I couldn't resist running this message I received from Steve Winer. And by the way, the romantic leads in that production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum were John Hansen and Pamela Hall.
I'm one who also saw Phil Silvers in Forum, but I saw him on Broadway. It was truly as memorable an evening as you noted, and I had an interesting near miss after the show. I had seen the show with my father, and after the show we went to Gino's Restaurant for dinner. Gino's was and remains today a beloved Italian restaurant near Bloomingdale's.
Just as we were finishing our meal, a group of cast members from the show, including the young romantic lead whose name escapes me, came in to dine. My father had written extensively for television in the live anthology days of the fifties, and he was friendly with Larry Blyden from that time. We stopped by the table on our way out to compliment the cast and for my father to ask them to send his regards to Blyden. The romantic lead said "You should stay around a while. Phil is going to be coming over." My father, however, decided we should leave. As Charlie Brown would say, "Auggghhh!"
And last year, watching the What's My Line? reruns on the Game Show Network, I heard Phil Silvers mention his regular dining at Gino's — nearly twenty years prior to my experience.
One more note. Wasn't Larry Blyden brilliant in that production? If anybody remembers Blyden at all today, it is probably from the many game shows he hosted. Few know how fine an actor he was (I also saw him be equally great in a New York production of Absurd Person Singular and the original production of The Frogs at Yale).
Blyden was a fine actor. I first came to know his work on a short-lived 1963 TV series called Harry's Girls which has never been rerun to my knowledge, and which I wrote about here. I recently got to see a few episodes of it and it really was as good as I recalled…and Blyden was terrific. The guy could act, sing, tell jokes, dance, direct, do everything. His end was so tragic: He was about to start a new game show for Goodson-Todman so he went on a vacation to Morocco. While there, he went against the advice of some local friends and sped off alone in a jeep to explore nearby villages.
As the story is told, he got into a car accident in some remote little town. The crash should not have been fatal but it occurred where there were no doctors and no telephones and by the time someone found him days later, he was dead…at the age of 49. The game show, which was called Showoffs, went on the air with Bobby Van as its host and disappeared quickly. Mark Goodson was later quoted as saying he thinks that if Blyden had hosted, it would have been a success.
I envy you getting to see him in those other plays. On the other hand, I got to have lunch with Phil Silvers.