Last night at the Stephen Schwartz tribute at the Venetian Room at the Fairmont Hotel, Liz Callaway sang this song by him as he accompanied her on the piano. I was sitting right next to the stage so it was thrilling to witness it. Before she began her stirring rendition of this soaring ballad by him, however, Schwartz sat the piano and told us all a bit of theatrical lore about this song, Meadowlark, which has become a kind of staple in the repertoire of a certain sort of theatrical diva working the cabaret circuit. But I prefer Callaways clarity to the more diphthongal throng of divas who dive into their vowels and claw at their consonants. Okay. Back to Schwartzs story. He told us that the song was from The Bakers Wife, his famously ill-fated musical from 1976 that never made it to Broadway after having toured the US for six months where it finally closed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. after Topol and Carole Demas, its two leads, were replaced by Paul Sorvino and Patti LuPone. Meadowlark was LuPones big first-act number. But David Merrick, the shows producer, hated the number, thinking it went on much too long and stopped the act in its tracks. His mission was to get the number cut from the show. Schwartz did acquiesce a bit and put in a truncated version of the song but it never really worked so he decided to revert to the original version. This angered Merrick so much that when they were down in D.C., he sneaked into the orchestra pit one afternoon and stole all the charts in the score for that song and took them back with him to New York on the afternoon train. When the orchestra arrived for that evenings performance its members discovered those pages were missing from the score so for that one night Merrick got his way and the song was deleted from the show. Schwartz didnt tell us LuPones reaction - but it was fun to imagine it. They got the charts back for the next nights performance. Cut to: Callaway.
Posted on: Sun, 28 Sep 2014 18:58:44 +0000
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