In 1979, Robert Klein and Lucie Arnaz starred in a musical called They're Playing Our Song — Book by Neil Simon, lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager and music by Marvin Hamlisch. It opened on Broadway on February 11 of that year and closed (with a different cast) on September 6th of '81 after 1,082 performances. That's a pretty good run especially when you consider that the original production of The Odd Couple only ran 964 performances. They're Playing Our Song was produced and produced and produced all over America after it closed in New York.
I'm not sure but I think it was the first time one of Mr. Simon's plays did outta-town tryouts in Los Angeles. I saw it downtown at the Music Center before it went to New York and what I saw was at least somewhat different. Throughout the play, there is constant talk about a never-seen ex-boyfriend of Lucie Arnaz's character named Leon. In the version I saw, Leon died at the end. In the version that opened in Manhattan, he survived.
Anyway, what I saw was, to me, a real lightweight and predictable romantic comedy that was made somewhat enjoyable by Neil Simon's one-liners, Lucie Arnaz's great performance and Robert Klein being absolutely incredible. I had many opportunities to see other productions of it but no interest. Then in 2010, the now-defunct Reprise Theater Company, which was definitely funct at the time, put on a pretty good, improved rendition of it with Jason Alexander and Stephanie J. Block. I wrote about that here.
But getting back to that original production: The show, the book, the direction and Klein were all nominated for Tony Awards but they were beaten out that year by Sweeney Todd, Sweeney Todd, Sweeney Todd and Len Cariou, who played Sweeney Todd. All of the characters who died in Sweeney Todd, by the way, stayed dead.
Klein and Arnaz performed the title song on the Tony Awards telecast that year. A long time later — in 2010, apparently — they performed it again somewhere. I know not where…but someone took a video of the Tony Awards performance and a video of the 2010 performance and merged them together. This is a little spooky but kind of fun to watch…