The Music Went 'Round and Around
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The Music Went 'Round and Around

The Story of Musicarnival

John E. Vacha

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eBook - ePub

The Music Went 'Round and Around

The Story of Musicarnival

John E. Vacha

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About This Book

Spotting a trend in the early 1950s of staging summer theater in the round under tents, Clevelander John L. Price Jr. decided to give it a try. Consulting a local statistician to determine the geographical center of the culturally inclined population, the bull's-eye fell in Warrensville Heights, a Cleveland suburb that was also the home to Thistledown Race Track. Price opened his Musicarnival there, on the grounds of the race track, with a production of Oklahoma! in the summer of 1954. The Music Went 'Round and Around tells the story of this unique summer theater and of its ebullient founder, John L. Price Jr.

Price's venture was one of the last commercial legitimate theaters established in Cleveland. In its heyday the Musicar-nival had a capacity of 2500 and presented an average of eight to ten shows each summer. The backbone of the repertoire consisted of such musical classics as Carousel; Kiss Me, Kate; Wonderful Town; Fanny; Paint Your Wagon; and The Unsinkable Molly Brown. The summer schedule also featured popular solo acts, such as Louis Armstrong, Henny Youngman, Tom Jones, and even burlesque. Occasionally Price tried to sneak in an opera, letting the popular shows support these operatic flings.

For the first eleven seasons Price principally used a resident stock company, occasionally bringing in a visiting star, if available and right for the role. Toward the end of the 1960s, however, Price was forced to adopt the star system to keep his tent filled. Dropping the stock company, he brought in packaged productions generally headlined by popular singing or television stars. Both offerings had strong followings, and Musicarnival kept the torch of musical theater burning brightly in Cleveland until 1975, when declining attendance finally forced its closing.

The Music Went 'Round and Around is the first book in the Cleveland Showtime Series.

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Year
2004
ISBN
9781612773940

1
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“Price’s Folly”

During the spring of 1954 a young Navy veteran suddenly began hanging around the racetrack. His mother, Emma Price, and his wife, Connie, were not overly concerned; they knew that Johnny Price wasn’t smitten by the ponies. Both had had their flings with the stage, and they knew that John was simply incurably stagestruck. Where railbirds watched thoroughbreds rounding the final turn into the homestretch, Price envisioned chorus girls breaking into their routines just beyond the oval rail.
What Price had in mind for the northwestern corner of the Thistledown grounds near the intersection of Warrensville Center and Emery Roads was a new and unique summer theater. Inspired by a recent trend on the East Coast, he planned to produce musical shows under a huge, circuslike tent. The big-top imagery would inspire, or more accurately necessitate, the adoption of another contemporary theatrical trend. In the tradition of Ringling Brothers and other circus impresarios, Price would be staging his shows on a circular platform right in the middle of his audience—in the round.
Summer theaters in themselves were nothing new in the Cleveland theatrical tradition. Nearly a century earlier, Clevelanders had begun patronizing Haltnorth’s Gardens on Kinsman Road. At first this was a simple German beer garden, viewed suspiciously by the earlier settlers with their New England Congregational origins. The Cleveland Leader in 1863 labeled it the city’s greatest nuisance, a gathering place for pickpockets, prostitutes, and “shoulder hitters” (whatever that was—perhaps nineteenth-century slang for purse snatchers). By 1872, after its relocation at Willson (East 55th) and Woodland Avenue, Haltnorth’s had become a widely popular gathering place with spacious grounds laid out around a picturesque pond. One of its chief attractions was a theater that featured concerts and operettas by the Holman Opera Company, among others. All the popular Gilbert and Sullivan shows, from H.M.S. Pinafore to Patience, could be seen there in the 1880s and 1890s.
There was even a summer tent theater in the city’s past. The Cleveland Pavilion Theater flourished in the 1880s between Wood (East 4th) and Bond (East 6th) Streets, probably in the old Lake View Park, descending from the bluffs to the railroad tracks along Lake Erie. It could accommodate up to two thousand spectators under canvas to view musical productions such as The Chimes of Normandy.
With the turn of the century, summer theatrics shifted to the Euclid Avenue Garden Theater, which opened in 1904 at Euclid Avenue and Kennard (East 40th) Street. Unlike Haltnorth’s, these gardens were described by a patron, Edith Moriarty, as “a temperance theater.” Moriarty recalled, “Green grass and trees, tables, umbrellas and chairs, invited the audience, particularly the young girls on Saturday afternoons, spending their allowances on the matinee, with sodas and root beer between the acts.” There was a stuccoed pavilion of Spanish Moorish design set two hundred feet back from the street, open to the air on three sides, and facing the stage on the fourth. Typical of the musical fare was Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. By World War I, however, the Euclid Avenue Gardens had given way to the commercial redevelopment of their eponymous street.
More permanent than any of these predecessors and a direct precursor to Musicarnival was Cain Park. This began with the joint inspiration of Cleveland Heights Mayor Frank Cain and Dr. Dina Rees Evans, a dramatics teacher at Cleveland Heights High School. Evans started out by requesting permission to use a natural ravine at Superior Avenue and Taylor Road for an outdoor production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1934. Mayor Cain not only granted approval but also subsequently promoted construction of a permanent amphitheater on the site. Built partially with labor from the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), Cain Park formally opened in 1938 as the country’s first municipally owned outdoor theater.
Under the direction of “Doc” Evans, Cain Park became the area’s preeminent summer theater and provided many of its fondest memories over the following decade. Repertoire ranged from classics such as Peer Gynt to such recent Broadway hits as Arsenic and Old Lace. But operettas soon became the three-thousand-seat, open-air theater’s forte, exemplified by productions of The Chocolate Soldier, The Vagabond King, Naughty Marietta, and The Student Prince, among other chestnuts. Not even obstacles such as the occasional rainout or lack of parking facilities could keep the crowds away. Nor could they keep away the annual migration of theater hopefuls from across the country. Through the years, names such as Hal Holbrook, Jack Lee, Pernell Roberts, and Dom DeLuise joined Cain Park’s roster of distinguished alumni.
Other than Evans herself, no one could claim a closer bond with Cain Park than John Price. His mother had a leading role, along with Dorothy Fuldheim, in the theater’s first dramatic production of The Warrior’s Husband in 1938. From Cassius in Julius Caesar to the Indian in High Tor, Price himself had a part in every Cain Park production during the first ten years, except during his stint in the service. Through sheer force of habit, Price recalls, “I would call Musicarnival ‘Cain Park’ for several years.”
Price was a local product all the way, a fourth-generation Clevelander. He was the son of John Lemar Price, a stockbroker who could quote Shakespeare and other poets by the hour—a trait he passed on to his second son. As for the stage itself, although he was distantly related to actress Agnes Moorehead, the elder Price limited himself to walk-on parts at Cain Park.
It was his mother, Emma Moskopp Price, who more likely transmitted thespian genes to John Lemar Price Jr. She had been president of the Dramatic Club at Flora Stone Mather College and a charter member of the alumnae group’s College Club Players. After her marriage, she gave talks on modern drama, helped start a dramatics group of the Women’s Civic Club of Cleveland Heights, and served on the original Mayor’s Committee for Cain Park. Emma got the whole family involved in the latter venture, as her husband joined her in bit parts and her older son Robert worked with the stage crew.
As for Johnny, he considered his exposure to Evans at Cleveland Heights High School to have been one of the luckiest breaks of his life. Naturally he was a member of the Heights Players, and when he graduated in 1938 he was named most likely to succeed. That summer he became one of the original “Doc Evans’s boys” during the inaugural season of Cain Park, playing the role of Watt in Sherwood.
Western Reserve University didn’t yet have a drama major in 1938, so Price majored in speech and took all the courses he could in the school’s fledgling theater program. There he studied under the program’s founder, Barclay Leathem, and directors Nadine Miles and Edwin Duerr, appearing in Eldred Theatre’s productions of August Strindberg’s The Spook Sonata (a Leathem obsession), Clifford Odets’s Rocket to the Moon, and Thornton Wilder’s The Merchant of Yonkers (later to be resuscitated as The Matchmaker and even later as Hello, Dolly!). Among his classmates were Bill Boehm from John Adams High School and Martin Fuss from Glenville, who would later rule Hollywood as Ross Hunter. During the summers all three would join Doc Evans’s boys at Cain Park, where Price’s characterizations ranged from young Howie Newsome in Our Town to old Gramp Maple in The Petrified Forest.
Taking his degree shortly after Pearl Harbor, Price immediately found employment in the U.S. Navy. As a lieutenant in the naval amphibious forces, he commanded an LST (officially, Landing Ship Tank; unofficially, Large Slow Target) in the second wave to hit Utah Beach on D-Day. Writing to Evans, Price inevitably described the spectacle in theatrical terms: “I’ve been right in the front row watching my own little show. I may even say that I have been backstage and at times on stage, especially at the rising of the curtain and was it ever an exciting opening.” His landing craft took so many hits it never made it back to England, being abandoned midway in the process of getting towed back across the channel.
Cleveland drama critic Peter Bellamy once described Price as “a mercurial mixture of charmer and fighter, extrovert and introvert, actor and businessman, the flamboyant and the sensitive,” a formula neatly reduced by the headline writer to “No shrinking violet.” Most of these qualities and a few more were employed in Price’s next World War II exploit, his celebrated unauthorized expedition to Paris.
Although outfitted back in Southampton with a new LST through some snafu in naval red tape, Price and his crew were idly sitting in it with no orders. Meanwhile the radio brought news that Paris was in the process of being liberated. Paris sounded like the place to be, so Price and crew simply took their ship back to France, landing on a British-controlled beach where they were benignly ignored as “crazy Americans.” Leaving a corporal’s guard on the LST, the others took off for the once and future City of Light, splitting up and arranging to meet at a later time on the steps of the Paris Opera. Price hailed the first American vehicle he saw and unbelievably discovered fellow Cain Parker Pat O’Keefe behind the wheel. He rode into “Paree” on the spare tire fixed to the running board, not minding “the sorest butt you ever saw.”
“Oh, me, oh, my. Cleveland was never like this,” Price wrote of their reception in another letter to Evans. “The girls, mothers, grandmothers, even the men kissed us.… We were all over lipstick.” Price used his high school French to tell the crowds how grateful they were for the welcome, adding, “We thought their women to be smarter and better looking than any in the world (which, by God they are), and that we thought that Paris was the most beautiful city in the world (which it simply must be).”
Bivouacking at the Grand Hotel, which refused their money, Price and O’Keefe went out on their balcony for more oratory when they sensed “a weird, electric groundswell of feeling” in the street. They went back out to join an impromptu procession down the Champs Elysee, walking arm-in-arm with the Parisians and singing “La Marseillaise.” The flow took them to the Arch de Triomphe, where they witnessed the relighting of the flame on the tomb of France’s Unknown Soldier. “No greater thrill could be experienced,” he wrote Evans, apologizing for the “overdose” of exclamation points. “What luck. Oh, man, oh man, oh man!!!!”
That was a tough act to follow, but Price came home after demobilization determined to top it in the postwar theater. He went back to Cain Park, where he broadened his experience as producer, director, and performer on the Cain Park Theatre of the Air over radio stations WGAR and WHK. A newer and more transient venue was the Ring Theater, which an actor-entrepreneur named Ray Boyle rigged up over the swimming pool in the Allerton Hotel on East 13th Street. There he acted briefly opposite a young lady named Ann Corio, whose path in show business would recross his many years later. Price also began to appear on the stage of the venerable Cleveland Play House, where he encountered another young woman who would play a much more immediate role in his life.
Her name was Constance Mather, and though Bostonian by birth she had strong local connections. Her father, Philip, was one of the Mathers and consequently a director of the Cleveland Cliffs Iron Company. Thus she was no stranger to Cleveland, and the Mathers were even acquainted with the Prices. Connie and John had never met, however, not even when she had been dispensing coffee and doughnuts for the Red Cross to American troops in England during the war. Her interest in theater led her to the Cleveland Play House, and to John Price, in the autumn of 1946.
She had the cool beauty of a debutante with the poised elegance of an experienced horsewoman. He combined the tanned good looks of a Navy veteran with a deep smile that engaged his entire face. They were married the following year.
In his efforts to make a living in show business, Price began to divide his time between Cleveland and New York. He picked up work in network radio, appearing on The Bob Hope Show, The Gene Autry Show, and especially on Duffy’s Tavern with Ed Gardner, where he played character roles and served as stage manager. However, when Gardner made plans to broadcast from Puerto Rico for the tax breaks, Price returned to Cleveland.
A new entertainment medium began in Cleveland with the introduction of television station WEWS in 1947. Price was hired by the city’s second station, WNBK (now WKYC), which made its debut on October 31, 1948. There he wrote, directed, and produced such shows as The Troubadour, Rowena, The Minstrel Girl, and Golden Wedding. His efforts to protect his performers led to clashes with the engineers’ union, however, a battle in which Price came out on the losing end.
Returning to live theater, Price picked up some work at the Hanna Theatre as a supernumerary in touring Broadway shows. When Hanna manager Milton Krantz built a production of The Man Who Came to Dinner around the Sheridan Whiteside of former Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck, Price landed the part of the antic Banjo. Around the corner from the Hanna, Price also began working at Herman Pirchner’s Playhouse Square nightspot, the Alpine Village. There he devoted his talents to adapting, producing, and directing capsule versions of popular operettas and musicals, often appearing in them with his fraternity brother and Cain Park colleague, Bill Boehm.
In 1951 the hot show on Broadway was Frank Loesser’s Guys and Dolls, and Price drew the assignment of pirating the show’s plot and songs for the Alpine Village. “I paid to see the first and second acts six or seven times, but knew the second act better because I walked in so many times after intermission without paying,” he later confessed. Given his intense exposure to the show, Price was bound to either love it or loathe it; happily, it became one of his perennial favorites. Loesser, hearing of the theft, wasn’t at all happy, but his reported threats to bring suit were never carried through.
Then Price found himself back in television again when he landed the role of Mr. Weather-Eye for WEWS. His Navy crew cut fit the Ivy League image the station was looking for, he explained, and it didn’t hurt too that he had once acted with the sponsor’s daughter—at Cain Park, naturally. Price performed his daily five-minute stint for several years, appearing next to Cleveland television icon Dorothy Fuldheim and coming up with his signature salutation, “Good evening, neighbors.” It provided him with the financial security he needed for his growing family, which now included son Jock and daughter Diana. It also gave him enough free time to make plans for his ultimate ambition—a theater of his own.
Ideally, Price would have liked to establish a small theater for classical drama and new scripts. “But I was practical enough to know that I couldn’t do classical drama in Cleveland, Ohio,” he says. Then he ran into Boehm, who had just done The Student Prince in Skaneateles, New York, in the Finger Lakes region. The show was performed in a tent. “Bill extolled the virtues of these musical tents and predicted that they would be the wave of the future for American summer stock,” Price says, and he became an eager convert.
The idea was both as old as the Roman circus and as contemporary as the Second World War. An actor and adventurer with the swashbuckling name of St. John Terrell was responsible for its postwar reincarnation. Born in Chicago, Terrell broke into show business with a fire-eating act in a local carnival. Later he was heard on network radio as the title character on Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. During World War II, “Sinjun” (as he was called) landed in a USO troupe in the Philippines. When a touring company of Irving Berlin’s This Is the Army couldn’t find a suitable stage in Manila, Terrell proposed scooping out a natural bowl with some bulldozers, pitching a tent over it, and staging the show in the middle, with the GI audience seated around the periphery. The idea was strangled by Army red tape.
Back home Terrell followed through on his own by opening the Music Circus in 1949 in Lambertville, New Jersey, with a production of The Merry Widow. Music Circus was located on the Delaware River, about twenty miles north of Philadelphia, and financed in part by Terrell’s Army craps winnings and the family perfume business. The novelty quickly attracted a broad, popular following. “The tent reduces the country people’s distrust of the theater’s forbidding formalities,” he explained. “The wise guys enjoy the new twist we give the old standbys.”
Success bred the usual imitators. Terrell himself established the Treasure Island Music Circus in Miami Beach, Florida, and assumed management of the Neptune Music Circus in Asbury Park, New Jersey. There were nine of these theaters by 1954, including Melody Fair in Toronto, the Cape Cod Music Circus in Hyannis, Massachusetts, and the Finger Lakes Lyric Circus in Skaneateles, New York. (A visit to the Toronto operation had inspired Tyrone Guthrie to open the first Stratford Shakespeare Festival season in a tent.) John Price checked out the Hyannis and Skaneateles operations, as well as Terrell’s original Lambertville Music Circus in the summer of 1953. “These were going concerns, and I learned as much as I could from my flying visits as to how they were set up, how they cast, where they got their tents and chairs and technical equipment like switchboards and lights,” he recalled.
Price began to calculate what it would take to raise such a tent in Cleveland. He once claimed to be the type who never worried where the money was going to come from, but a couple of similar ventures had recently gone belly up. “So it was immediately dubbed ‘Price’s Folly,’” Price said of his own project. It was his wife, Connie, who suggested that he go to see her cousin, Robert H. Bishop III, a lawyer.
Bishop was also a Mather, in fact the son of Connie’s namesake, Constance Mather Bishop. He was the last person Price thought would be interested in theatrical ventures; oil wells were much more in his line. Price was also a little leery about taking advantage of his relationship with Bishop, but he figured that at least the lawyer could put him in contact with moneyed people who might be interested in his idea. So he trotted down to Thompson, Hine, and Flory in the National City Bank Building and left a prospectus of his plans with his cousin by marriage.
The lawyer was properly dubious at first. He told Price that it looked mor...

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