This is a weekly feature on BroadwayLiving.com. It’s
just like the game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon”. You
know how it goes…someone throws out an actor’s
name and you have to try to connect them to Kevin Bacon
in six steps or less.
I thought it might be fun to do
the same thing with the theater’s luminaries. I
will be trying to connect them to the longest running
show in Broadway
history, The Phantom of the Opera and its
very first “Phantom”, Michael Crawford.
With Halloween just around the
corner it seems appropriate to pay tribute to the
King of Creepy, Vincent Price. With
his sallow face, thin moustache and sinister voice,
the 6’4”actor lent his eerie persona to
numerous horror films over the years, but the Broadway
stage is where he “cut his teeth”and caught
his big break.
Price was born in St. Louis, Missouri. His father
was the president of the National Candy Company. Initially
he had no designs on acting as a career. In his
childhood he often visited the St. Louis Art Museum
and in doing so developed a passion for art at a very
young age. He went to Yale to earn a degree in
art history, but after graduating, while performing
in a production of H.M.S. Pinafore, he was
bitten by the acting bug. Graduate studies took
him to London and it was there that he made his professional
theatrical debut in the play Chicago - the
source material for the musical of the same name.
It was soon after that that Price
was cast as Prince Albert in Laurence Houseman’s Victoria Regina. When
the show came to New York, Price was asked to reprise
his role and in 1935 he made his Broadway debut at
the Broadhurst Theatre in a production starring Helen
Hayes. His performance brought him to the attention
of U.S. audiences and to Hollywood. After signing
with Universal Pictures, he made his film debut in Service
De Luxe (1938).
The next 15 years included numerous notable appearances
on film: The House of the Seven Gables (1940), Hudson’s
Bay (1941), The Song of Bernadette (1943)
and Laura (1944); as well as on stage: Heartbreak
House (1938), Outward Bound (1938) and Angel
Street (1941).
Then in 1953 Vincent landed the role of Prof. Henry
Jarrod, the sculptor disfigured by arson who later
implements a special kind of revenge, in the movie House
of Wax. The movie turned out to be a great
success and was the first of many horror films in which
Price would star - films like: House on Haunted
Hill (1959), The Fly (1958), House
of Usher (1960), Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The
Masque of the Red Death (1964), Scream and
Scream Again (1970) and the bizarre, The Abominable
Dr. Phibes (1971), which had the tagline that
professed, “Love means never having to say you’re
ugly!”
In the late sixties Price returned
to Broadway to try his hand at a musical. The
show was Darling
of the Day (1968) and no doubt he must have been
drawn to the project because of a connection he felt
to the character he would play. The leading man
is an artist. He tries to escape his spurious
colleagues in the art world by staging his own death
and assuming the identity of his recently passed butler. Despite
music by Jule Styne and lyrics by E.Y. Harburg, and
the performance of Patricia Routledge as Price’s
love interest, the show would only run for 31 performances.
Mr. Price continued to act until
the time of his death in 1993. For a younger
generation he may best be remembered for his turn
as the Inventor in Edward
Scissorhands (1990) or as the Voice of the Rap
in Michael Jackson’s song and video Thriller (1983).
1) Vincent Price did Angel Street with
Judith Evelyn
2) Judith Evelyn was in The Shrike with Jose Ferrer
3) Jose Ferrer starred in The Girl Who Came to Supper which
also featured Marian Haraldson
4) Marian Haraldson did Woman of the Year with Gerry Vichi
5) Gerry Vichi shared the stage in Ain’t Broadway Grand with
Luis Perez
6) Luis Perez was the original “Slave Master in Hannibal”in The
Phantom of the Opera with Michael Crawford.
“And though you fight to
stay alive
your body starts to shiver
for no mere mortal can resist
the evil of the thriller.”
…”Voice
of the Rap”in Thriller
So that’s the game. Join
me each week as I try to come up with new ways of
connecting Michael
Crawford to the entire theater community.
