Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

We see someone named John Kenley, a godfather of the bus-'n'-truck company circuit, a man who brought star-turn vaudeville to summer-stock theater, has died. Any man who could cast Hugh Downs, Merv Griffin and Joe Namath in his shows must have been...a genius. I suspect we get only the faintest inkling of his approach from these closing grafs:

He would build his shows around them even if it meant making “adjustments,” as he put it, which could mean rewriting the script, adding musical numbers or doing whatever it took to make them happy.

“He would always add a tap number for Ann Miller, even in ‘Hello, Dolly,’ ” said Patrick Quinn, a former president of the Actors’ Equity Association and a former employee of Mr. Kenley’s in Ohio. Mr. Quinn spoke in an interview in 2006, the year he died.

“His most famous interpolation was in a 1975 production of ‘She Loves Me,’ starring Jack Jones and Anita Gillette,” Mr. Quinn said. “He had Jones close the first act singing, ‘What I Did for Love,’ the hit from ‘A Chorus Line,’ ” the musical created by Michael Bennett. That seemed to satisfy everyone, Mr. Quinn said, “at least until a telegram arrived from Michael Bennett.”

Oh well, just so long as it sold.

(Via the usual AHTSJournal; photo via Cleveland.com)

(P. S. on 11/10 at 1:43 p. m. I meant to mention this but one wonders if Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick knew about Mr. Kenley's six-left-footed interpolation, and what they'd have thought. They might not have been pleased. Banging and chiseling that song into a frothy romantic musical set in the 1930s would be in almost as bad taste as putting it at the end of the first act of FIDDLER. But singers like Jack Jones always had some bad taste.

It figures: He showed in AIRPLANE II: THE SEQUEL.)