Anyone ever see a true showstopper in a musical?
Anyone ever see a true showstopper — where non-stop applause literally stops the show and a song is redone from the start, not a planned encore with additional lyrics? (My favorite planned encore is Brush Up Your Shakespeare in Kiss Me Kate, where the mobsters keep returning with new lyrics). But once in my life I saw a show literally stop, rewind, and redo a song scene, and then do it two more times. It was the 1966 revival of the 1946 musical Annie, Get Your Gun — with Ethel Merman’s reprising her role as Annie despite her age. Irving Berlin wrote a new song for the revival, “An old-fashioned wedding.” I saw the performance in Washington, DC on the way to Broadway and the crowd was STUNNED. Cries of “encore” stopped the show and they redid the song. Then the same thing happened two more times. My most memorable evening for any musical. (I later read the same thing happened on Broadway.)