![]() ![]() At the same time, while accentuating the masculine, Take Me Along reduces the importance of the feminine roles written by O’Neill (already secondary in his version), except for one, that of Lily Miller, the sister of Nat, a spinster schoolteacher, who is disapprovingly but everlastingly in love with Sid.ĤIn constructing Take Me Along, the adapters contradict the decision taken by O’Neill in his original play, and allow Lily to be reconciled with (and by strong implication wedded to) Sid. In comparison with the O’Neill original, these roles were magnified, and become the leads in the musical. ![]() One – that of Nat Miller, newspaper-owner and benevolent paterfamilias – was taken by Walter Pidgeon, the popular film star born in 1897, and the other – Nat’s brother-in-law, Sid Davis, a bibulous journalist – by Jackie Gleason, a popular comic television star of the Fifties 3. Take Me Along pushes the shift even further away from Richard, providing two important roles for middle-aged male actors not primarily associated with the musical stage. Because of this heavily publicised and greatly successful piece of casting, in O’Neill’s opinion, the thematic thrust of the stage version was shifted more heavily onto the father than he would have liked, since he thought the son, Richard, to be the main character of his play 2. Cohan, “America’s First Actor”, for the first time playing a role he hadn’t written himself. 3 Gleason (1916-1987) had a strong off-stage persona as a drinker and braggart: his popularity was g (.)ģIn the first production of Ah! Wilderness in 1933, the role of Nat Miller was taken by George M.Estring, ed., Conversations With Eugene O’Neill, Jackson and London, University of Mississ (.) In 1949, Ezio Pinza, a fiftyish, non-dancing opera singer, became a matinee idol in Rodgers’and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, starting the trend, but, in 1956, the mature Rex Harrison, a totally non-singing (and also non-dancing) stage actor, playing Henry Higgins in Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady, made an artistic triumph of his lack of traditional qualifications. Nevertheless, male stars could play a strong role on the Broadway musical stage – even when middle-aged and hardly able to sing, or hardly able to dance, and even when quite unable to do either. 1 My thanks to Sanford Aborn, Vice President of the Tams-Witmark Music Library, for allowing me to t (.)ġThis paper deals with the way that some male and female characters created by Eugene O’Neill for his 1933 comedy, Ah! Wilderness, have been made to change their tune by Robert Merrill, Joseph Stein and Robert Russell, the authors of Take Me Along, their 1959 adaptation for the Broadway musical stage 1.ĢThe great stars of the Broadway musical comedy genre were typically women – Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun (1946), Gertrude Lawrence in The King and I (1951), being classic examples. ![]()
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