NEW Dame Andrews' news (She sure is NOT a dried fruit!)
June 13th 2005 (
www.theday.com by Kristina Dorsey)
Julie Andrews Honored At Goodspeed With Rhyme, Song
East Haddam — Everyone had effusive words of praise for Julie Andrews at the Goodspeed Gala honoring her Saturday night. Christopher Plummer, however, took it one step further. He put his accolades and comic recollections of his “Sound of Music” co-star into a rhyming ode.
Plummer's tribute was part of an evening during which Goodspeed Musicals gave Andrews the Goodspeed Award for Outstanding Contribution to Musical Theatre. His poem's clever couplets drew lots of laughter from the 400 people at the gala, including Andrews.
Plummer recalled that, back in the 1950s, Andrews' performance on Broadway as Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady” was impressing everyone, including Plummer himself. Director Moss Hart was looking for an actor to take over for Rex Harrison in the Henry Higgins role. He suggested Plummer as a potential replacement.
“But he had to hear me sing first, and that was not treat/For the sound I made resembled a rhinoceros in heat... ” Plummer recited from the text he said he wrote in the car on the way to the gala. “Though Mr. Hart liked my Higgins, and that's the truth/I didn't get it simply because of my youth.”
Plummer didn't meet Andrews then. A few years later, another possible role in another musical starring Andrews gave him yet another glimmer of hope.
“Suddenly, Moss Hart was directing ‘Camelot'/And he thought I'd make a good Lancelot/So I sang for him again, the poor, long-suffering soul./That's why Robert Goulet got the role.
“Well, that just about reached the very end of my tether/Until you know what finally brought us together?/To play opposite Guenevere and Eliza would have been such fun./What did I get instead? For God's sake, a nun.
“But this nun was different, she was hysterically funny./Her irreverent humor was right on the money./When she sang, her golden voice brought the evening's hush./But sometimes, her language could make a stevedore blush.”
On a serious note, Plummer described Andrews as “a lady with an exceptional heart/Which keeps shining through her life and her art.”
Andrews is in East Haddam to direct “The Boy Friend.” After a run at Goodspeed, from July 8 to Sept. 18, the show will go on the road for 21 weeks. Andrews starred in the original version of the musical on Broadway, in 1954. It was the show that brought her to America.
“There is nothing like musical theater. I was lucky enough to begin my career in this glorious sandbox,” she said.
Before the gala began, Andrews noted that the Goodspeed award “comes from people who know musical theater and appreciate musical theater. When it comes from somebody like that, it's always very meaningful.”
Another of Andrews' former co-stars took the stage as well. Rachel York, who performed with Andrews in Broadway's “Victor/Victoria,” sang Andrews' praises, literally. She sang “It's a holly holiday with Mary” from “Mary Poppins” but changed the lyrics to “It's a jolly holiday with Julie.”
The gala was held in the Goodspeed's paint shop, which was transformed into an elegant dinner room, with delicate strings of small white lights and swags of gossamer fabric. Photos of Andrews in some of her most famous roles were projected onto the walls. Among the guests in attendance were Morley Safer of “60 Minutes,” U.S. Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, and Andrews' daughter, Emma Walton, and her family.
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