So I’m going through some very old stuff that I kept in a trunk in my room in the house where my mom just moved out of, and found a few really old Playbills (I’ve got a huge number of them in a drawer here, but didn’t realize that I had kept a few older ones there).
Among other things, I discovered that I did not, as I thought, see Herschel Bernardi as Tevya in Fiddler on the Roof in March, 1967 — there is one of those notes in the program that apologizes because Bernardi was ill; the role was played by Harry Goz. However, that was made up for by the fact that the role of Tzeitel, the oldest daughter, was played by Bette Midler. Who knew?
And two years earlier, I had seen Bernardi in the musical Bajour (which I actually have some vague memories of, because there is a comic song sung by an anthropologist who talks about the places she doesn’t want to go, including one line about “the tse-tse fly,” which I remember thinking was hilarious). Other people in Bajour: Harry Goz (yes, the same guy I saw in Fiddler two years later), Paul Sorvino, Nancy Dussault (who I saw in The Sound of Music a couple of years earlier than that), Mae Questel (yes — the “Betty Boop” Mae Questel) and Chita Rivera.
Bajour was my 11th birthday treat (each year, I was given the choice of a party or a musical and I usually chose the latter). I just wish I could go back into my own head at age 11 and see it again, now that I’d be more aware of who the actors were…
BrooklynWriter 