I recently read Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), pieced together by Jesse Green, with entertaining and informative footnotes, from the reminiscences of Mary Rodgers. She was the daughter of the composer Richard Rodgers, and she knew a vast array of musical-theater people, from her parents to Stephen Sondheim and beyond. The book offers up a spicy buffet of dish on all of them, including herself. It's not for everyone; many readers were offended by her bluntness and openness. "Make it meaner," she told Green when he showed her his early drafts; "Make it funnier." He did.
Rodgers was also a composer, a writer, a producer. Among her credits is the 1959 musical Once Upon a Mattress, which gave Carol Burnett her big break. I believe I saw the first TV version, broadcast in 1964, but there have been two more since then. She also worked on Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, broadcast on TV from 1958 to 1972, which I watched regularly in its first years.
In 1966 Rodgers composed a ditty known as "The Boy from..." for an off-Broadway revue, The Mad Show. Stephen Sondheim wrote the lyrics, which parody the bossa nova hit "The Girl from Ipanema" but also draw on Rodgers' admitted tendency to fall in love with gay men, such as her first husband and Sondheim himself:
Why are his trousers vermilion?The original recording was sung by the actress Linda Lavin, with a breathy -- indeed breathless -- delivery exaggerating Astrud Gilberto's in "Ipanema." It took me several listenings to fully appreciate Lavin's performance, partly because the recording level was low, but it grew on me.
Why does he claim he's Castilian?
Why do his friends call him Lillian?
And I hear at the end of the week
he's leaving to start a boutique.
Not being a musicals queen, I hadn't heard of Lavin until Rodgers mentioned her in connection with this song. Then, a few days after I read Shy, I began seeing YouTube clips from a new sitcom, Mid-centuiry Modern, in which Linda Lavin plays the mother of one of the characters. Interviews with the other cast members contain praise of her greatness and sadness for her loss; she died of cancer in the middle of production of the first season. At some point I realized that her name rang a bell, but it took me a few days to make the connection. If I were the kind of believer who sees the world that way, I'd say that God must have been in there somewhere; luckily, I'm not.
