Sweet Charity
November 4-20, 2011

SWEET CHARITY, based on Federico Fellini's screenplay for Nights of Cabiria, is a musical choreographed and conceived by Bob Fosse, with music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Dorothy Fields, and book by Neil Simon. The original production, directed by Fosse, opened on January 29, 1966 on Broadway at the Palace Theatre, and ran for 608 performances. It starred Gwen Verdon, John McMartin, Helen Gallagher, and Thelma Oliver. The production was nominated for 12 Tony Awards®, winning only one, for Fosse's choreography.

The 1969 film version of Sweet Charity, also directed and choreographed by Fosse, starred Shirley MacLaine and McMartin, recreating his original Broadway role. The movie also included Chita Rivera, Paula Kelly, Stubby Kaye, Ricardo Montalban, and Sammy Davis. The movie was noted for the editing of the dance sequences, “Hey, Big Spender” and “The Rich Man’s Frug”.

Sweet Charity was revived on Broadway in 1986 starring Debbie Allen as Charity and won four Tony Awards®. The most recent revival of the production was in 2005 starring TV star Christina Applegate. It opened on Broadway at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre on May 4, 2005. The show was nominated for many Tony Awards® including Best Revival of a Musical and Best Actress in a Musical for Appelgate. The show ended its Broadway run on December 31, 2005, after playing 279 performances.

Theatre World 1966: The Original B’way Sweet Charity Company Listing

SWEET CHARITY: THE CREATIVE TEAM

Sweet Charity Concept and Choreography By Bob Fosse

Born June 23, 1927, Bob Fosse was an American musical theater choreographer and director. His career in dance began at an early age when his father taught him ballroom dancing. Fosse began his dance training at the Frederick Weaver Ballet School where he learned tap and acrobatic dancing, and was the only male enrolled. He worked as a choreographer in his first two Broadway shows, The Pajama Game (1954), in which he first met Gwen Verdon, and Damn Yankees (1955). Fosse developed a jazz dance style that was immediately recognizable, exuding stylized movements. Fosse earned many awards for his works. Among them were a Tony Award® for Pippin, the Academy Award® for Directing for Cabaret and an Emmy Award® for Liza with a Z. He was the first person to win these three most important awards in the same year. Fosse died on September 23, 1987.

Sweet Charity Lyrics by Dorothy Fields

Dorothy Fields, born July 15, 1905, was an American librettist and lyricist who wrote well over 400 songs for Broadway musicals and films. She had great talent to match colloquial everyday speech to complex scores, and was one of the first successful Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley female composers or librettists. Her career as a professional songwriter took off in 1928, when Jimmy McHugh, invited her to provide lyrics for him. They would team up until 1935.

After, Fields started to write lyrics for films and to collaborate with composer Jerome Kern. With Kern, she worked on the movie version of Roberta, and also on their greatest success, Swing Time. The song “The Way You Look Tonight” earned the Academy Award® for the Best Song in 1936. In the 1940s, she teamed up with her brother, Herbert Fields, with whom she wrote the books for Let's Face It, Something For The Boys, and Mexican Hayride. They also wrote the book for Annie Get Your Gun. Fields died on March 28, 1974.

Sweet Charity Music by Cy Coleman

Cy Coleman, born June 14, 1929, was an American composer, songwriter, and jazz pianist. Coleman was a child prodigy who gave piano recitals at Carnegie Hall between the ages of six and nine. Coleman's winning streak as a Broadway composer began when he collaborated on Wildcat (1960), which marked the Broadway debut of Lucille Ball. In the late 1970s, he collaborated on I Love My Wife (1977) with Michael Stewart and On The Twentieth Century (1978) with Comden and Green. In 1980, Coleman served as producer and composer for Barnum, which introduced Jim Dale and Glenn Close. In 1990s, Coleman composed The Will Rogers Follies (1991) and The Life (1997). Coleman died on November 18, 2004.

Sweet Charity Book by Neil Simon

Neil Simon, born July 4, 1927, began his career as a TV comedy writer and is the author of over 40 Broadway plays since 1961, ranging from humorous, lighthearted plays of the 1960s (Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple) to darker, more autobiographical works in 1970s and 1980s (Chapter Two, the Eugene Jerome trilogy featuring Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound). Simon also contributed librettos to such hit musicals as Sweet Charity, Promises, Promises, and They're Playing Our Song. His plays are known for their family-based New York settings, where world-weary characters use one-liners to hide often-fractured psyches. Simon's second wife (of four) was actress Marsha Mason, who starred in several of his plays and movies. Simon has won several Tonys® and other awards for his work, including a Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Lost In Yonkers in 1991.

SWEET CHARITY, FELLINI, AND NIGHTS OF CABIRIA

Nights of Cabiria is a 1957 Italian film directed by Federico Fellini. Fellini's wife, Giulietta Masina, plays Cabiria Ceccarelli, a feisty but naive prostitute in Ostia, a seedy section of Rome. In 1998 the film was rereleased, restored and with a crucial scene that censors had cut.

The film opens with Cabiria laughing on a river bank with her live-in lover. He pushes her into the river and steals her purse. She cannot swim and very nearly drowns, but is rescued at the last possible moment by helpful ordinary people who live further down the river. The rest of the plot follows Cabiria as she plies her trade, interacts with her neighbor Wanda, and searches for a chance to better her life. She is frequently mistreated and taken advantage of, but has interesting adventures, and manages to keep her basic attitude to life positive. Eventually, she meets Oscar, an accountant, who seems genuinely kind and who promises her a happy future. At first she is cautious and suspicious, but after several meetings she falls passionately in love with him and they get married after only a few weeks. During the honeymoon, they walk into a wooded area to a cliff overlooking a lake where Oscar becomes shakingly nervous and violent. Cabiria realizes that, just like her earlier lover, Oscar intends to push her over the cliff and steal her money. She throws her purse at his feet, sobbing in convulsions on the ground as he abandons her. Hours later, she picks herself up and stumbles out of the wood in tears.

In the film's famous last sequence, Cabiria walks the long road back to town when she is met by a group of young people riding scooters, playing music, and dancing. They happily form an impromptu parade around her until she begins to smile through her tears.

At the time of the film's first release, New York Times critic Bosley Crowther gave the film a mixed review. Forty years later, the Times carried a new review by Crowther's successor, Janet Maslin. She called the film “a cinematic masterpiece”, and added that the final shot of Cabiria is worth more than “all the fire-breathing blockbusters Hollywood has to offer.” French director François Truffaut thought Cabiria was Fellini's best film to date (1957).

10 CENTS A DANCE: WHAT IS A TAXI DANCER?

A taxi dancer is a paid dance partner. Taxi dancers are hired to dance with their customers on a dance-by-dance basis. The term “taxi dancer” comes from the fact that, as with a taxi-cab driver, the dancer's pay is proportional to the time he or she spends dancing with the customer.

During the 1920s and '30s when taxi dancing enjoyed its peak popularity, patrons in a taxi dance hall would typically buy dance tickets for ten cents each, giving rise to the term “dime-a-dance girl”. When a patron presented a ticket to a taxi dancer, she would dance with him for the length of a single song. The taxi dancers would earn a commission on every dance ticket that they collected from their dance partners. Typically half the price of the ticket went to pay for the orchestra, dance hall, and operating expenses, while the other half would go to the taxi dancer. The “ticket-a-dance” system was the centerpiece of the taxi-dance halls where the taxi dancers worked. During the 1920s, taxi dancers, while only working a handful of hours an evening, frequently made two to three times the salary of a woman who might work in a factory or a store. In the 1920s taxi dancing reached national popularity. At that time in Chicago and in other large cities of the United States, dance academies began to adopt the ticket-a-dance system for their students. This system was so popular at dance academies, that taxi dancing quickly spread to an increasing number of non-instructional taxi-dance halls. By the mid 1920s, scores of taxi-dance halls had opened in Chicago and other cities, as the taxi-dance hall became the most popular place for urban dancing. Some films and novels of that era occasionally chronicled the life of taxi dancers. In 1927, Joan Crawford starred in the film The Taxi Dancer. Near that time the Ziegfeld Broadway musical Simple Simon popularized the song, “Ten Cents A Dance.”

Taxi-dance halls flourished in America during the 1920s and '30s. But after World War II the popularity of taxi dancing began to diminish, and most of the taxi-dance halls disappeared by the 1960s.

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Barn Players “Sweet Charity” Dramaturgy by Ross Harmon ©2011

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