January 7, 2025: Theatre Yesterday and Today, by Ron Fassler.

Between the years 1965 and 1997, eleven John Kander and Fred Ebb musicals were produced on Broadway. Three followed Ebb's death in 2004 that were presented posthumously. Out of these fourteen titles, the one with the distinction of the shortest run was 1971's 70, Girls, 70, a show that has always had a special place in my heart. I saw it just two days after its opening night at a Saturday matinee and thoroughly enjoyed it; so much so that I attended its closing Saturday evening performance as well (it's 35th). As you can see, my student rush ticket was just $3, jotted down for my records, which I did for all the shows I saw during the height of my teenage theatregoing years on my weekly excursions into Manhattan from my home on Long Island. I was fourteen when I wrote this:

Honing in, I see that I actually moved from downstairs to upstairs rather than the other way around. I always scoped out any theare I entered to see if better seats were available. This time, I swapped one in the rear of the orchestra (T 5) for one that was 4th row center in the Front Mezzanine (D 113), a great seat. On my first visit to 70, Girls, 70, I was in the very last row of the balcony—L 108—albeit dead center. Listen, in those days I was happy just to be in a theatre.

Funny addendum: My son has forever teased me with the admonition, "You saw 70, Girls, 70 twice and Follies once? Dad, what was wrong with you?"

As opposed to the sort of subject matter to which Kander and Ebb were usually drawn, 70, Girls, 70 is pure fluff. In fact, Chicago's subtitle, "A Musical Vaudeville," could easily have applied to 70, Girls, 70, which came three years earlier and had no subtitle (it could have used one). It had a thin story about a group of seniors who live in a retirement home and are tired of being forgotten by their families and ignored by everybody else. So, they band together to rob large department stores ("They can afford it!") singing and dancing along the way. In order to take away the awkwardness of cheering on a bunch of thieves, the audience was told that it was watching a group of actors performing it all as a show, which also allowed for musical numbers that had nothing to do with the plot. To that end, the Playbill listed all the actors but not the characters they were playing (who did they think they were fooling?). And in addition to the locations of scenes, it prominently mentions "The Broadhurst Theatre."

Honestly, it was a mess. But I didn't care when there were such melodic tunes as well performed as "Coffee in a Cardboard Cup" and "Broadway, My Street." And how grateful should we be that, in spite of its poor showing at the box office, Thomas Z. Shepard felt the score was important enough to be produced as an original cast recording for Columbia Records, ensuring that these old timers strutting their stuff was preserved for posterity. Check out the recording if you can (to my knowledge, it's never gone out of print).

The album is sensational, truly, but let me tell you . . . you had to have been there. I can remember bits of Onna White's ingenious choreography all these many years later.

The hook of 70, Girls, 70 had to do with its title not referring to the number of women the musical employed but instead the average age of the 24-person cast, which was 70.4. It allowed for former vaudeville and burlesque performers to shine, such as the baggy pants comic Joey Faye (born in 1909), who was once billed as "the fastest sneeze in the west." Gil Lamb, another vaudevillian in the cast, hadn't been on Broadway since 1948, when he played Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow, a musical adaptation of the Washington Irving short story about the Headless Horseman. It had a cast of fifty-seven (!) and played the St. James Theatre. It lasted for twelve performances.

For many, 70, Girls, 70 was their final moment in the spotlight. Indelibly so for the great David Burns (The Music Man, Forum, Hello, Dolly!), who didn't even reach Broadway in it. An irrepressible character actor, Burns was brought in early in rehearsals to replace an ailing Eddie Foy Jr. (The Pajama Game). In the theatrical parlance, Burns was "killing it" while the show was out of town in Philadelphia with his Act Two showstopper "Go Visit." But one night, after he'd done the number and gotten a wonderful round of applause, he collapsed onstage during the next scene. He was carried into the wings died there while the show continued as if nothing was wrong.

It was a devastating blow to the company and may have affected the way the show was perceived by audiences thereafter. It was hard to celebrate the joy of living well into your retirement years when death had come a-knocking in real life. It didn't help that the lead character—played by Mildred Natwick—dies just before the play's finale. She comes back (on the moon, no less) and, in Fred Ebb's words, "teaches [her friends] about living life to the fullest every day." The finale is "Yes," one of the most uplifting songs in the Broadway cannon. As John Kander has said, "For a show that ran only three weeks, we had wonderful times with it. It was one of the few shows that I've ever gone to night after night." As Fred Ebb put it: "I loved that show like a father loves his weakest child."

In all the subsequent productions I've seen of 70, Girls, 70, the biggest problem is that unless its set in the 70s with people born in 1900 or shortly thereafter, any connection to actual vaudevillians have now long since vanished. Their kind of show biz savvy and know-how that could only be taught by experience doesn't exist in today's theatre. The drudgery of performing six shows a day took a kind of stamina no one can even fathom let alone duplicate. It was that specific link to the past that made 70, Girls, 70 such a genuine treat.

For that, and a number of other reasons, it's not seen often. But a special Tony should have been presented to the summer camp director who, in 2015, decided to stage an hour-long version of 70, Girls, 70 with a group of middle schoolers in Wheatley Falls, New York. Just watch the opening number and see if these "Old Folks" don't put a smile on your face. They did mine.

Ron Fassler is the author of the recently published The Show Goes On: Broadway Hirings, Firings and Replacements. For news and "Theatre Yesterday and Today" columns when they break, please hit the FOLLOW button.