You can find some fun things on YouTube if you do a little diggin' and searchin'. I love the musical of Al Capp's newspaper strip Li'l Abner and especially the number, "Jubilation T. Cornpone," performed by Stubby Kaye in the original Broadway production and in the movie.
There has been no Broadway production of Li'l Abner other than the original. It's never been revived, though there have been several attempts that never got off the ground. I was briefly tapped a few times by folks who were making those attempts and wanted to have me update the script but those attempts never reached the stage where I started updating.
One of the many factors that worked against its resurrection on The Great White Way is that it requires a large (and therefore, expensive) cast. It can be as large as you like but I would think you'd need at least thirty bodies up on that stage to do it as right as you'd have to for Broadway. Part of my mission, had I been truly engaged to revise, would have been to try and pare that number down a bit.
But the show is revived a lot around the country, especially in venues where the actors aren't paid. I had a telephone friendship with Al Capp's brother Elliott and I think he was the one who pointed out two reasons why colleges and community theaters loved to do the show. One was that in such productions, you want as many people in the cast as possible. The bigger your cast, the more friends and relatives there are to buy tickets. You can put a hundred of any age, shape or size in the cast.
The other reason is that it's a damn cheap show to costume. Right now, if you were cast in a production as a citizen of Dogpatch, I'll bet you could whip up a fine outfit from those old clothes in the back of your closet — the ones you keep meaning to throw away. I've seen it staged with most of the cast barefoot and in rags.
So I came across this video of the "Jubilation T. Cornpone" number from a 2014 mounting of the show at the Eureka Theatre in San Francisco with (apparently) an all-children cast. Mammy and Pappy Yokum, as you'll see, look about eight years old. The gent playing Marryin' Sam who carries the piece is named Tosh Harris Santiago and he looks a bit older than the others but still a kid.
A lot of these videos make me cringe and dive for the STOP button but I thought this was rather well done, given the lack of experience and budget. Take a look — and notice how the "the bigger your cast, the more tickets you'll probably sell" strategy was apparently being employed…
When I watch videos like this, I always think, "At least one person on the stage went on to an actual performing career." And realizing that this is from 2014 and all those kids are a lot older now, I did a search for Tosh Harris Santiago. Sure enough, I found a couple of videos of a seasoned performer by that name singing and dancing. I'm assuming the guy in this number from In the Heights is the same Todd Harris Santiago. I'm also assuming we're going to see more of this man. He's real good…