By Tom Nondorf
02 Apr 2007

The Scene Stealer: Ron Holgate
The Show: 1776, 1969, 46th Street Theatre
The Song: "The Lees of Old Virginia"
The Story: Ron Holgate had just one number in 1776 as the indomitable Richard Henry Lee, but he made such an impression that he won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical just seven years shy of the Bicentennial.

Question: Do your recall your first encounter with the "The Lees"?
Ron Holgate: When I auditioned for 1776, they asked me to come back and sing something else that I hadn't prepared. They wanted me to sing "Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye," and I thought, "Really?" It made me so curious as to what their song was all about in a show about the writing of the Declaration of Independence. Anyway, I came back the next week, and I sang "Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye," gave it my all, and there was silence out there, and they said, "Yeah…you know what? Uh…what else can you sing?" And Stuart Ostrow, the producer, came running down the aisle yelling, "You know what I wanna hear? I wanna hear 'Blue Skies' in an uptempo!" [Laughs.] I said, "What the hell is this song anyway? Give it to me, I'll sight read it." And, they all looked at each other and Stuart said, "You can't. It's at the copiers. We don't have the copy of the music." I finally was hired for the thing, and the first day of rehearsal was the first time I heard that song. As soon as Sherman Edwards was going through the score singing all the songs and he sang that song, and I listened to it, and I said, "That song is 'Old MacDonald Had a Farm.' That's what I should have sung [at the audition]!"

The first time I heard it, I knew I could do a lot with it. I just had a gut feeling it was going to be a successful thing.

I'll tell you another story about the song. When we went to Washington, DC, for tryouts, we had a heck of a time with the show. The show wasn't a success in Washington. We opened it, and it got a lukewarm review. It said the show went downhill right after I left the stage, and that number was the only standout number in the show. So when I came into rehearsal the next day, they called me aside and they said, "Ron, we want you to do something tonight. We want you to sing the song, but don't do any of the staging that you do." And, I thought, "Why am I being singled out like this?" I was very upset, of course, and I went to Onna White who was the choreographer, and she said, "Just do it tonight, okay? Just do it tonight." So I did it that way, and, of course, it didn't have the impact, and they realized it was a stupid way to do it, and they put it right back in the next night.

Q: They thought you might be overshadowing the rest of the show?
Holgate: It's kind of like, "What is this number in the show for?" Either it's too good, or it's too different, let's put it that way. Too boisterous. I already had one thing taken away from me from in the first Broadway show I did, which was Milk and Honey. They had taken away a big scene that I had that had gotten great reviews and gave it to Mollie Picon. I said, "What is this? Every time I do something good, I get punished for it?" [Laughs.]

Q: In the end, you were rewarded with a Tony.
Holgate: And to round out the story, when we made the film of 1776, the first thing they filmed was my number, and it was because they wanted to show Jack Warner that the musical wasn't just a bunch of guys sitting around talking about the Declaration of Independence.

Q: How was doing the film?
Holgate: I enjoyed it. I'm a great movie fan, but not working in movies. What you go through to do a movie these days is pretty torturous. When we filmed that, the Santa Ana wind conditions were pretty prevalent in Los Angeles. It was 115 degrees when we filmed that number, dressed in those wigs and costumes. It was really rough. They had huge canisters of tea and water and juice around, and you'd be drinking stuff all day long, then you'd go home at night and drink like a quart of beer and go to bed and wake up at two in the morning with a horrible thirst and go to the refrigerator and guzzle down a quart of water. It was really rough.

Q: How did the reception of the movie compare to the show?
Holgate: It did go through an odd history. When we did the Broadway show, people thought it was being iconoclastic in the way we treated the founding fathers, Benjamin Franklin and [Thomas] Jefferson, and [John] Adams especially. Then, when the movie came out, a lot of people thought it was kind of jingoistic, flag-waving and that sort of thing. That's how rapidly the writing of American history changes.

Q: What have been your favorite roles since then?
Holgate: The show I did most often and every opportunity I could was Lend Me a Tenor. I did the original production, I did it in London, I did it on the road, I directed it, I acted in it. You might be interested to know there is a musical version of Lend Me a Tenor that's going to be done this summer at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. I don't think I'll get out there, but I talked to [playwright] Ken Ludwig about it. He talked to me about doing it, but I'm too old for that now.

The Sequel: Ron is now living in Saratoga Springs, NY. In recent years he has toured in Urinetown, and is currently preparing a Civil War musical called Reunion, which he co-created for the New York State Theater Institute in Troy, NY. Next fall, he will return to his hometown in South Dakota to be inducted into the Aberdeen Central High School Hall of Fame.

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The Scene Stealer: Austin Pendleton
The Show: Fiddler On the Roof, 1964, Imperial Theatre
The Song: "Miracle of Miracles"
The Story: Recognized more now for his numerous cinema ("What's Up Doc?," "My Cousin Vinny," "A Beautiful Mind") and television ("Oz," "Homicide," "Law and Order") character roles, Austin Pendleton kicked off his career in a big way by creating the role of Motel in Fiddler on the Roof. Stealing a scene couldn't have been easy with Zero Mostel in the cast, but Pendleton's unbridled joy in "Miracle of Miracles" puts the number right up there with some of the show's more famous standards.

Question: How do you remember the song coming into your life?
Austin Pendleton: We were on the road with that show, and [composers Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick] were trying to find a song that would work for Bert Convy, who was playing Perchik, and I had a song called "Now I Have Everything." They adapted the song I had for him, and I would sing it in the first act, and he would sing it in the second act. Of course, that made no sense to the audience. But they liked that song for him, so they decided to write another song for me. So this was almost at the end of the out-of-town tryout, and all of a sudden, they just overnight wrote that song for me, and they played it for me and we put it right into the show three nights before we ended the out-of-town engagement in Washington. We had a handful of previews on Broadway, like four or five previews, and then that was it. So, it was pretty last minute. It was all because they couldn't find a song for Bert.

Q: So that worked out well for you.
Pendleton: Yeah.

Q: Do you remember the first time you heard it, thinking, "Hey, this is not bad."
Pendleton: I remember thinking exactly that. They had a real feel for the character I was playing. I heard a lot of songs they had written for Motel over the year that I was in the show before we opened, and they just wrote very easily for that character. I think it came very naturally for them.

Q: When did you have a sense that it was going to be a standout?
Pendleton: On the night we put it into the show, I'd only rehearsed it for a couple of days. We always rehearsed in the afternoon when we were out of town. And that afternoon they brought the orchestra in, and they played it, and I sang the song onstage, and the cast came up onstage and said, "You bastard! You have one of the best songs in the show!" And, this is right at the last minute. The show, other than that, was essentially completely frozen, so we had a lot of fun about that.

Q: Was Mr. Mostel cool with it?
Pendleton: He was very generous. He was always very supportive of me and a lot of other people in the cast, too. He was delighted.

Q: When did you record the song for the original cast LP?
Pendleton: On a Sunday — that was in the days when the day off was on Sunday. Maybe a week or two after we opened, and it was when you recorded an album in this big room with the orchestra there. It wasn't like the orchestra did one track, and you came and recorded a separate track at a different time. It was all in a sort of cruder day of recording. So, you had to do a lot of takes to get everything exactly right because the orchestra was being amplified and all that. . . . I remember this quite well: We'd had two shows on Saturday, so by now the voice was getting a little shredded, so on the tenth take, we finally got everything right — it was going alright, and right toward the end of the take, someone in the room accidentally kicked over a Coke bottle on the floor, and you could hear it, so we had to do the 11th take! I always thought the tenth take was the brilliant one, but then, of course, you always think that. You think it in movies, too. "Oh, see the take when it was really great, something got screwed up, so now we have to do another one not as good." But that's just actor paranoia.

Q: Since then, you haven't been known as much for musicals…
Pendleton: I've done a few since then. In fact, the only show I ever won awards for was a musical a few years later Off-Broadway called The Last Sweet Days of Isaac by Gretchen Cryer and Nancy Ford, and that ran for about a year and a half. That was my biggest thing in terms of awards, and that was a musical with actually a lot more singing. I was in a musical a few years after that by Arthur Miller and Stanley Silverman from Arthur's play about the Book of Genesis. The play is called The Creation of the World and Other Business, and the musical is called Up from Paradise, and that's a beautiful score, and of course the script is terrific, but that just played like a month at the Jewish Rep on East 14th Street in 1983, and then it disappeared from view, and I don't think there's any recording of that or anything. That's too bad.

Q: You direct a good deal for the stage. Are musicals something you enjoy directing?
Pendleton: I have directed two musicals. Each of them was a new musical. Neither one of them really worked, but I'm up for doing it any time. That idea just thrills me. It's a really difficult form. And Jerry [Robbins], who directed Fiddler, he was the master at it of all time, I think. We all learned a lot from him of how to direct a musical. I would love to keep at that, absolutely.

The Sequel: Pendleton teaches acting at the HB Acting Studio in New York, which he says keeps him together. He's involved in a couple of showcase projects and continues to write and direct for the stage. Of recent stuff, he recommends a film he acted in now out on DVD, called "Bad City," in which he gets to play "a really bad human being."

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Also… An inveterate record fiend from youth, my first encounter with the song "Joey Joey Joey" was about 20 years ago at a thrift shop in Northern Indiana. It was on an EP 45 rpm record I found that included that song plus "Big D" and a couple others from The Most Happy Fella. I recognized "Standing on the Corner" from the Four Lads hit version, but Art Lund's performance of "Joey" blew me away, so it is nice to see it set apart as the scene-stealer it must have been. Also included on "Broadway Scene Stealers: The Men" are Ben Wright, performing "Giants in the Sky" from Into the Woods, Paul Wallace doing "All I Need is the Girl" from Gypsy, John Travolta with "Dream Drummin'/Soft Music" from Over Here! , Lonny Price doing "Franklin Shepard, Inc." from Merrily We Roll Along, Swen Swenson singing "I've Got Your Number" from Little Me, Cyril Ritchard performing "Captain Hook's Waltz" from Peter Pan, and Barney Martin as "Mr. Cellophane" from Chicago.

To purchase "Scene Stealers" online right now visit www.playbillstore.com.

For more information visit www.sonybmgmasterworks.com.

Tom Nondorf is a publications editor for Playbill Classic Arts. He can be reached by e-mail at tnondorf@playbill.com.

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To read about the women featured on the new CD "Broadway Scene Stealers: The Women," click here.