May 16, 2025: Theatre Yesterday and Today, by Ron Fassler

Composer Charles Strouse died yesterday at the age of ninety-six, just shy of his ninety-seventh birthday. The more than thirty musicals he wrote for the stage, including thirteen for Broadway, contain some of my personal favorite songs written for the theatre, none more so than "Put on a Happy Face" from Bye, Bye Birdie. Too young in 1960 to have seen the original Broadway show, I fell in love with the film version three years later at the age of six, especially the “Put on a Happy Face” number as sung by Dick Van Dyke. Plus, it was the theme song for The Hollywood Palace, a 1960s TV variety program I watched religiously. I often go to YouTube now and listen to Joe Lipman's orchestral arrangement that opened and closed the show each week. Hell, here it is right now, courtesy of YouTube:

It was also the theme song for Chuck McCann’s syndicated kid’s show Let’s Have Fun, which was a huge part of my childhood. What can I say? The song still brings me undiluted joy whenever I hear it.

In addition to his theatre credits, Strouse’s official website boasts his composing scores for five Hollywood films, including Bonnie and Clyde, as well as two orchestral works and an opera. The proud recipient of induction into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Theatre Hall of Fame, he is a three–time Tony Award winner, two–time Emmy Award winner, and also a Grammy. His “Those Were the Days,” with lyrics by Lee Adams, opened more than 200 episodes of All in the Family and Annie and Bye, Bye Birdie, with hundreds of productions licensed annually, are among the most popular titles in the Broadway canon.

In a 2018 interview with Playbill, Strouse talked about his roots and musical education of growing up on the West Side of Manhattan. “A lot of well-known people came from around there, like Burt Bacharach. We were friends. Everyone would call him Happy. I was Buddy. When I got married, my wife said, 'Forget the Buddy.' So, I became who I really was."

Sadly, Strouse’s wife, Barbara Siman, died in 2023. They had been married sixty-one years.

"My first connection with music was through my mother," Strouse told Playbill. “She was a pianist. She played a kind of ragtime piano. That was the first thing I heard. She was a very sad woman. I started tinkering at the piano to amuse her, to make her happy. She liked it, I guess. I had a good ear and took lessons. I went to P.S. 87 and Townsend Harris High School, and when it was time to go to college I went to music school. I was quite young—15. . . When I graduated in 1947, I sent some of my music to Tanglewood, and I became a student of Aaron Copland and had my music played there . . . I knew Lenny Bernstein at Tanglewood, and of course he became the conductor of the New York Philharmonic, but he never would play anything of mine. I pursued that career—I wrote a string quartet, a piano concerto—but that career was shadowed by the fact that every day I was playing at auditions and playing rehearsal piano. This started taking my emotional life to a different place. I liked it. I liked the people. I started to enjoy it."

And enjoy it he did, even if there were inevitable downs to go with the ups. For every Bye, Bye Birdie or Annie, there was A Broadway Musical or Dance a Little Closer (two Strouse shows that closed on their opening nights). So what if had his share of flops alongside his hits? Every other major Broadway composer in the 20th century did as well, including Leonard Bernstein.

Case in point was Birdie’s follow-up, All American. Once again re-teaming with lyricist Lee Adams, they brought on board a new librettist, a mutual friend named Mel Brooks, then a TV comedy writer with limited theatre experience, who turned out to be less than ideal (according to most sources, he never finished the show’s second act). An adaptation of a novel titled Professor Fodorski, by Robert Lewis Taylor, All American attempted a satirical look at the immigrant experience from the point of view of a Hungarian professor who comes to America to teach at a small southern college. Opening two years after Birdie’s freshmen success, All American lent credence to the fearsome “sophomore jinx,” closing in less than two months. Its fate was pretty much assured by Howard Taubman in the New York Times, when he wrote: “With a stage full of targets in sight, All American has managed the amazing feat of hitting none.”

Still, All American has some wonderful songs in it, especially the ballad “Once Upon a Time.” Written quickly in Philadelphia to replace a scene that wasn’t working between the show’s two leads (Ray Bolger and Eileen Herlie), Strouse and Adams were thrilled when Tony Bennett decided to record it. It was to be the “A” side on a 45 record, only it didn’t turn out that way. When “Once Upon a Time” got little attention, DJs across America flipped the record over and the “B” side, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” captured the hearts of listeners. A huge hit, it won the 1962 Grammy for Record of the Year (don’t cry for Strouse and Adams: for every record sold they got the same residual payments as George Cory and Douglass Cross did for “San Francisco”). Eventually, “Once Upon a Time” got recorded by other artists, thus finding its rightful place as a standard.

Two Strouse and Adams musicals followed in the mid-1960s, Golden Boy and It’s a Bird … It’s a Plane … It’s Superman. And even if the shows containing them received mixed reviews, the scores were terrific. Luckily, audiences have had a chance to hear them again with full orchestras at City Center’s Encores!, in productions staged in 2002 and 2013, respectively. Golden Boy, which opened in 1964, was based on Clifford Odets’s 1937 boxing melodrama as a vehicle for Sammy Davis Jr. Though it ran a year and-a-half, it couldn’t manage to return its full investment. Worse luck hit with Superman in 1966, which failed after four months, though its score remains a personal favorite of mine, as well as many other musical comedy aficionados I’ve encountered over the years. If you don’t know it, this is Strouse’s overture, which really brought out the classicist in him. Try not to fall in love with it, as well as its brilliant orchestration by the notable arranger Eddie Sauter:

In 1970, Strouse and Adams won their second Tonys with Applause. It wasn’t the final show they would write together, but it was their last one that was a hit. A musical version of the 1950 Academy Award winning All About Eve, it ran two years and made an unlikely musical theatre star of Lauren Bacall. It then took seven long years for Strouse to return to Broadway, but when he did, it was one for the record books. Annie, based on the “Little Orphan Annie” comic strip, ran for six and-a-half-years, won seven Tony Awards, and has since been revived twice on Broadway and made into three different films. Its signature tune, “Tomorrow” (an unforgettable ear worm), is known to millions the world over.

It’s a shame that nine years later his 1986 musical Rags (with lyrics provided by Stephen Schwartz) didn’t work. A far more dramatic take on the immigrant experience than All American, it contains perhaps the finest music Strouse composed for the theatre. Plagued by an unwieldy and unworkable story, it closed after 4 performances (though, in a weak Broadway season, landed a Tony nomination for Best Musical). A 2017 production at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut, even with a seriously rewritten book, did not make the case for reconsideration.

It's unfortunate that Strouse's Broadway career ended on a sour note: the one-week flop Nick & Nora, based on the old Thin Man series of films for MGM, famously played by William Powell and Myra Loy. Even with a cast boasting the charms of Barry Bostwick and Joanna Gleason as the title characters and such stalwarts as Christine Baranski, Debra Monk, Faith Prince, Chris Sarandon, and Thom Sesma in support, it was an ill-conceived musical. And yet, another classy Charles Strouse overture makes for some lovely listening:

For more than fifty years, Charles Strouse wrote songs that have influenced not only generations of composers, but nearly anyone with a love for the musical theatre. One great story that he tells in his autobiography hits on that in an unconventional way:

“I was lecturing to students at the University of Miami when a young man came up to me afterward and said, ‘When I heard Ann-Margret sing ‘Bye, Bye Birdie’ in the film, I knew then that I wanted to be in the theatre.’”

“Humbled, I responded, ‘You knew you wanted to be a composer?’”

“‘No,’ he replied. ‘I wanted to be Ann-Margret.’”

Lastly, on a personal note (and to bring things full circle with a "Put on a Happy Face" moment), I had the pleasure of working with Strouse at a benefit in 2008 at which he played piano for Dick Van Dyke while he graced the stage with his signature moves and warbled "Gray skies are gonna clear up" . . . For the evening, I did my best Ed Sullivan imitation, something for which I've been cast more than once (you can see me briefly in 2007's Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story). I hosted the event in costume and in character (I also wrote the show) and though you can't see me in this photo, I'm just off to the side of the stage, exactly where Ed would be, watching these two pros go at it in close proximity. It was a night to remember, the same as Charles Strouse's indelible music will be for generations to come.

Ron Fassler is the author of the recently published The Show Goes On: Broadway Hirings, Firings and Replacements. For news and "Theatre Yesterday and Today" columns when they break, please hit the FOLLOW button.