BROADWAY RECALL: Still Here? No, They're Back!

Welcome to BROADWAY RECALL, a bi-monthly column where BroadwayWorld.com's Chief Theatre Critic, Michael Dale, delves into the archives and explores the stories behind the well-known and the not so well-known videos and photographs of Broadway's past. Look for BROADWAY RECALL every other Saturday.

With its many supporting roles for older performers, one of the great pleasures of productions of Follies is the opportunity to see some of the theatre's senior members making a triumphant return to the Broadway stage.  When Ethel Shutta first belted "Broadway Baby" on the Winter Garden boards it had been over 40 years since her last big hit musical, starring alongside Eddie Cantor in Ziegfeld's 1928 western spectacular, Whoopee!  When Jane White essayed Solange LaFitte in the 2001 revival it was her first appearance in a Broadway musical since opening as Queen Aggravain in 1959's Once Upon A Mattress.

Naturally, the new revival of Follies is populated by some beloved old faces that haven't graced Times Square stages in some time.

Susan Watson, who plays retired dancer Emily Whitman began her Broadway career in 1960 as the excitable 15-year-old fangirl Kim McAfee in Bye, Bye, Birdie and was last seen tap dancing the boards as the only slightly older adventure-hungry title character in the 1971 revival of No, No, Nanette.  In between she was one of Broadway's busiest ingénues of the 1960s, being a replacement Lili in Carnival!, playing a French student revolutionary opposite Robert Preston in Ben Franklin in Paris, cracking a whip as the go-go girl in Celebration and earning a Tony nomination for her shortest run, the twelve-performance A Joyful Noise.

Watson's career might have taken a different turn if the television pilot she shot in 1963, Maggie Brown, had sold.  Here she is playing the daughter of the musical sitcom's star, Ethel Merman.

 (CLICK THIS PHOTO TO PLAY THE VIDEO!)

 

St. James audiences swooned with delight watching real-life married couple Don Correia and Sandy Duncan fall in love eight times a week as replacements for Tommy Tune and Twiggy in My One And Only.  Though his spouse was certainly the more famous of the pair, Correia, after making his Broadway debut flashing his heels to "I Can Do That" as a replacement in A Chorus Line, had established himself as one of Broadway's leading song and dance men through revues like Perfectly Frank and Sophisticated Ladies and by stopping the 1982 revival of Little Me nightly with "I've Got Your Number."

As Theodore Whitman, one of three roles he understudied in the 2001 revival of Follies, Correia performs "Rain on the Roof" with Susan Watson, but it was in Singin' In The Rain where Broadway audiences last saw him in a starring role.  Having the high-pressured responsibility of creating a stage version of Gene Kelly's most famous film role, Correia earned a Tony nomination and charmed audiences by singing and dancing the title number in an actual on-stage rainstorm.

(CLICK THIS PHOTO TO PLAY THE VIDEO!)

The senior member of the Follies cast, singing the thrilling "One More Kiss," is actually making her Broadway debut, though she was a long-time favorite of two of New York's most famous stages.  The celebrated mezzo-soprano Rosalind Elias made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1954 and was a frequent attraction at both the old and new Mets, as well as major opera houses around the world. 

At 82 years of age her career is still very active, but here's a sample from her younger days, singing Carmen's "Habanera" in 1959.

(CLICK THIS PHOTO TO PLAY THE VIDEO!)

 

Photos by Joan Marcus.

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