Good morning, all! I have a rehearsal at 1, so until then I have two projects. One is to finish moving the books around that I started last night and the other is the continuation of the Montgomery & Stone edits. David Montgomery & Fred Stone are the first musical comedy team I can think of; they were vaudeville performers in the 1890s who reached a modicum of fame before Julian Mitchell cast them as the Tin Man andScarecrow in his 1902 production of THE WIZARD OF OZ, which made them huge stars. they stayed with the show for three years and then had a huge success with Victor Herbert's THE RED MILL, which was produced by Charles Dillingham, who became their manager. Dillingham produced THE OLD TOWN for them, a rather poor, but enormous, show that Montgomery & Stone carried pretty much by themselves. Their next show was THE LADY OF THE SLIPPER in 1912, which co-starred them with Elsie Janis, and in which they played two characters modeled very closely on the OZ characters: Montgomery & Stone played a pumpkin and a scarecrow that Cinderella's wishes have brought to life; at the end of the musical, the Fairy Godmother turns them into human beings, In Act Two the team had a medley to reprise some of their hits and the medley, which I'm currently editing, has songs from THE RED MILL, a couple of things I cannot find in OZ or THE OLD TOWN, and two currently popular songs of 1912: "Everybody's Doing It" and "Oh, You Beautiful Doll."
David Montgomery died in 1917, during the post-Broadway tour of their successful CHIN-CHIN, based on the story of Aladdin. He never married although gossip columns at one point had announced his engagement to Anna Fitzhugh; I've always thought he might have been gay. Fred Stone married Allene Crater, one of the replacement OZ actresses as madwoman Cynthia Cynch, and they had several daughters: Dorothy became a star playing opposite her father in THE STEPPING STONES and her final Broadwat show was, I believe, replacing Claire Luce in THE GAY DIVORCE; Paula Stone and her husband became Broadway producers, producing successful revivals of THE RED MILL and SWEETHEARTS, both by Victor Herbert, in the 1940s. Fred Stone, after deciding he was too old to do athletic comedy, ended up doing character roles on Broadway and in Hollywood. I've only seen him as Katharine Hepburn's father in ALICE ADAMS.
This afternoon I have a rehearsal with two singers to hear several Herbert songs they will record in late 2010. I may watch THE SEAGULL on the Chekhov BBC set tonight. I wish the film with Vanessa Redgrave and David Warner were on DVD.
