of minority votes being suppressed and Democratic candidates losing the last two presidential elections, a member of the Congressional Black Caucus has alleged. “Watching family members and others cling to rooftops in Hurricane Katrina, I wonder whether or not the absence of attention [to the recovery effort] is attributable to the loss of a vote in 2000 and 2004,” U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat from Texas, said. She added that the government’s hurricane response gave her the feeling of “deja vu,” following the Republican Party’s alleged attempts to undermine the black vote in those two presidential elections.”

There are far too many perplexing quotes from hyperventilating politicians to print in this article, however, Rush Limbaugh gives a better summary to this mess than I could ever write.

“It is becoming clear, and has been for two or three days here, of the utter failure of local government and state government to handle the circumstance. Everybody is out there saying, “We need a Giuliani! We need a Giuliani!” What was Rudy Giuliani? He was a mayor. Has anybody seen Ray Nagin? Was Ray Nagin at the Superdome? Was Kathleen Blanco at the Superdome? Were these people there? We saw Rudy everywhere. Yeah, we need a Rudy, fine, but Rudy was not part of federal government, folks; Rudy was not part of any FEMA organization; Rudy was not part of any federal bureaucracy. He was mayor of New York, and when you saw pictures of Rudy on TV the New York police chief flanked him and he was flanked by New York fire chief, and New York City officials, and the governor flanked him, of course, Pataki was there as well. But you haven’t seen that in this circumstance. We also know that President Bush on Sunday begged the governor to get everybody out there, declare an emergency. She said, “No, I need 24 hours to decide.” We now have the mayor, Ray Nagin — and we have the audio of this. It happened on CNN today. The mayor is now trying to pass the buck to the governor, claiming that the governor was the one that was holding up the decision-making process. We also know that the governors are in charge of the National Guard. Everybody wants to know, “Why didn’t Bush send the Guard?” The governors have to do this, and that’s why Bush wanted her to declare an emergency so that he could get a foot in the door. You notice there are no law enforcement problems in Mississippi? There aren’t any law enforcement problems over in Alabama. You haven’t seen the looting; you haven’t seen the utter chaos, but you have seen the destruction. There are reasons for this, and we will get into them this afternoon. The New Orleans police disintegrated, and now the mayor wants hotel vacations for them in Las Vegas.”

All of these many circumstances make the Katrina disaster and its multi=faceted aftermath my nominee for the biggest news story of 2005.

You have to see and read this list of the twenty most obnoxious quotes related to Hurricane Katrina. I am not sure how they narrowed the list to only twenty quotes!

Ian Schwartz and Thespis Journal team up to provide great coverage on Lying Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu and her ridiculous statements on Fox News Sunday.

The Mudville Gazette provided wonderful coverage throughout the event. In this article, the history of the bad blood between Governor Blanco and Mayor Nagin is fully detailed.

Michelle Malkin debunks many myths about Katrina.

Check out the best and worst at the Junk Yard Blog.
Check out the open post at the Mudville Gazette.
Check Outside the Beltway for more news.
Lots of other news at Right Wing Nation.
Check out Betsy’s page too!
Check out: Stop The ACLU!