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256 C H a P t e r f i f t e e n Success Returns mary’s involvement in tHe 1980 OKLAHOMA! ProduCtion on Broadway began two years earlier, when she signed on to play Aunt Eller in two back-to-back, week-long performances in July 1978, first at the St. Louis Muny, and then at the Starlight Theatre in Kansas City. She was paid $1,750 per week. This was her first time playing Eller, the rural matriarch who in many ways is the heart of the show. Mary claimed she had never seen Oklahoma! before performing in it, but this is hard to believe. She lived in New York during the entirety of the musical’s groundbreaking 1943–48 run, when its particular combination of drama, music, and dance was the talk of the performing arts world. On March 31, 1943, while in Boston for Dancing฀in฀the฀Streets tryouts, Mary sent a congratulatory telegram to Richard Rodgers in New York on the opening night of the original Oklahoma! at the St. James Theatre. It was an evening that changed the nature of American musical theatre, and he wrote her back. Three decades later, her denials of having seen the show were probably driven by wanting to avoid any suggestions that she patterned her performance on that of Betty Garde, the original Eller. Oklahoma! is a sentimental tale about romantic rivalries that surface around a town social in the pioneer Midwest, just the kind of homespun storytelling that Mary liked. The part resonated with her, so in November 1978, when she was asked to play Eller in a short Florida tour being assembled by producer Zev Bufman, she quickly agreed. Just four months after playing the role in Kansas City, this job would pay less—$1,500 per week—but it would last ten weeks. She began rehearsals on December 4, 1978, in New York, before performing at the Miami Beach Theatre, Parker Playhouse in Fort Lauderdale, and the Royal Poinciana Playhouse in Palm Beach. At this point, just shy of seventy, Mary—who never had trouble projecting her voice—struggled to establish a presence on stage. “When we s u C C e s s r e t u r n s 257 were rehearsing, she was perfect. It was subtle and she was the absolute epitome of Aunt Eller. I couldn’t think of anybody righter for the role. I thought, ‘Boy, she’s gonna just kill in this,’” says Lewis Stadlen, who played the peddler Ali Hakim. “But I was surprised that she lost a little energy on stage. She didn’t have the right amount of energy to score, to show all the subtle aspects of her performance, and I think it may have frustrated her that it was somehow going to take a little more energy than she knew she had. Her performance in these big theatres didn’t go beyond those first fifteen or twenty rows.” Harve Presnell played the wholesome cowboy Curly in the Florida shows. He and Mary bonded immediately around their lack of confidence in director Stone “Bud” Widney. “Mary came to me and said, ‘Look, to protect us and to protect the show and so that the composer and lyricist don’t turn over in their grave, we better make sure we do this right. We’ve both done it before, so let’s do it our way.’ So we did and the director just finally went along with it.” That they had now established a rapport helped later when Presnell objected to Mary’s efforts to guide his own performance. “She had done a lot of research in the characters and I got a lot from her. But she said, ‘Well, that฀Curly . . .’ and I said, “I don’t care about the other Curlies. I do it my way. The reason they did it that way is because they couldn’t sing.’” Mary had little patience with performers who were “perennial amateurs or with people not willing to do their homework. She was pretty short with some of those people,” Presnell says. “But she was not domineering and she didn’t interfere with the choreographer or the director. She’d say to me, ‘What are they doing?!’ [I’d say,] ‘I don’t know, maybe we’d better tell them.’ ‘You tell them.’ ‘I don’t want to tell them—you tell them.’” Another cast member, who prefers not to be named, says he...

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