Acting Citizen: Auditioning (Part 2)

By James Knudsen

Last month I auditioned for a local theatre and provided some insights into the woes of the actor hoping for a callback. In the process, I revisited a song in my book of sheet music, Why Can’t I Walk Away, and learned more about the musical for which the song was written. To refresh your memory, the musical is Maggie Flynn. Its creators, Hugo Peretti, Luigi Creatore, and George David Weiss, based the story on the Civil War Draft Riots of 1863 and an orphanage that was burned to the ground during the unrest. The show’s development occurred in the thick of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War.

    Parallels to the Civil War seemed natural. The critics felt otherwise. A feature of the show was the inclusion of nine African-American children playing orphans. Among those young performers were Irene Cara, Giancarlo Esposito, and Stephanie Mills. From a historical perspective this is accurate, and it is believed that their presence, many of them the children of runaway slaves, played a factor in the orphanage being set ablaze during the riots of 1863.

But to some others, the story reminded them too much of the recent Rodgers and Hammerstein hit, The Sound of Music, with the plucky heroine pursued by Confederates instead of Nazis. One review labeled it, “a Sound of Music about tolerance.” Still, there were high hopes for the show as its cast and crew labored on in New Haven before bringing the show to Broadway. Besides high hopes, the show was buoyed by an investment of $500,000.00, roughly four million in today’s dollars.
    The show opened on October 23, 1968, and starred Shirley Jones, of The Partridge Family fame, and her husband Jack Cassidy. Growing up in the ’70s, I remember Jack Cassidy appearing frequently in the crime dramas of the day – Columbo, Barnaby Jones, Hawaii Five-O, to name a few – usually as the villain. He could also do comedy and appeared on numerous sit-coms: Bewitched, Get Smart, That Girl. All made use of his good looks and roguish manner.
    It wasn’t until years later, while looking for songs that might work for my voice, that I discovered his career on the stage. The Internet Broadway Database (IBDb) provided other information about the musical and the shows Mr. Cassidy appeared in on Broadway. Starting out as a chorus-member replacement in the long-running South Pacific, he later starred in several plays and musicals.
    And for reasons that I’ve yet to uncover, he had his share of bad luck in choosing scripts. The previously mentioned Maggie Flynn was a proverbial hit, running for 82 performances. Shangri-La, a musical adaptation of James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon, ran for just 21 performances. Let’s not forget that the Broadway schedule is eight shows per week, which works out to two and five-eighths weeks.
    But as bad as that sounds, it wasn’t the worst. His last performance on Broadway was in the play, Murder Among Friends – 17 performances. And that still wasn’t the worst.
The year after Maggie Flynn, Mr. Cassidy signed on to the cast of The Mundy Scheme. Written by Irish playwright Brian Friel, the play satirizes Irish politics and economics. It lasted four performances. Four, 4, IV?
    I know that it is usually a multitude of deficiencies that doom a stage production. Mr. Cassidy was well regarded enough by Broadway to receive a Tony nomination for his work in Maggie Flynn, Best Actor in a Musical, his third in that category, still.

    I can’t help but wonder whether a career renaissance might have been in his future. Jack Cassidy died in a fire, December 12, 1976. He was 49.

Copyright © 2021 by James Knudsen