That song is from THE JULIE ANDREWS SHOW, which is an NBC special, shown on the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend, 1965. It was such a tremendous ratings' success for NBC, they rebroadcast it on March 23, 1966, to equal success.
Aw I'm actually in rehearsal for The Fantasticks right now. This song also reminds me of times before 9/11 happened.
"You have two kinds of shows on Broadway – revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles. You get your tickets for The Lion King a year in advance, and essentially a family... pass on to their children the idea that that's what the theater is – a spectacular musical you see once a year, a stage version of a movie. It has nothing to do with theater at all. It has to do with seeing what is familiar.... I don't think the theatre will die per se, but it's never going to be what it was.... It's a tourist attraction." Stephen Sondheim
It's strange how huge events create ripples that gradually change the course of people's fates. The events of 9/11 started a chain reaction that gradually reached my small town, and indirectly set the spark that led me into the theatre.
I was a young tween, pulled out of school when all the local private schools were briefly shut down due to our proximity to the field in Somerset where one of the planes went down. During the aftermath, my father, still shaken up but kind of in awe of what was going on, brought me into the living room to show me how the music world had come together to raise money and support the first responders. The "Concert for New York City" blew my mind- especially the performances of Billy Joel and The Who, who I had heard snatches of on the radio, but never gave serious thought to.
The way this fat old guy at the piano, and these three grizzled British men managed to squeeze passion, energy and a very real sense of drama and storytelling out of their music, while still rocking pretty hard, blew my mind. I had been no big music fan- I found it pleasant in its way but it didn't engage me. Suddenly, I saw something I hadn't seen before- music that was more than words with a tune. Music that said something, from a point of view and with an IDEA behind it. Music that was, in a sense, theatrical, without being "theatre music."
My next birthday saw the arrival of lots of albums by The Who, including "Tommy" and my favorite, "Quadrophenia." Music as storytelling as well as performance touched a chord in me, a young kind who aspired to be a writer and a storyteller, who played piano because his parents told him "it's good for you." When I discovered that "Tommy" had become a movie musical, and then a stage show, I launched a rather unsuccessful attempt to get my seventh-grade musical to be "Tommy." Instead, it was "You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown." I decided to audition anyway, and played Schroeder.
My whole journey with the theatre has been a result of the willingness of The Who, Billy Joel and their colleagues to come together and do good with their music. I suppose that's the moral of this story: despite the massive acts of evil, and the equally massive acts of apathy, that plague our world, a single act of good can stand as a beacon to others to do good, live more, and bring some amount of light into the world.
I think the thing that struck me as most poignant (and almost eerily foreshadowing) was the last verse, "Deep in December, it's nice to remember, without a hurt the heart is hollow...." especially listening to the late great Jerry Orbach singing it and recalling that he passed away "deep in December" (12/28/2004). RIP Jerry, nobody sang that piece like you.