The other day, we had some clips of Nathan Lane in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I am a huge fan of this person and have been since I saw him in the (mostly) non-singing role of Nathan Detroit in the 1992 Broadway revival of Guys and Dolls.
Hey, do you know why Nathan Detroit only really has one song in that show? I probably told this before on this blog but here it is again: When the show was originally written, the producers signed the actor Sam Levene to play Mr. Detroit, even before the show was written. Levene was a big star then on the Great White Way in (mostly) non-musicals…and he was available and they were so eager to lock him up for the role that nobody bothered to check to see if he could sing. It turned out that he couldn't but he was so funny that they kept him and dropped the character's songs or reassigned them to others.
So when Guys and Dolls is revived, as it so often is, Nathan Detroit is only heard in the easy-to-sing number, "Sue Me" and he sings with the chorus in a few others. Sam Levene was told to mouth the words in those group numbers but not to sing because even surrounded by others, his voice was pretty ruinous. For the movie, they cast Frank Sinatra, who sorta could sing so Frank Loesser wrote a new number for him and they added Nathan to the title song. Often when the show is staged now, they make those adjustments.
A few years ago, there was a one-night concert-style staging of the show at Carnegie Hall. Megan Mullally played Adelaide and I'll bet she was terrific, and Lane reprised his turn as Nathan Detroit (from whom he got the first half of his stage name). Here are some moments…