306. LET MY PEOPLE COME. From my (unpublished) ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW YORK STAGE, 1970-1975

 

Ray Colbert, Tuesday Sommers.

LET MY PEOPLE COME [Musical Revue/Sex] M/LY: Earl Wilson, Jr.; D/P: Phil Oesterman; CH: Ian Naylor; L: Centaur Productions; T: Village Gate (OB); 1/8/74-7/5/76 (1,327); Morosco Theatre, 7/7/76-10/2/76 (108)

Christine Rubens, Steven Alex-Cole, Jim Rich.

If you think that the title of this show means what you think it means, you're right! Let My People Come was, perhaps partly because of its provocative title, an impressively successful Off-Broadway revue that ran for two and a half years at a small theatre, had numerous touring versions, both national and international, and eventually moved to Broadway, even though the critics weren’t formally invited to review it. Those who went did so on their own or their outlets’ initiative.

Song titles included “Whatever Turns You On,” “Give It to Me,” “Fellatio 101,” “Poontang, “Come in My Mouth,” and “The Cunnilingus Champion of Company C,” to cite some of the more obvious examples. The numbers covered a wide variety of sexualities,"straight, gay, bi, pansexual," as Paul Tenaglia, who later joined the show, informs me. (An earlier version of this entry noted that only "a smattering" of the show deviated from a heterosexual orientation into bisexual material.) Tenaglia notes that songs like "I'm Gay," "And She Loved Me," and "Take Me Home with You" explored alternative sexual orientations.

Complete nudity was greatly in evidence, and the naked cast greeted the spectators at the exits as the audience left. Filthy words were spoken and simulated sex acts were performed, although with a “gingerly” touch, according to Mel Gussow.

Steven Alex-Cole, Marty Duffy.

Gussow enjoyed the “ingenuousness and adolescent giddiness,” but he thought the score—by the son of one of New York’s best-known gossip columnists—derivative and the straight comic skits not up to even the less-than-acceptable bits in Oh! Calcutta!. That 1969 show, of course, is the one that opened the floodgates for products like Let My People Come to rush into the mainstream. The cast was considered merely “adequate.”

Tuesday Sommers, Robin Charin, and others.

Let My People Come was the center of several controversies. One was when the State Liquor Authority asserted that the Village Gate’s liquor license was in jeopardy because of the theatre’s mixing nudity and booze. Another came when protests emerged from members of the New York League of Theatre Owners and Producers, who were unhappy with the presence of a semi-pornographic show in a respectable Broadway theatre just when they were struggling to remove from the Times Square area the blight of porn and prostitution.