The Muny Saga: 1980-1989

Florence Henderson as Nellie Forbush (Center) in The Muny’s 1980 production of SOUTH PACIFIC.
From The Muny Archive.

The new decade arrived, accompanied by a profound loss. On the final day
of 1979, the world learned that Richard Rodgers had died at age 77. At his funeral
on January 2, a eulogist suggested, “Through his songs, Richard Rodgers has prob-
ably given more pleasure to more people than anyone else in the 20th century. His
melodies are truly the heritage of the world.” No one in St. Louis – the city that
staged more Richard Rodgers productions than any other – would have disagreed.

Five months later, a gala one-night tribute to Rodgers preceded the 1980
Muny season. With CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite and three-time Academy
Award nominee (and former St. Louisan) Marsha Mason co-hosting, musical direc-
tor Donald Chan and the Muny orchestra reviewed Rodgers’ prolific 60-year career.
Baritone Richard Fredricks returned to sing. George De La Pena and Rima Vetter
danced Rodgers’ kinetic Slaughter on Tenth Avenue ballet from On Your Toes. The
nearly sold-out memorial concert was attended by 11,352, which would prove to be
the largest crowd of the summer.

The Rodgers celebration continued three nights later when the 62nd con-
secutive season opened with South Pacific. Florence Henderson and Giorgio Tozzi
starred as Nellie Forbush and Emile de Becque. The Muny’s sixth South Pacific was
the best-attended of the summer’s ten book shows. In second place: the Muny’s third
staging of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella.

Thus, for the fourth consecutive decade, musicals by Richard Rodgers and Os-
car Hammerstein remained the backbone of the Muny repertory. The 1980s featured
the Muny’s third Flower Drum Song (with Pat Suzuki repeating her Broadway role),
its sixth Carousel and seventh Oklahoma! There were two productions each of The
King and I and The Sound of Music – nine Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals, in
all. And in 1983 management surprised subscribers by scheduling something only
rarely seen in Forest Park: a week of Rodgers and Hart.

Alexis Smith as Vera, and Joel Grey as Joey. PAL JOEY, 1983. Photo by Smith/Garza

To put the Muny debut of Pal Joey into context …

On a Sunday afternoon in spring 1919 – even as in St. Louis rehearsals for
Robin Hood, the inaugural offering at the new Municipal Opera, were being held in
the Central High School auditorium – in New York City, 17-year-old Richard Rod-
gers was introduced to 23-year-old lyricist Lorenz Hart. The two novice musicians
liked each other and decided to collaborate on some songs. By the late 1920s Rod-
gers and Hart were among the most successful songwriting teams in America; they
would write 28 musicals. But the cosmopolitan shows by Rodgers and Hart were not
favored in Forest Park. Their sassy songs were deemed too risque for family fare. In
1940 Pal Joey, a scandalous tale about an unrepentant scheming heel, was a Broad-
way sensation but was not even considered by the Muny, which still leaned to oper-
etta.

Then in 1983, 43 years after its Broadway debut, Joel Grey and Alexis Smith
headlined a touring production of Pal Joey that St. Louis Post-Dispatch reviewer Joe
Pollack proclaimed “a wonderful evening of theater,” one that was “well worth” the
long wait. Midway through the one-week run, Grey and the cast convened at Llywe-
lyn’s Pub on McPherson Avenue to unwind after a performance. After the bar offi-
cially closed, the Pal Joey ensemble covered the windows and entertained each other
until 3 a.m. For those few hours, McPherson Avenue was Broadway West.

***

There were other special moments in the early 1980s. In 1981 the Muny
collaborated with Opera Theatre of St. Louis on A Grand Night for Singing. Un-
der the thoughtful direction of Opera Theatre general director Richard Gaddes and
executive producer Steven Woolf (who five years later would become artistic director
of the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis), the exquisite evening balanced excerpts from
Carmen, La Boheme and Die Fledermaus with nostalgic songs that elicited treasured

Lucie Arnaz. From The Muny Archive

Muny memories: the likes of “Indian Love Call” from Rose Marie and “Stout Heart-
ed Men” from The New Moon. Joe Pollack deemed the sensitively balanced produc-
tion as “among the finest ever to grace the magnificent Forest Park stage.”

In 1982 West Side Story returned for the first time in 15 years. The young cast
included a little-known dancer named Rob Marshall. Later that year, a herniated
disc would steer Marshall away from performing and into choreography. (In 1991
he choreographed The 1940s Radio Hour at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis.)
Choreography led him to directing, first on stage, then on film. But long before he
directed Chicago, the Academy Award-winning Best Picture of 2002, and Into the
Woods, Rob Marshall danced on the Muny stage at age 21.

Two weeks later Lucie Arnaz repeated her triumphant Broadway performance
in They’re Playing Our Song. Doubtless, she received much good advice about what
to expect in Forest Park from beloved Muny alum Mary Wickes, who – as Lucie
grew up in Beverly Hills – often was at Arnaz’s home, schmoozing with Lucie and
her mother, comedienne Lucille Ball. “Mary was my mom’s best friend,” Arnaz con-
firmed. “That’s not debatable. Mary was closer to me in many ways than some of my
actual blood relatives were.” St. Louis loved Lucie. They’re Playing Our Song gar-
nered the highest attendance figures of 1982.

Two weeks after They’re Playing Our Song moved on, A Chorus Line returned
to Forest Park for the second time in two years. If, not so many decades ago, Pal Joey
was an unthinkable prospect for the Muny, so too, when it debuted in New York
in 1975, was A Chorus Line. Pal Joey took 43 years to reach Forest Park; A Chorus
Line took only six.

***

The Muny shared a direct link to the birth of the century’s most influential

A CHORUS LINE played The Muny twice in two years. This photo is from the 1982 production.
From The Muny Archive.

musical. In January 1974, 19 dancers living in New York City – collectively, veter-
ans of scores of Broadway musicals – came together to share intimate stories about
their lives and careers. Fourteen of the 19 participants in this unprecedented mid-
night-to-dawn rap session had danced in Forest Park. Some, like Tony Stevens from
Herculaneum, also had grown up attending Muny shows.

The dancer with the most clout at that initial rap session was Michael Bennett,
already a successful Broadway choreographer. (Muny vet Bennett choreographed
West Side Story in Forest Park in 1967.) Early on he saw in this workshop the po-
tential for an innovative new musical that would give faces and personalities to those
he most admired: Broadway dancers. From that original group, Bennett selected
Nicholas Dante (who had spent three summers performing at the Muny) to shape a
script that would reveal the personal stories of 17 dancers auditioning for eight open-
ings in a new musical.

By the time A Chorus Line opened off-Broadway at New York’s Public Theater
in April 1975 (15 months after that first workshop), many of the original partici-
pants no longer were involved. But of the 26 performers who now comprised the
cast, 13 had danced at the Muny. As they stood onstage singing the new theater an-
them, “What I Did for Love,” is it too great a stretch to imagine that perhaps some
of those dancers were recalling the exhilaration of charmed summer evenings under
the stars in Forest Park?

Two months later, on July 25, 1975, A Chorus Line moved to Broadway.
(That same night, Munygoers were attending Funny Girl with Carol Lawrence and
Harve Presnell.) The backstage musical won nine Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize.
More important than awards, A Chorus Line became a transformative experience for
viewers, the galvanizing grail for generations of young show-business hopefuls.

Program Cover, from The Muny at the Fox. From The Muny Archive.

Six years later, following sold-out engagements at Kiel Opera House and the
American Theater, A Chorus Line arrived in Forest Park. That 1981 appearance by
the international company elicited the largest advance sale of any show in Muny his-
tory. The one-week run drew 80,875. The following year, when the Muny unexpect-
edly lost a booking, general manager Edwin “Bill” Culver filled the vacated slot with
an immediate return of A Chorus Line. Its third visit in 1985 and the fourth in 1989
both featured Donna McKechnie reprising her Tony Award-winning performance as
Cassie. When attendance figures for all four productions are added together, A Cho-
rus Line in the 1980s played to nearly a quarter million Munygoers.

Yet despite such astronomical figures, Municipal Theatre Association execu-
tives were determined to look beyond Forest Park. In June 1981, Pantheon Corpora-
tion, headed by developer Leon Strauss, took title to the defunct 4,500-seat, 52-year-
old Fox Theatre on Grand Boulevard. One year later, in June 1982 – the same week
the 64th Muny season opened with its fourth Fiddler on the Roof – the Municipal
Theatre Association and Pantheon Corporation signed a pact whereby the Muny
would lease the Fox for a minimum of 12 weeks between September and May for the
next ten years.

One year later, at the end of the 1982 season, the Muny moved indoors. In
September, an eight-show series titled “Broadway Comes to the Fox” premiered at
the restored movie palace. The debut offering was the national touring company of
Barnum. In true Muny tradition, “free seats” were made available.

Two months later, in December 1982 Ann Miller made a splashy return to
St. Louis. Under the Muny banner, she and co-star Mickey Rooney headlined at
the Fox in the national tour of their Broadway hit, the madcap Sugar Babies. Fortu-
nately, Miller had made a smooth recovery from her close encounter with a Muny
stage boom on opening night of Anything Goes in 1972. She credited her successful

Jim Walton (Center) and ensemble, from 42ND STREET, 1986. From The Muny Archive.

comeback to the support of former astronaut John Glenn, who phoned her to say
that he too had suffered a concussion of the inner ear, after a bathtub fall, and that
his balance had returned. If he could overcome, so could she. Sure enough, when
Sugar Babies opened in New York in 1979, Miller became the toast of the town.
After a 1,200-performance run on Broadway, she and Rooney took to the road. The
Fabulous Fox was one of their first stops.

Two years after performing on Grand Boulevard, Miller and Rooney were
back. In August 1984 they cavorted before huge crowds in Forest Park. Sugar Babies
scored the highest one-night Muny attendance of 1984.

42nd Street, another exercise in nostalgia, also was a record-breaker. The na-
tional company that played the Fox in April 1984 offered a sampling of the Muny,
past and future. Dolores Gray, who had wowed Muny audiences for nearly 20 years,
starred as veteran actress Dorothy Brock. In a supporting role, Beth Leavel – who
had first appeared in Forest Park the preceding summer – made a strong impression
as Anytime Annie. Leavel has since become a Muny regular. In 2004, two decades
after she was featured in 42nd Street at the Fox, Beth Leavel added Dorothy Brock to
her roster of memorable Muny roles.

In August 1985, the national company of 42nd Street moved outdoors as the
final musical in a seven-show Muny season. The opening-night performance was the
best-attended evening of 1985. 42nd Street fared so well that Culver (his title now
elevated from general manager to Muny president) booked this same touring pro-
duction to open the 1986 season. In essence, it was as if the same company enjoyed a
two-week engagement in Forest Park – with the two weeks separated by a ten-month
intermission. Remarkably, that return booking in June ’86 was the best-attended of
the summer’s nine musicals.

Cary Grant backstage at The Muny, 1931. From The Muny Archive.

42nd Street (“You’re going out a youngster, but you’ve got to come back a
star”) transports viewers back to Depression-era 1933, when the original Warner
Bros. film was released. In 1985 the Muny presented a revue whose antecedents
extended back even further, to the 1920s. In Festival on Ice, Olympics gold medalist
Dorothy Hamill served as a cool antidote to the hot July nights as she led skating
champions like Brian Pockar, Randy Gardner and Tai Babilonia through an evening
of lifts, jumps, spins and spirals. For sure, Festival on Ice was an unlikely booking for
the Muny. Yet as far back as 1922, elaborate ice skating routines were featured in the
annual spectacular fashion pageants that immediately followed the Municipal Opera
seasons. For two weeks every August, people would flock to Forest Park to see how
St. Louis’ new Municipal Theater could accommodate waterfalls, swimming pools
and ice rinks. So of course in 1985 ice skating was welcomed back to Forest Park.

***

In November 1986, 82-year-old Cary Grant also was headed back to the
Muny. Although he only performed here for one season in 1931, Grant had re-
mained an ardent fan. In the 1950s the superstar reminisced with Vincent Price
about his Muny summer with such fervor that Price remarked to a friend, “He talks
about St. Louis as though he came from here.” According to Grant’s business partner,
Stanley Fox, “Cary had a lifelong love affair with St. Louis.” Clearly, that love affair
was centered on Forest Park.

Between 1982 and 1986 Grant made 36 personal appearances throughout
America in an evening of movie clips and casual chatter called A Conversation with
Cary Grant. St. Louis was to have been Grant’s 38th appearance. “It was Cary’s idea
that I find a booking in St. Louis,” his presenter explained. “He loved returning to
places he had known as a youth and showing them to his wife, Barbara, who was
British and had not seen the United States.” A booking was secured for Monday
evening, December 1, 1986, at the Sheldon Concert Hall on Washington Avenue.

Anthony Geary, in the title role of JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR. 1985. From The Muny Archive.

Grant requested a suite at the Chase-Park Plaza Hotel so that he could gaze out on
Forest Park. He planned to arrive in St. Louis on Sunday, escort Barbara out onto the
great Muny stage on Monday afternoon and converse at the Sheldon that evening.

It was not to be.

On Friday, November 28, the Grants arrived in Davenport, Iowa, for a Satur-
day evening performance. On Saturday morning they strolled along the Mississippi
River, which flows past downtown Davenport. That afternoon, November 29, near
the end of a rehearsal at the restored Adler Theater, Grant complained of a headache
and nausea. He returned to his suite at the Blackhawk Hotel. Several hours later he
was taken to a local hospital. At 11:22 p.m. Cary Grant succumbed to a massive
stroke.

To the world-at-large, a great star had been dimmed. To the citizenry of St.
Louis, who were only hours away from a long-overdue and much-anticipated re-
union, the loss felt personal.

***

Jesus Christ Superstar arrived in Forest Park in 1985. The galvanizing rock
opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice, two brash Brits in their early 20s, was
the runaway best-selling pop album of 1971. That same year, Jesus Christ Superstar
found its way to Broadway. In 1985 – after local performances at Kiel Auditorium,
the Arena and Powell Hall – Jesus Christ Superstar made its eagerly-awaited Muny
debut. Anthony Geary sang the title role. The cast of the touring company also fea-
tured Carl Anderson as Judas Iscariot and Barry Dennen as Pontius Pilate. Both men
had played their roles on Broadway and onscreen.

The Muny was not done with Webber and Rice. One week later, in another

Florence Lacey as EVITA, 1985. From The Muny Archive.

Forest Park debut, their Tony Award-winning Evita became the most-attended pro-
duction of 1985. “All the Muny magic that has given the joy of theater to so many
generations of St. Louisans came together Monday night,” Joe Pollack wrote, “and
the result was a rendition of ‘Evita’ that was dazzling, simply dazzling.”

It seemed as if St. Louis – indeed, the world – could not get enough of Web-
ber and Rice. The next summer, 1986, featured their early pop cantata, Joseph and
the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. If you looked carefully, you might have no-
ticed that Benjamin, the last of Joseph’s 11 brothers, was played by 22-year-old Dan-
ny Burstein. Burstein also spent much of the summer of ’84 in Forest Park. He was
back again in 1987, playing Mendel, the Rabbi’s son, in the Muny’s fifth Fiddler on
the Roof. (Theodore Bikel played Tevye.) Nearly three decades later, Burstein would
receive his sixth Tony Award nomination as Tevye in the acclaimed 2015 Broadway
revival of Fiddler on the Roof. Back in ’87, Burstein wrote in his Muny playbill auto-
biography, “When Danny grows up he wants to be an astronaut.” Happily, Burstein
never has grown up, but his performances have sent many a theatergoer over the
moon.

Like Tony Award winner Beth Leavel, Danny Burstein continues that tradi-
tion of young actors whose valued early training in Forest Park sustains them as they
evolve into the next generation of America’s prized musical theater performers.

For his next major musical, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber selected a lyri-
cist from St. Louis. Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis in 1888. Some of his
fondest childhood memories included watching buffalo in Forest Park and listening
for Mississippi River steamboat whistles on New Year’s Eve. Years later, long after he
had relocated to London and was renowned as one of the world’s most insightful po-
ets, T. S. Eliot wrote to Post-Dispatch reporter Marquis Childs, “There is something
in having passed one’s childhood beside the big river which is incommunicable to

Ben Vereen starred as PIPPIN at The Muny, 1986. From The Muny Archive.

those who have not. Missouri and the Mississippi have made a deeper impression on
me than any other part of the world.”

Andrew Lloyd Webber was born in 1948, the same year Eliot received the
Nobel Prize for literature. Some of Webber’s fondest childhood memories included
reading Eliot’s whimsical volume of verse, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. As
an adult, Webber set those whimsical poems to music. Cats opened in London in
1980 and in New York one year later. In 1987 Cats became the fourth Andrew Lloyd
Webber musical to play Forest Park in three summers.

Then there was Stephen Schwartz. He too was born in 1948, in New York
City. Schwartz’s first Broadway musical, Pippin, opened in 1972, one year after Jesus
Christ Superstar. Stephen Schwartz’s infectious songs were first heard in Forest Park
in 1986 when Ben Vereen recreated his Tony Award performance in Pippin. In 1989
Schwartz was back, this time with the Muny debut of Godspell, a buoyant riff on the
Gospel according to St. Matthew.

***

The Muny continued to re-brand itself. In addition to its new year-round
schedule, throughout most of the 1980s there was an emphasis on one-night con-
certs. These one-nighters had begun in a limited way in 1970. But when the Mis-
sissippi River Festival folded after its 1980 season, increasing numbers of touring
musicians became available. Under the Muny Starfest banner, headliners included
Alabama, Chicago, Crosby, Stills and Nash, Bob Dylan, Whitney Houston, Al Jar-
reau, the Moody Blues, Linda Ronstadt, (former St. Louisan) David Sanborn, Sting
and James Taylor.

Starfest 1989 included an appearance by soul diva Patti LaBelle. As Post-
Dispatch writer John Burnes described, “Her arrival onstage was delayed briefly.

Ed Greenberg, The Muny’s Executive Producer from 1971 through 1989. From The Muny Archive.

When she did emerge, she explained in hushed tones that she had just found out
that her sister had died of cancer, a disease that had already taken her mother and
two other sisters.” LaBelle proceeded to honor her sister “in the only way she knew
how. And that was to sing. Sing from the bottom of her heart, sing from the depths
of her soul. Sing, sing and sing.”

You don’t forget an evening like that.
***

In July 1989 Muny executive producer Edward Greenberg took a night off
to watch television. Since 1971, Greenberg had devoted his winter months away
from St. Louis to teaching. He was a professor in the drama and theater department
of Queens College of the City University of New York. Now he enjoyed a professor’s
paternal pride in watching the debut of a new NBC television series, The Seinfeld
Chronicles, that was co-created by and starred one of his former students, a young
comedian named Jerry Seinfeld. Years later – by which time the series’ title had been
whittled down to Seinfeld – at a network press conference Jerry credited Greenberg
with having taught him the basics of the performing arts: “It all began with indepen-
dent study and standup comedy with Professor Greenberg, and that worked out very
well.”

To put it mildly. Things also had worked out well for Greenberg, who was
in his 19th year as productions director. But with the Muny’s increased reliance on
touring shows, he had less control over the product onstage. Sixty-five year-old Ed-
ward
Greenberg elected to retire after the 1989 season.

***
That same July, even as Greenberg was watching Jerry Seinfeld on television,

something unprecedented happened in Forest Park. For the first time in 71 years,
there was a three-week gap in the middle of the season when the theater sat dark.
Also in 1989, it was reported that the Municipal Theatre Association was consider-
ing a plan to relocate all book musicals to the Fox and then reconfigure the outdoor
Municipal Auditorium from its current 11,500 seats to 20,000, at which point the
Forest Park theater would be used exclusively for concerts.

At the end of 1989, after 71 seasons the Muny had played to nearly
43,600,000 attendees. Yet the energy being expended on one-night concerts and
year-round indoor seasons was impacting the Muny’s very imprimatur: its summer
musicals. Something was amiss. As columnist Joan Dames perceptively observed in
the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1985, the Muny was “a state of mind for those who
love it fiercely.” But sometimes love is blind, and some did not want to acknowledge
that the future existence of the fiercely-loved Muny was at risk.

By 1989 there were some who believed that the 71-year-old theater should be
retired. Perhaps their vision was too focused on the future to see the present. Perhaps
they missed the thrill, in the 1980s, of watching Mikhail Baryshnikov soar into the
night sky with the American Ballet Theater; perhaps they overlooked the breathtak-
ing splendor of the La Scala Ballet as it performed Zeffirelli’s Swan Lake.

Perhaps they missed the sheer ebullience of delightfully droll George Rose in
Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance or the sinewy strength of John Cullum
repeating his Tony Award role in Shenandoah or the lanky effervescence of Tommy
Tune strutting his Tony-winning stuff in My One and Only. Or Debbie Reynolds
claiming “I Ain’t Down Yet” as she recreated her rambunctious Oscar-nominated
title character in The Unsinkable Molly Brown.

Perhaps they failed to appreciate the significance of Chita Rivera, the very

embodiment of theater royalty, asking, “What are you if you haven’t experienced a
summer at the Muny? It’s part of the experience of being a performer.”

To draw on a cliché, perhaps some simply missed the forest for the trees. Or,
to be more precise, perhaps they missed the trees for the forest.

In 1981, the boisterous Irish actor Richard Harris repeated his movie role as
King Arthur in a sumptuous staging of Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot. The produc-
tion was so popular that it returned to Forest Park two summers later. Harris often
walked backstage, quietly running his lines prior to show time:

Don’t let it be forgot

That once there was a spot

For one brief shining moment …

He would stop to stare up at the majestic oak and ash trees that might not
have been out of place in King Arthur’s charmed Camelot but which were so incred-
ibly rare in a professional theater. Even a stranger from Ireland knew that a theater as
unique as the Muny needed to be preserved.

Richard Harris turned to a member of the stage crew and, in a tone of respect-
ful understatement, said, “You got to like these magnificent trees.”

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