A Broadway celebrity story from Author Ben Bryant


This

celebrity story

happened as a result of one of my two auditions the first week I was in The City (August 1964). I got the first job on the spot and the other one required another audition.

Excerpt from Three Stages:

“I had my second audition for Hang Down Your Head and Die. This was the New York production of a West End hit being produced by Marion Javits, wife of NY’s (liberal) Republican Senator, Jacob Javits. (Not many of them left. No pun intended.) The subject, capital punishment, was strange for a musical and the show itself stranger still. For my final audition, without advance warning, I was asked to do an improvisation: a ringside announcer at a hanging. That seemed pretty weird but I really got into it, they liked what I did and hired me.

“The setting of the show was a circus with two ringmasters, James Rado and Remak Ramsey. The condemned man, a white-faced clown, was played by Gerome Ragni. This is when Rado and Ragni met. A few years later they would write the book and lyrics for Hair. I was a black-faced clown.

BB Ragni

Me                                     Ragni

 “… Near the end of the show there was a scene where Ragni (as the condemned) was to be taken from his cell by four “warders” and marched to the scaffold to be hanged. This action was accompanied by the reading of a description of an actual hanging. The direction was that one warder was behind him, one each at his sides and the fourth (me) in front of him just inside the cell door. As the guy behind him took his hands to shackle them behind his back Ragni was to “go berserk” and try to escape. Fine, we could choreograph that. But no, Murray and Ragni wanted to “do it naturally”. They said that there were four of us and one of him so he should just do it and we should react.

“At that point I said, “Wait a minute. You want Jerry to go crazy, try to get away and then you want us to ‘naturalistically’ subdue him and carry him out. Is that what you want?” Both Ragni and Murray enthusiastically said, “Yes!” I replied, “Okay, I just wanted to be sure.”

“We got into position, the guy behind him [George Marcy] grabbed his hands and Jerry went nuts, flailing his arms and trying to run past me. I put my head in his gut and tackled him, as a linebacker would tackle a running back, slamming him to the hardwood floor and knocking him out cold. Now Murray, the stage manager and the other actors freaked out. As someone attended to the groggy Ragni I said to Murray, “Is that what you want eight times a week?” I had made my point. I received silent nods of approval from my fellow actors. After a short break for Jerry to recover we properly and carefully choreographed the escape attempt.

“We rehearsed for four weeks, opened on October 19th to mixed reviews and closed after a week. At least I got a good review.” 

From the New York Times:

Hang 1

Hang 2

 

 

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