Wednesday, December 30, 2020

425. RICHARD FARINA: LONG TIME COMING AND A LONG TIME GONE. From my (unpublished) ENCYCLOPEDIA OF THE NEW YORK STAGE, 1970-1975

About this series (for newcomers and whoever else might be interested): Prior to the pandemic, Theatre's Leiter Side was a blog on which I posted nearly 1600 reviews of New York theatre, beginning in 2012. Once the theatres shut down, I kept the blog alive with a series of production surveys covering, in neworder, nearly every show that opened on or Off Broadway from 1970-1975. They came from the manuscript of what was planned back in the eighties as a book called The Encyclopedia of the New York Theatre, 1970-1980, which would kick off a series of similar volumes for earlier decades. 

That project was altered midway through when the publisher (Greenwood Press) and I decided to begin the series with the 1920s. Subsequently, I published The Encyclopedia of the New York Stage in three thick volumes, one each for the twenties, thirties, and forties, making it the most comprehensive survey of every show of every type to have opened in New York over those three decades. With nothing to review when the shows shut up shop, I dug up the typescript (I'd thrown the now useless floppy disks away) of the abandoned 1970-1975 entries and began retyping and posting them. Today's is the 425th since I began; I used to post more than one daily until time became a problem.

Although I've updated and slightly revised many of them, many are, admittedly, a bit less detailed than those in the published volumes, especially those for the thirties and forties. Still, many have found them interesting and even useful. I hope you do, too.

RICHARD FARINA: LONG TIME COMING AND A LONG TIME GONE [Musical Revue] AD: Nancy Greenwald; D: Robert Greenwald; S: Richard Hammer; C: Joyce and Jerry Marcel; L: John Dodd; P: Free Flow Productions and Jay K. Hoffman; T: Fortune Theatre (OB); 11/17/71-11/21/71 (7)

NoteS: No photos are available for this production. An earlier version of this posting mistakenly used the title LONG TIME GOING AND A LONG TIME GONE.

One of the young hopefuls in this short-lived grab bag of material written and composed by the late, eponymous folk singer was Richard Gere, soon to be a major film star. Richard Farina’s claim to fame was a novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, finished shortly before his death in 1966 in a motorcycle crash, when he was 29.

This revue was based on Farina’s book and some of his unpublished writings. Nobody was thrilled, though Martin Gottfried, for one, admitted he “enjoyed” the show in spite of its uneven production. Clive Barnes was wearied by it, and condemned the show as “anti-theatrical.” “The music sounds like a dated echo of Bob Dylan,” he carped.

Cast members included Charles Weldon, Jessica Harper, Brendan Hanlon, Michael Lewis, Vicki Sue Robinson, and Penelope Milford.