She was never accepted with the same fervor in her native U.S.A., which had barred her from entering the country for most of the decade before this show. The singer and dancer who had starred in both the Paris Folies Bergère and the Broadway Ziegfeld Follies was known for her erotic dances in the 1920s La Revue Nègre in her adopted homeland of France. The show would eventually surpass My Fair Lady to become, for a while, Broadway’s longest running musical.įebruary 4: Stage legend Josephine Baker returned to Broadway with a revue of her work titled Josephine Baker and Company, offered a revue of her work, showing she still had “it” at age 57. Football fans may prefer to forget, but the halftime show at the Super Bowl I was Carol Channing singing the title song.
#Ting me a song buddy hackett full#
Lyndon Johnson used the song as the theme for his ultimately successful campaign for a full term of his own. 9 at what is now the Ed Sullivan Theatre on Broadway at 53rd Street) out of the Number One spot on the Top 40 chart, the week of May 9, 1964. How big a hit was Dolly? The title song, as sung by Louis Armstrong, pushed the Beatles (who had made their US debut on the Ed Sullivan Show on Feb. The out-of-town tryout was a legendary mess, but Champion lived up to his name by overseeing a miraculous transformation that had critics and audience flinging their hats in the air, as the period expression goes. January 16: The year got off to the best possible start with the opening of Hello, Dolly!, with its classic score by Jerry Herman, staging by Gower Champion and featuring the comeback stardom of Carol Channing in a role that had been turned down by other actresses including Ethel Merman. So let’s pause for a moment and go month by month, show by show and remember why musical theatre fans with access to a time machine might consider setting the dial for that special year. The year 1964 was a time when Broadway musicals were still powerhouses of American mass culture. Stephen Sondheim’s cult favorite Anyone Can Whistle ran barely two weeks, and Bert Lahr’s Foxy earned him the Tony Award despite a run of just a few months. Golden Boy, High Spirits, Ben Franklin in Paris and Oh! What a Lovely War had a proud place in the next drawer down. The year 1964 saw Carol Channing triumph in Hello, Dolly!, Zero Mostel break and win hearts in Fiddler on the Roof and Barbra Streisand cement her stardom with Funny Girl. How many theatre fans wish they could go back in time to, say 1947, with Finian’s Rainbow and Brigadoon or 1949 with South Pacific and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or 1956 with My Fair Lady, The Most Happy Fella and Bells Are Ringing or 2005 with Spamalot, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee and The Light in the Piazza? But not many wall calendars could compete with 1964, now a half-century gone, for a pure concentration of red-letter days. There are a few golden years in Broadway history just packed with great musical hits and stars. From Fiddler on the Roof to Funny Girl, Anyone Can Whistle and Hello, Dolly!, Overtures looks back at the landmark productions that debued on Broadway 50 years ago.
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