In the late ’70s, a new kind of touring show emerged, one that featured not one headliner but rather a quartet of female stars, each performing a set of songs as well as performing a number or two together. It was called “4 Girls 4” and the women included — in various configurations — Rosemary Clooney, Margaret Whiting, Rose Marie, Helen O’Connell, Kaye Ballard, Martha Raye, Barbara MacNair and Kay Starr.
Wethersfield-raised producer-playwright Matthew Lombardo (Broadway’s “High,” “Looped”) is reviving the format with co-producer Rick Murray but with a twist — one that brings together a foursome of Broadway performers. This version, in its early stages of touring that will also play Boston and Buffalo, will stop at the Belding Theater at Hartford’s Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts on Monday, Dec 1 at 8 p.m.
The show stars two red-dressed stage icons — Andrea McArdle (“Annie”) and Donna McKechnie (“A Chorus Line”) as well as Faith Prince (“Guys and Dolls,” the upcoming musical “The First Wives Club” TV’s “Drop Dead Divas”) and Maureen McGovern (“The Pirates of Penzance,” the musical “Little Women,” pop singer of the Oscar-winning song “The Morning After”).
During a recent luncheon interview at Hartford’s Firebox restaurant, McArdle, 51, and McKechnie, 74, both looking sensational, talked buoyantly about the show, their careers and girl power.
“We’re like Charlie’s Angels,” laughs McArdle,” who last performed in the state in “Urinetown” at Connecticut Repertory Theatre. “They don’t write for women in the movies but musical theater does.”
“Each of us brings a different part of theater history and a unique range of talent,” says McKechnie, who taught and worked on a new cabaret/concert show of her own last summer at Waterford’s Eugene O’Neill Theater Center’s Cabaret and Performance Conference. (That show, “Same Place, Another Time” played New York and London and a recording of the act will be released next month.)
“What I love is our chemistry,” says McKechnie of the show’s performers. “You feel it on stage and off stage, too.”
“It’s like when you’re backstage in the dressing room at the Tonys,” says McArdle, “and you’re just telling each other all these show biz stories. That’s what I love. It’s the stories about stuff that didn’t go well, or the crazy way you got a job, things like that.”
“I knew Faith,” says McKechnie, “though I had never worked with her. Nor Maureen, though we both worked at the Public Theater and I knew what a great person she was from other people.”
“And we’re all so different from each other,” says McArdle.
McArdle and McKechnie knew each other when they starred in Rodgers & Hammerstein’s “State Fair” in 1996
“I thought that show had a lot of integrity,” says McKechnie of the short-lived musical.
“But that was the year of ‘Bring in ‘Da Noise/Bring in ‘Da Funk’ and there was a different kind of groundbreaking theater going on. I thought we should have just toured the country and then come in another year.”
McKechnie tells one great backstage story surrounding that show when famed producer David Merrick saw the show when it was playing in Philadelphia. “He was in a wheelchair at the time and he told the show’s producers, ‘You need this money [to come to Broadway] and here it is.’ And he handed them $500,000 — in cash in a brown paper bag.”
But both actors said by that time it was too late and the show just didn’t have the right publicity nor the deep pockets to cushion a show until positive word-of-mouth spread. “But we had so much fun on that show,” says McKechnie.
2 Hits 2
But their connection goes back further when they were both stars in the mid-’70s with two of the Broadway’s biggest theatrical phenomenon: 1977’s “Annie” (which began at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam) and “A Chorus Line,” which opened in 1975 and ran for 15 years.
“I remember begging my mom to go see ‘A Chorus Line’ and as soon as I went I wanted to go back to see it again and again. My Mom said, ‘I’m not made of money. I can’t afford $8.95 for a ticket .’ You can barely get a Coke for that now at theaters.”
McArdle says living inside a megahit as a youngster is different than observing it from the outside. “I saw it through the eyes of a child so I didn’t feel any stress,’ says McArdle of her 13-year-old self. “Dorothy Loudon [the adult star of the show] and she loved us but she would pull her hair out and say to us kids in the show, ‘I just want to give you some of the stress that I’m feeling. But as a kid, you’re unfazed. I was more concerned about playing Dorothy in ‘The Wizard of Oz’ at school. I suggest if you’re going to be in a mega-hit, do it as young as you can.”
“I on the other hand was very stressed,” says McKechnie of her Tony Award winning show (including one for herself as outstanding lead actress). “There was ‘A Chorus Line’ fever and it was like being a hot house tomato.”
McKechnie, who began her Broadway career in 1961 in the chorus in “How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying,” says because of performing a demanding acting-singing and especially dance role for eight shows a week, she had to have the discipline to protect herself and tried to keep a low-profile as much as she could. But it was difficult, she says. (She married the show’s director, Michael Bennett.) However, she still glows at the memory of that opening night. “I wish every one could be like that. I had no nerves because we all knew we had a hit so it was like one big celebration. That was one of the best nights of my life.”
Black Annie
When asked what McArdle thinks of the upcoming film that gives “Annie” a contemporary twist and with African-Americans in the leads: Quvenzhané Wallis as Annie and Jamie Foxx as hard-nosed tycoon and New York mayoral candidate Will Stacks — the new version of Daddy Warbucks.
“It’s a great idea but I had the idea to do a black ‘Annie’ 10 years ago,’ she says. “We were set to go to [the show’s composer] Charles Strouse but he had just sold the franchise rights for the horrible Broadway revival. James Lapine is an incredible director but this was a mismatch and dreary and with such weird choices. It was just the wrong fit. When [the show-stopping song] ‘Easy Street’ just gets a smattering of applause it makes me want to cry. Just take the stake and drive it into my heart and twirl it around a few times.
But for now, the focus is on ‘4 Girls 4,” and with the addition of Randy Graff, Leslie Uggams and Christine Andreas as part of the rotating pool, it allows the stars to step in and out of the show depending on what else is happening in their careers.
McKechnie remembers talking to Kaye Ballard about touring with the original ‘4 Girls 4’ show and Ballard telling her it was the most fun she ever had on the road.
It also excites McKechnie and McArdle about what else the show — under the direction of John McDaniel, who runs the Cabaret and Performance Conference at the O’Neill — can become.
“I’d love to do some duets, too” says McKechnie.
“It’s going to be fun to see how this show grows organically and see what else we can do with it,” says McArdle.
‘4 GIRLS 4’ will play the Belding Theater at the Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford on Monday, Dec. 1, at 8 p.m. The show is two hours, including one intermission. Tickets are $55 to $95. Information: 860-987-5900 and www.bushnell.org.
