I am still thinking about DR JOSE as Linda Low.
It would be one of those performances of which one says "you had to be there."
DR JRand60, PROMENADE opened the Promenade Theatre at 74th and Broadway in late spring, 1969, produced by Edgar Lansbury, with an amazing cast including Madeline Kahn as the Waitress, George S. Irving as the Mayor, Shannon Bolin of DAMN YANKEES as the Mother, Alice Playten as Miss U) and a wonderful cast of singers. It was about two young prisoners who dig their way out of prison to steal their way into society. They encounter the rich snobs (Mr R. Mr S, and Mr T, and Misses I, O, and U), the poor (the waitress, the dishwasher, and the waiter), and end up on a battlefield where the country cannot afford to give the soldiers guns fighting a war for reasons they don't understand while the wealthy perform maypole dances with the wounded soldiers' bandages. The prisoners decide jail is safer.
It's a large dose of theatre of the absurd, and I used to tell people it was as if Ionesco or Samuel Beckett wrote Leonard Bernstein's CANDIDE. When I was doing community theatre in the 1970s, I almost did a production but I wasn't sure I'd have the voices for it. I used to have a complete reel-to-reel performance of the whole score, and I'd love it if an mp3 file turned up some day. The commercial RCA recording is about half of the score, but Alice Playten has this fantastic number, "Capricious and Fickle," about a broken love affair ("In spite of my reputation as a woman with no heart/ I gave my heart to you").
