The Great White Way - A Trip Down Memory Lane

For all intents and purposes, Long Island is in the shadow of The Great White Way, otherwise known as Broadway.  For anyone who has had the privilege of experiencing a live broadway show, with the attendant electricity that fills the theater from behind the footlights, there is magic there.  I, personally have been fortunate enough to have seen and been influenced by many of the greats. Getting to see Charles Boyer and Claudette Colbert ply their craft as married lecturers on what makes a good marriage, while having to deal with the threat of a very young and sexy Julie Newmar, who would go on to win a Tony Award for her role in the play, was a lesson in itself.

My first exposure to the thrill and drama of live performance was at Rogers and Hammerstein's The King And I, with Gertrude Lawrence, playing Anna in what would sadly be her final performance.  Yul Brynner was a masterful King of Siam, stomping around the stage with great purpose and authority.  By the final curtain I was hooked.  I knew I wanted to spend my life doing what they did.  

Years followed, as did other great performances -- by Vincent Price, Betty Davis, Anne Bancroft as Gittel Mosca in Two For The Seesaw, and the delicate, steely performance of Dorothy McGuire, sharing the stage with Leon Ames in Winesburg, Ohio.  I cried at the believable portrayals of the hopeless situation of Anne Frank and her father as the family hid from the nazis during World War II, and as played by Joseph Schildkraut and Susan Strassberg.  I marveled at the impossibility of the life into which Helen Keller was born and the tenacity of Annie Sullivan, her teacher in The Miracle Worker, with a very young Patty Duke as Helen Keller and Anne Bancroft in the title role.

All these talented artists filled me with the absolute knowledge that the theater was my home.  It was where I was most alive.  I danced along with Chita Rivera and Carol Lawrence in the riveting West Side Story, a modern day adaptation of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, on a backdrop of Manhattan's mean streets.  

For anyone with a hankering for the world behind the lights, and a desire to learn to act, or perfect their craft, there are wonderful options right here on Long Island.  As published in Newsday, and written by Arlene Gross, you'll find the acting schools right here.  If I were a few stops back on the railroad of life I might take a refresher course myself.