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Some enchanted evening: Pink Frolic, Marshalls and Rodgers Award
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
By Christopher Rawson

"My whole life flashed before my eyes," said Rob Marshall Saturday, May 10, at the William Penn in his remarks on accepting the Richard Rodgers Award for Excellence in Musical Theater.

Ditto, sort of. When I arrived in Pittsburgh in 1968 to teach in the Pitt English Dept., fresh out of grad school, one of the first people I met was a fellow fugitive from New England, Bob Marshall, and then Anne and their kids, Maura, Rob and Kathleen (to list them in order of age, Maura being older than her twin brother by a few minutes).

We hit it off, and not just because we shared the Red Sox. (But Bob and I did found the two-man Rico Petrocelli Fan Club of Western Pa., which got us on Myron Cope's talk show in 1975 when the Red Sox played that great World Series with the Reds.)

Although the Marshall kids are a couple of years older than ours, they all grew up together as we and a couple of other English Dept. families shared family weekends and holidays.

So there's a personal as well as Pittsburgh pleasure in seeing their success. Along, doubtless, with others at the William Penn, we felt pride in how gracious they were, how affirmative about growing up amid the academics and performing artists of Pittsburgh.

Of course the 53rd Pink Frolic Ball would have been fun even without the Marshalls as its centerpiece, what with getting dressed up, good food and drink, and then dancing. But with them, it was a trip down memory lane.

It started off with a small cocktail reception, which included lots of theater people -- CMU's Barbara Anderson, Judy Conte and Greg Lehane and Laurie Klatscher, former CLO heads Bill Thunhurst and Charlie Gray, the Playhouse's Jodi Welch and Ron Tassone, comedienne Barbara Russell, and many more.

After that, I had a brief window in which to interview Rob and Kathleen for PG Video. (You can watch that video here.)

Then into the maelstrom of the larger cocktail party, with the fun of the grab-bag pink boxes that are a Guild tradition.

Finally we all crammed into our seats in the William Penn ballroom for a 20-minute revue by a 10-performer ensemble of numbers associated with the many Marshall shows on Broadway and elsewhere.

Point Park grad and Playhouse and Public Theater veteran Daina Griffith was charismatic in "Maybe This Time." There were also three current Point Park students: Ahmad Simmons ("Too Darn Hot"), Brittany Carricato ("Wrong Note Rag") and Justin Peebles ("Le Jazz Hot").

From Carnegie Mellon came Zachary Berger ("Hey There") and Steffi Garrard ("Whatever Lola Wants"). The University of Michigan contributed Stephanie Maloney ("Unusual Way"), and Penn State, grad JD Daw ("Kiss of the Spider Woman").

And representing the CLO Academy were Kristin Serafini and Ted Stevenson ("Favorite Things" and "I Can Do That").

The whole was arranged and directed by Jason Coll and choreographed by Kiesha Lalama-White, with orchestrator JC Carter conducting the band in the balcony.

Larry Richert was the evening's emcee. I think it was either he or the CLO's Van Kaplan (I was too surprised to take note) who introduced the evening's surprise guest, Harry Connick Jr.

As Kathleen said later, it really was a surprise: hearing it was someone who'd worked with her on "The Pajama Game," she ran through some possibilities in her mind without ever expecting it would be the star.

"Rob, I'm still waiting for the call for 'Nine'" (the movie musical Rob's about to direct), Connick joked from the podium.

He thanked Kathleen for taking on "Pajama Game" because it "saved us a lot of money," the implication being that she took less than a full director's salary. And he joked that she'd actually gotten him to dance, so that "sometimes I feel I don't even have to speak, I just move."

In the video tribute the CLO produced and showed, there were pictures of Rob and Kathleen as teenagers (I admit I provided those to CLO) and one of the two of them with sister Maura as Von Trapp children in the CLO's 1973 "Sound of Music."

Accepting her Rodgers Award, a handsome, engraved crystal bowl, Kathleen called the evening "a combination of 'This Is Your Life,' 'Queen for a Day' and, with Harry Connick Jr. here, a Friars' roast."

Kathleen said she and Rob were "so happy to be the home-town kids," and recognized some former teachers and other early mentors present.

She recalled that both of them received their Equity cards at CLO, but she traced her and Rob's love of musical theater back to doing Gilbert & Sullivan at Falk School in the fifth or sixth grade.

And "most of us who love musical theater probably fell in love with it at a Rodgers and Hammerstein show," she said, in tribute to the namesake of the award, which was presented to them (as is traditional) by Rodgers' daughter, Mary Rodgers Guettel.

Rob remembered having been a performer at a Richard Rodgers Award gala in the 1980s, wearing a tux "with a pink tie and cummerbund."

He mentioned the inspiration provided by their childhood idol, Lenora Nemetz, who, in the following summer at the CLO, when they were in "The King and I," would "slip us into dance rehearsals to watch."

But "it's time to retire those pictures of the 'Sound of Music' with the chubby boy in the knee-highs," he said.

An oddity about Connick's appearance is that I'd just written about him in connection with the Rodgers Award, in last Thursday's In the Wings column. That was only because it was just announced Kathleen is doing a newly devised Gershwin musical with him in the fall, but the CLO naturally feared for a moment that the news he was coming had slipped out.

Their care to keep it quiet even had him skulking unobserved around the hotel that afternoon and then sitting way off to one side before he was announced./p>

So much for the ceremonial part of the evening.

For me, the rest of it is a happy blur of dancing, laughing and a sip of wine or two.

It ended up with a group of us -- the awardees, Maura, Bob, Anne, Connick and several of us old (in either sense) friends -- sitting around laughing.

As the song says, it's "nice work if you can get it."

PG theater critic Christopher Rawson can be reached at 412-263-1666 or crawson@post-gazette.com.
First published on May 15, 2008 at 3:21 am
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