Music Went 'Round and Around

E. Vacha John

Description

Spotting a trend in the early 1950s of staging summer theater in the round under tents, Clevelander John L. Price Jr. decided to give it a try. Consulting a local statistician to determine the geographical center of the culturally inclined population, the bull's-eye fell in Warrensville Heights, a Cleveland suburb that was also the home to Thistledown Race Track. Price opened his Musicarnival there, on the grounds of the race track, with a production of Oklahoma! in the summer of 1954. The Music Went 'Round and Around tells the story of this unique summer theater and of its ebullient founder, John L. Price Jr.Price's venture was one of the last commercial legitimate theaters established in Cleveland. In its heyday the Musicar-nival had a capacity of 2500 and presented an average of eight to ten shows each summer. The backbone of the repertoire consisted of such musical classics as Carousel; Kiss Me, Kate; Wonderful Town; Fanny; Paint Your Wagon; and The Unsinkable Molly Brown. The summer schedule also featured popular solo acts, such as Louis Armstrong, Henny Youngman, Tom Jones, and even burlesque. Occasionally Price tried to sneak in an opera, letting the popular shows support these operatic flings.For the first eleven seasons Price principally used a resident stock company, occasionally bringing in a visiting star, if available and right for the role. Toward the end of the 1960s, however, Price was forced to adopt the star system to keep his tent filled. Dropping the stock company, he brought in packaged productions generally headlined by popular singing or television stars. Both offerings had strong followings, and Musicarnival kept the torch of musical theater burning brightly in Cleveland until 1975, when declining attendance finally forced its closing.The Music Went 'Round and Around is the first book in the Cleveland Showtime Series.

Sujets

• Musicals
• Histoire
• USA
• United States of America
• Musical theatre
• History of the Americas
• États-Unis
• Ohio

Informations

• Publié par: The Kent State University Press
• Date de parution: 19 juillet 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781612773940
• Langue: English

Extrait

The Music Went ′Round and Around
The Music Went ′Round and Around

John Vacha
The Kent State University Press    Kent and London
© 2004 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ISBN 0-87338-798-8
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2003028275
Manufactured in the United States of America
08   07   06   05   04      5   4   3   2   1
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Vacha, John.
The music went ’round and around : the story of Musicarnival / John Vacha.
       p.   cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-87338-798-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Musicarnival (Warrensville Heights, Ohio)
2. Musical theater—Ohio—Cleveland—History.
I. Title.
ML 1711.8. C 57 V 3 2004
782.1'079'77131—dc22
            2003028275
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.
To the memory of
My Mother and Father:
Norma S. and Edward O. Vacha
Contents
Preface: Welcome to Musicarnival
1 “Price’s Folly”
2 Production Years I: From Oklahoma! to Opera
3 Production Years II: Cinderella Story
4 The Package Years: From Benny to Burlesque
5 Striking the Tent
Appendix A: The Production Years, 1954–1965
Appendix B: The Package Years, 1966–1975
Bibliographic Note
Index
Preface: Welcome to Musicarnival!
W henever I think of South Pacific , I visualize it in the round. The Rodgers and Hammerstein characters populate a circular, nearly bare stage, symbolic of the lonely island on which the action takes place. They are surrounded on all sides by an unbroken sea—the faces of the audience. I first saw South Pacific , of course, at Musicarnival.
Along with an entire generation of Clevelanders, I saw quite a few classics of the American musical stage for the first time at Musicarnival. For those of us who missed the touring New York companies at the Hanna Theatre, John Price’s tent theater in Warrensville Heights more often than not gave us our next chance to catch those shows in a professional production. It first opened its flaps in 1954, during the golden age of the American musical, and kept its pennant fluttering above the “Queen of the Big Tops” for the following twenty-two summers. In many respects, the history of Musicarnival, especially for the production years, is the history in microcosm of that original American art form.
Although theater is probably the most collaborative of art forms, any history of Musicarnival is to a large degree a biography of its founder and guiding genius, John L. Price Jr. The full list of his credits would include a great many of the significant theatrical enterprises of his era in Cleveland, but Musicarnival is the connective tissue that binds them all together. Fortunately he was also a saver, and the John L. Price Jr. Musicarnival Archives provide as rich a documentary record as left by any local theater.
In undertaking this history of Musicarnival, then, I am indebted first and foremost to John Price for donating his archives to the Cleveland Public Library. Next, Mrs. Evelyn Ward and the staff of that institution’s literature department made those materials available in record time and were unfailingly accommodating and helpful to me in my research. Retired theater librarian Herbert Mansfield provided greatly appreciated guidance through the picture and slide collection. Several people helped fill in, elucidate, and complement the printed record by sharing their memories of Musicarnival through oral interviews, including those of John Price, William Boehm, Diana Price, Jock Price, Frank Baloga, and Keith Joseph. Quotations taken from these interviews may be recognized by verbs of attribution in the present tense. I am grateful moreover to Diana Price for reviewing the manuscript in the interest of accuracy. Final responsibility for accuracy of fact as well as opinion rests, as always, with the author.
Finally, I would like to thank the editors and staff of the Kent State University Press for their encouragement in inaugurating this series on individual Cleveland theaters as an extension of our general history, Showtime in Cleveland . Thanks also to my wife, Ruta, for continued patience and support, and to my niece, Audrey Dadzitis Hopkins, for putting me right with the computer age.
And now, settle back in your canvas deck chair as the house lights dim. If you’re on the aisle, you may feel a sudden stir of warm summer air as a figure races past from the back of the house and bounds confidently up onto the white stage. A young man in a crew cut and red blazer peers out at that encircling sea of faces and addresses them in a ringing tenor: “Good evening, neighbors, and welcome to Musicarnival!”
1
“Price’s Folly”
D uring the spring of 1954 a young Navy veteran suddenly began hanging around the racetrack. His mother, Emma Price, and his wife, Connie, were not overly concerned; they knew that Johnny Price wasn’t smitten by the ponies. Both had had their flings with the stage, and they knew that John was simply incurably stagestruck. Where railbirds watched thoroughbreds rounding the final turn into the homestretch, Price envisioned chorus girls breaking into their routines just beyond the oval rail.
What Price had in mind for the northwestern corner of the Thistledown grounds near the intersection of Warrensville Center and Emery Roads was a new and unique summer theater. Inspired by a recent trend on the East Coast, he planned to produce musical shows under a huge, circuslike tent. The big-top imagery would inspire, or more accurately necessitate, the adoption of another contemporary theatrical trend. In the tradition of Ringling Brothers and other circus impresarios, Price would be staging his shows on a circular platform right in the middle of his audience—in the round.
Summer theaters in themselves were nothing new in the Cleveland theatrical tradition. Nearly a century earlier, Clevelanders had begun patronizing Haltnorth’s Gardens on Kinsman Road. At first this was a simple German beer garden, viewed suspiciously by the earlier settlers with their New England Congregational origins. The Cleveland Leader in 1863 labeled it the city’s greatest nuisance, a gathering place for pickpockets, prostitutes, and “shoulder hitters” (whatever that was—perhaps nineteenth-century slang for purse snatchers). By 1872, after its relocation at Willson (East 55th) and Woodland Avenue, Haltnorth’s had become a widely popular gathering place with spacious grounds laid out around a picturesque pond. One of its chief attractions was a theater that featured concerts and operettas by the Holman Opera Company, among others. All the popular Gilbert and Sullivan shows, from H.M.S. Pinafore to Patience , could be seen there in the 1880s and 1890s.
There was even a summer tent theater in the city’s past. The Cleveland Pavilion Theater flourished in the 1880s between Wood (East 4th) and Bond (East 6th) Streets, probably in the old Lake View Park, descending from the bluffs to the railroad tracks along Lake Erie. It could accommodate up to two thousand spectators under canvas to view musical productions such as The Chimes of Normandy .
With the turn of the century, summer theatrics shifted to the Euclid Avenue Garden Theater, which opened in 1904 at Euclid Avenue and Kennard (East 40th) Street. Unlike Haltnorth’s, these gardens were described by a patron, Edith Moriarty, as “a temperance theater.” Moriarty recalled, “Green grass and trees, tables, umbrellas and chairs, invited the audience, particularly the young girls on Saturday afternoons, spending their allowances on the matinee, with sodas and root beer between the acts.” There was a stuccoed pavilion of Spanish Moorish design set two hundred feet back from the street, open to the air on three sides, and facing the stage on the fourth. Typical of the musical fare was Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado . By World War I, however, the Euclid Avenue Gardens had given way to the commercial redevelopment of their eponymous street.
More permanent than any of these predecessors and a direct precursor to Musicarnival was Cain Park. This began with the joint inspiration of Cleveland Heights Mayor Frank Cain and Dr. Dina Rees Evans, a dramatics teacher at Cleveland Heights High School. Evans started out by requesting permission to use a natural ravine at Superior Avenue and Taylor Road for an outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1934. Mayor Cain not only granted approval but also subsequently promoted construction of a permanent amphitheater on the site. Built partially with labor from the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), Cain Park formally opened in 1938 as the country’s first municipally owned outdoor theater.
Under the direction of “Doc” Evans, Cain Park became the area’s preeminent summer theater and provided many of its fondest memories over the following decade. Repertoire ranged from classics such as Peer Gynt to such recent Broadway hits as Arsenic and Old Lace . But operettas soon became the three-thousand-seat, open-air theater’s forte, exemplified by productions of The Chocolate Soldier, The Vagabond King, Naughty Marietta , and The Student Prince , among other chestnuts. Not even obstacles such as the occasional rainout or lack of parking facilities could keep the crowds away. Nor could they keep away the annual migration of theater hopefuls from across the country. Through the years, names such as Hal Holbrook, Jack Lee, Pernell Roberts, and Dom DeLuise joined Cain Park’s roster of distinguished alumni.
Other than Evans herself, no one could claim a closer bond with Cain Park than John Price. His mother had a leading role, along with Dorothy Fuldheim, in the theater’s first dramatic production of The Warrior’s Husband in 1938. From Cassius in Julius Caesar to the Indian in High Tor , Price himself had a part in every Cain Park production during the first ten years, except during his stint in the service. Through s