Stuff That I Have Noticed #55: Alfred Drake and the Boy with the Bull

As a child I was told a story about a seventeen year old farm boy who could carry a year old bull over a stile. This seemed an impossible feat for a lad since the yearling bull weighed over 1,200 pounds. (For you city-raised folks a stile is an arrangement of steps, short stairs, that allows people to climb over a fence or wall.)

The lad had a simple explanation. At age sixteen when the bull calf was born he picked it up and carried it over the stile. No mean feat since at birth they can weigh in excess of fifty-five pounds but farm boys are strong so he did it with ease. And he continued this exercise every day for a year. Every single day as both he and the young bull grew he carried it over that same stile.

Strangely this brings us to the Broadway star Alfred Drake who was my idol when I was a young singer.

About four (or five) years after moving to The City I actually got to meet him at an audition for a summer of three musicals at Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut. He was to be the lead in the shows directed by Howard Da Silva.

– A brief excerpt from Three Stages:

Having worked with Howard in “Cradle [Will Rock]”, I had an inside track and a successful audition. Howard also liked Betsy. But since this was a resident company who would be working together all summer, before hiring anyone Alfred wanted to meet us one on one so we each had a meeting with him. I was very excited by this and we had a companionable chat in his office. As I was leaving I told him about the “act” I had done with Marilyn in college (Chapter Three) and how many of his numbers from “Kismet” and “Kiss me Kate” we did. When I was just closing the door I turned and sang, in my best A. Drake impression, “Rhymes, fine rhymes have I”. I closed the door and mentally kicked myself thinking I’d blown the job but as it turned out I hadn’t. He must have liked my imitation because they hired both of us.

Elizabeth and Alfred at Goodspeed

Alfred and I actually became friends and often swapped stories. Having seen him in the L. A. revival production of Kismet about a decade earlier I asked him one day about his closing musical phrase of that show which, in the Broadway album comes in at about 2:20 into this Youtube post.

Alfred’s phrasing was good in this cast recording but in the production I saw it was spectacular. He sang the last forty or forty-five seconds on one breath … while striding across the stage as though bringing in the final curtain! I had a great pair of lungs but I could only get a bit more than halfway through the phrase standing still. A very fine actor, he told me that when he first saw the song he realized that that phrase was a single idea and needed to be done without interruption for breath. So (back to the boy and the bull) he started working on it and gradually over a few weeks of performances – alas, after the cast album was recorded – he could do it on one breath.

I’m sorry Alfred left us (1992) before I thought to tell him that story about the boy and the bull.