La Salle Music Theatre was started in 1962 by Dan Rodden, ’41. He founded the program to provide a place for young people to train in musical comedy, and it quickly became one of the most popular summer entertainments options in the greater Philadelphia region.
At its founding, La Salle’s Music Theatre was the only college-sponsored professional summer theatre in the U.S., and by its own account, it retained this distinction for more than twenty years. Another point of pride was that, while many musical theatre companies were run by volunteers, all of La Salle’s Summer Music Theatre members were salaried, from technical staff to performers.
From its initial production, Carousel, to its record yearly attendance in 1970, with 23,600 patrons attending Bitter Sweet and Man of La Mancha, La Salle’s Music Theatre thrived under the leadership of Dan Rodden. Even as his health declined, his passion for the Music Theatre program persisted. Once he stepped down from the Theatre, his work continued through the hands of Sidney J. MacLeod, Jr. and Bro. Gene Graham.
Though the program had been immensely successful throughout the 1960s and 1970s, by the 1980s it faced rapidly increasing production costs and declining audience numbers. After 27 years and 52 productions, La Salle Music Theatre performed its final play, Good News!, in 1988.
Over the years, La Salle’s Music Theatre saw a number of entertainment industry professionals cross its stage. Notable names included Mary Lou (Cookie) Metzger, who was a feature soloist on The Lawrence Welk Show; Marcus Brown, who was company manager, captain, and lead dancer for The Sammy Davis, Jr. Show in Las Vegas; Dennis Cunningham, who was a drama critic for WCBS-TV in New York; and Pat Cronin, who appeared on TV shows, including All in the Family, Alice, and Two Close for Comfort.
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Pal Joey
La Salle College
Music Theatre's revival of PAL JOEY renews an old theatrical acquaintance with local audiences. On December 11, 1940, in Philadelphia's heyday as a broadway tryout town, Director George Abbott applied his famous "touch" to the Rodgers and Hart Musical at the Forrest Theater. After its bow here, it went on to a Christmas opening in New York, a run of 379 performances and a reputation so unique as"to cause an even more widely successful revival during the 1952 Broadway season.
There had never been any controversy concerning the music. Several of the tunes from the score gained "Hit Parade" popularity immediately and have long since become pop standards. It was the show's unusual book which gave it a certain aura of heraldry; the musical play which had been misunderstood in its debut simply because it insisted on being ahead of its time. Its story line and central characters, after all, never afforded the thoughtlessly pleasurable pastime which characterized even the brassier musicals in those seemingly naive days before World War 11. Librettist John O'Hara's literary signature had always been his directness and authenticity, the realistic reportage of society's sophisticated but sad misfits. The critical fraternity wondered about audience acceptance of any musical designed around a title character who in the original novelette from which the 'play was derived, would thus epitomize himself and his seamy nocturnal millieu:
"Well, Merry Christmas as the saying goes. I guess I will have to go to bed for 24 hours so I don't have to stop hating my fellow men."
But the authors had the courage to retain Joey's basic attitude, the besmirched integrity of the anti-hero, the bitter morning, after taste of desperate, ruthless ambition in the grubby era of Depression-blighted "night life".
Quite apart from its structural novelties, remarkable for 1940,-innovations making for consistent dramatic pertinence of book, songs, and dances-PAL JOEY has become, in retrospect, the sign post for the directions taken by such contemporary works of the musical theater as Stephen Sondheim's COMPANY, FOLLIES, and Kander and Ebb's CABARET (Music Theatre's initial offering of this season). First and foremost, however, PAL JOEY continues to be its own rough, unflinchingly knowing and, yes, impudently comic self.