We’re coming up on the fiftieth anniversary of the fabulous Frank Loesser musical, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.  To celebrate, Daniel Radcliffe will star as window washer turned business hotshot, Finch, along with John Larroquette as the big boss, J.B. Biggley.  I’m looking forward to this one, not only because of the dissonance of watching Harry Potter sing “Brotherhood of Man,” but because of my personal history with this play.  Yes, readers, a much younger Broadway Fred was one of the great Finches of his time, in one of the finest productions of the mighty Studio Y Players.

You’ve never heard of it?  Studio Y, housed in the Klein Branch Jewish Community Center in Northeast Philadelphia, was once a major force in the lives of scores of theater-loving folk as well as the two thousand or so senior citizens and family members who made up our audience. I appeared in many productions there from my teen years (Once Upon a Mattress, Good News, Bye Bye Birdie, etc.) into my young adulthood (Forty Carats, Count Dracula, The Good Doctor, etc.) to the beginnings of my directing career (Cinderella, Joseph, Carnival, etc.). Eventually, I was on “the committee,” the group of dedicated, loving, and obsessed people with other jobs who selected the plays, helped choose the directors, served as stage managers, hung the lights, and painted the flats.

Finch was a great part for me. Listen, I wasn’t accustomed to playing the lead roles in musicals. I was more the secondary comic type. In young people’s productions, I was often cast as an old man. But How to Succeed was different. Finch wasn’t supposed to be a pretty boy, the score was easy to sing, and I got to kiss not one but two girls, which, as foolish as it sounds, did a lot to make me feel special and invincible—especially coupled with the fact that my actual girlfriend was in the cast and I could kiss her as well. How to Succeed was as big a hit as a community theater show could be, and people actually recognized me in Roosevelt Mall, Kum Tong, and Tiffany Diner for a couple of years thereafter.

Naturally, there was always something to mess things up. In this case, it was the critic from The Jewish Times, a now defunct local newspaper that covered us. The review was exceedingly positive, but my actor pride was damaged. The critic had the audacity to compare me to Robert Morse, the “beguiling young man” who originally created the role. She went on to marvel at how much I reminded her of Morse, “right down to the space between [my] front teeth.” Little did she know I did everything I could to NOT be like Robert Morse. I felt I was an original, dammit. And what did she think–that I took a screwdriver to my teeth to imitate my idol?  Oh, well…

I enjoyed it, but not for long, because I was both blessed and cursed with an unrelenting realism. I understood that as big a mackerel as I was in the Studio Y pond, there were other, larger ponds. I performed in other shows, did magic, performed in improv groups, and even danced in two comic ballets. I continue to perform, but I haven’t done a musical in years.

In my mid-twenties I was in two other productions of How to Succeed in local theaters, though not in the leading role.  (I hadn’t accumulated enough theater seniority in those particular ponds.) At the Huntington Valley Dinner Theater another chorus boy, about twenty years old, had been watching me. One night he pulled me aside and said, with perfect sincerity, “You know, Fred, I’ve been watching the way you’ve been handling yourself, and you’re really doing a GREAT job…. And I’ve been in this business a long time.” I looked into his 20-year-old eyes and thanked him for the compliment.

Then I went home and applied to graduate school.

“Broadway Fred” appears every Wednesday.

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