On my 17th birthday, in 1975, three friends abducted me from my suburban Philadelphia home and hustled me into a car. When I asked where we were going as we headed west on Lancaster Pike, they said they were taking me to the Devon Horse Show: an event they surely knew I would relish about as much as a dinner made from its contestants.
I hid my disappointment — but not my relief when the smell of stables receded as we passed the fairground and turned sharply right. The horse show had been a stalking horse! Soon we pulled into the parking lot at the Valley Forge Music Fair, where I’d seen many great musicals over the years, none involving dressage.
Still, the two institutions had much in common, including their origins as alfresco events. The Music Fair began its life in 1955 as a double-masted, red-and-orange-striped tent. In those early days, the heat often sent audiences into a stupor; rain pelting the canopy rendered some shows inaudible. Once, wind blew the whole contraption down on the set of “Silk Stockings.”
Though the Music Fair was rebuilt with walls and air-conditioning in the early 1970s, you still couldn’t confuse it with gorgeous legitimate theaters like the Shubert and the Forrest in Philadelphia’s decaying downtown. The Music Fair, much larger, with 2,750 seats, was about as gorgeous as a bunker. It was also configured in the round, and was far enough west of the city to be neighbors with a horse show.
And yet, that June day, soon after my friends and I were seated, who popped up beside us but the very legitimate Angela Lansbury? I watched her, startled, as she paused for a moment, a foot from my feet, on one of the runways that led to the stage from behind the audience. (I later learned they were called vomitoriums.) What was the chic, sophisticated woman who had played Mame Dennis doing in Devon?
“Smile, Baby!” she bellowed as she got her cue and stalked toward the action, for she was Rose and this was “Gypsy,” the 1959 musical set among showbiz nomads in the hectic days of vaudeville.
Lansbury knew all about that grind; she had by then played Rose for the better part of two years — in London, on an 11-city pre-Broadway tour and then on Broadway itself. Now she was spending her summer saying farewell to the role with an eight-week lap of the music fair circuit.
That she was terrific — more Lady Macbeth than Ethel Merman — is hardly surprising. What does surprise me is that it was possible to see her at all. Tickets that cost less than $9 were part of it, as was abundant free parking. Not especially wealthy teenagers could swing it on their summer salaries.
More amazing is that there was something in the suburbs worth swinging it for. Lansbury was already among the last major stars who took their best roles on the road, and not just to major cities. Granted, she didn’t do it as charity; she reportedly received $200,000 for the music fair tour, a quick million today.
Still, no one could call the schedule relaxing or the accommodations luxurious; whether or not she stayed with the rest of the cast at the Tally Ho Hotel Motel, adjacent to the theater, she surely lived out of a trunk like Rose herself. After Devon came similar stands at in-the-round theaters in the suburbs of Baltimore, Washington, New York and Cleveland.
Most of those theaters were part of a chain owned by Lee Guber and Shelly Gross, and most had started out, like the Valley Forge, as hot, dusty tents. For a couple of decades Guber and Gross had nevertheless kept top-drawer Broadway stars and hits shuttling among them: Zero Mostel in “Fiddler on the Roof,” Howard Keel in “Man of La Mancha,” Leslie Uggams in “Cabaret.” The sets were vastly reduced from Broadway, but the shoestring décor and arena excitement created something usefully distinct from traditional tours. Going to a musical was, for a time, as easy for suburbanites as going to a horse show.
That time is long gone. All of Guber and Gross’s theaters have been demolished or burned or, in the case of the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island, sold and repurposed to showcase pop and circus acts. The one where I saw “Gypsy” on my 17th birthday closed after a Kenny Rogers Christmas show in 1996 and was razed to make room for a Super G supermarket. Now the site is occupied by a Floor & Decor outlet.
But like many things experienced in one’s own backyard, Lansbury’s performance remains indestructible in memory. When she finished the climactic “Rose’s Turn” — that nervous breakdown set to scraps of show tunes — she bowed and bowed, rotating to acknowledge the whole arena, until she outlasted the applause but kept on bowing: as chilling a portrait of terminal narcissism as (politicians aside) I ever expect to see.
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The Time I Saw Angela Lansbury Instead of the Horse Show - The New York Times
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