The Other Couples Trivia Quiz

Answer: Will Parker and Ado Annie Carnes

'Oklahoma!' was the first collaboration of Richard Rodgers (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II (lyrics). It was a success from the moment the curtain went up on Broadway in March, 1943, and it's still going strong!

It will always be one of my top ten because it was the first musical I ever saw. That was back in May, 1947 and I was not quite ten when my cousin took me to see 'Oklahoma!' in London. When Howard Keel, who played Curly, entered in the first scene, vaulting over a fence as he sang 'O, What a Beautiful Morning', I fell madly in love with him, and it is a love that never waned.

Will Parker and Ado Annie have the best songs in the show. Will sings 'Kansas City', Ado Annie sings, "I'm Just a Girl who Can't Say No', and they duet on 'All or Nothing'.

Aunt Eller is Laurey's aunt who runs Laurey's farm with her, Mr. Skidmore is the rancher who employs Curly and Will, Ali Hakim is the Persian Peddler who will woo any female, and Gertie is the girl with the irritating laugh who is keen to get married - to anyone!

I was thrilled when I was cast as Ado Annie in 'Oklahoma!' and got to sing some of my favourite songs.

Answer: Kiss Me Kate

Cole Porter wrote the music and lyrics for 'Kiss Me Kate', which features a musical based on Shakespeare's 'The Taming of the Shrew' at the core of the play. The stars are Fred Graham/Petruchio and Lilli Vanessi/Kate. Lois Lane/Bianca and Bill Calhoun/Lucentio have what can only be described as a rocky romance. Lois wants to settle down, preferably on a farm, while Bill loves the big city and the bright lights where he can get all the gambling action he needs.

The original Broadway production starred Alfred Drake and Patricia Morison as Fred and Lilli, with Lisa Kirk and Harold Lang as Lois and Bill, and it garnered five Tony Awards.

Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson played Fred and Lilli in the movie, with Ann Miller and Tommy Rall as Lois and Bill. No mention of the movie can fail to mark the delightful performances of Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore as a couple of gangsters who perform the hilarious 'Brush Up Your Shakespeare' number. Of Howard Keel's rendition of 'Where is the Life That Late I Led?', one critic wrote, "He makes one wish that one had led that life with him!"

Answer: Guys and Dolls

Frank Loesser's 'Guys and Dolls' is one of my all-time favourites. Based on the short stories of New Yorker Damon Runyon, 'Guys and Dolls' features all the idiosyncratic characters who populate Runyon's seedy little not-quite-underworld. The romantic leads are gambler Sky Masterson who falls for the evangelical Miss Sarah Brown of the Save-a-Soul Mission. Nathan and Adelaide, who have been engaged for 12 years, have some of the best songs in the show - especially 'Adelaide's Lament', in which Adelaide chronicles all the physical side effects accruing from permanent residence on the shelf.

I remember when the movie came I was a first year art student (I never made it to second year because I was kicked out of art school for not taking my studies seriously). Our painting instructor took all 20 of the first years to see the movie because of the colour palette used in the film. In the movie, Marlon Brando and Jean Simmons play Sky and Sarah, with Frank Sinatra as Nathan and the incomparable Vivian Blaine reprising her Broadway creation of Adelaide.

Answer: Finian's Rainbow

'Finian's Rainbow' premiered on Broadway in 1947. It was brought to the movie screen in 1968, and the main romantic leads are Irish colleen Sharon McLonergan and Woody Manloney, the leader of the Rainbow Valley community. The Broadway production ran for 725 performances and garnered rave reviews.

The movie? Not so much! The movie had a great cast - headed by Fred Astaire as Finian McLonergan, the wily Irishman who steals a leprechaun's pot of gold and hotfoots it for the US and the mythical state of Misstucky to bury the pot near Fort Knox. Finian labours under the mistaken belief that proximity to the US' gold reserve will make the pot of gold grow. Travelling with him is his daughter Sharon (Petula Clark) and, unbeknownst to either of the McLonergans, the leprechaun Og (brilliantly played by Tommy Steele) who is determined to retrieve his gold, because a leprechaun separated from his pot of gold turns into a human! His attempts are thwarted by Woody's deaf-mute sister Susan, but Og falls in love with Susan and soon adjusts to becoming human.

The cast is terrific (Barbara Hancock is lovely as Susan the Silent, Don Francks, a Canadian singer-actor, is a very sexy Woody Maloney, and Keenan Wynn turns in a very nice piece of work as the racist Senator Rawkins, as does Al Freeman Jr as Howard, the scientist who is working on cultivating a mentholated tobacco leaf). The songs are great ('How are Things in Gloccamorra?', 'That Old Devil Moon', 'On That Great Come and Get it Day' to name just three), as is the music and dancing.

So what went wrong? The movie was directed by then-fledgling director Francis Ford Coppola, who later showed a masterful hand with 'The Godfather' but was way out of his depth when dealing with this mixture of political satire/race relations/whimsy, and tried to make the magic real. Still, rent the movie just for the cast and their lovely performances.

Answer: Carrie Pipperidge and Enoch Snow

'Carousel' is not my favourite musical (even though Richard Rodgers said it was his), but it has some lovely songs - 'If I loved You', 'The Soliloquy (aka 'My Boy Bill'), 'You'll Never Walk Alone', 'When I Marry Mr. Snow', to name a few.

'Carousel', which opened on Broadway in April of 1945 to critical acclaim, is based on Ferenc Molnar's 1909 play 'Liliom'. Rodgers and Hammerstein transported the action from Budapest to a Maine fishing village. In the more than sixty years since its debut, 'Carousel' has become a mainstay of Little Theatre, high school productions and Summer Stock.

Answer: Tuptim and Lun Tha

'The King and I' opened on Broadway in 1951, starring Gertrude Lawrence and the then-relatively-unknown Yul Brynner. It was for this show that the balding Brynner was persuaded to shave his head completely, and both the role and the bald head were inextricably linked to Brynner for the rest of his life (he reprised his role as the King of Siam in the 1956 movie which starred Deborah Kerr as Anna).

The plot revolves around the king's efforts to modernize Siam, which is why he hires an Englishwoman to teach his children, offspring of his several wives. There are some wonderful songs in the show, including 'Hello, Young Lovers', 'Shall We Dance', 'A Puzzlement', and 'We Kiss in the Shadows'.

Tuptim is a Burmese slave sent as a gift to the king. She is escorted to Siam by the young Buddhist scholar Lun Tha. Tuptim and Lun Tha fall in love, but they can never be together because she is the property of the king. Their love ends tragically.

Lady Thiang is the king's Chief Wife, the Kralahome is the king's Prime Minister, and Chulalongkorn is the young crown prince and heir to the throne.

Answer: Zaneeta and Tommy

Set in a small town in 1912 Iowa, 'The Music Man' is rife with Americana Nostalgia. Music, book and lyrics are all by Iowa-born Meredith Willson, and the plot centres on Harold Hill, who presents himself as the right person to keep the idle hands of the town's children away from the devil by forming a band. He sells the parents on buying the instruments and uniforms and promises to teach the youngsters using the 'Think System'. Marion, the town's upright, uptight librarian and piano teacher, smells a rat, but by the time she uncovers Harold's chicanery she has fallen in love with him and doesn't blow the proverbial whistle.

Zaneeta Shinn is the daughter of the Mayor of River City and his class-conscious wife. Tommy Djilas is a boy from the wrong side of the tracks who achieves a certain level of hero status when Harold makes him the leader of the band.

Robert Preston created the role of Harold in the Broadway show which opened in 1957 and reprised it in the 1962 movie.

'The Music Man' has terrific songs - 'Seventy Six Trombones', 'Till There Was You', 'Trouble', 'Lida Rose', 'Goodnight, My Someone', 'Pickalittle', 'The Sadder But Wiser Girl', to give you a partial list.

By the way, Winthrop and Amaryllis are Marion's younger brother and one of her piano students, and Marcellus and Eulalie are Harold's friend and the wife of the mayor (and they are definitely not lovers!), while George and Emily don't appear in 'The Music Man'. I borrowed this pair of young lovers from 'Our Town'.

Answer: Jean McLaren and Charlie Dalrymple

The musical is Lerner and Leowe's 'Brigadoon' and it is set in a magical highland village that comes to life for only one day every hundred years. Tommy Albright and Jeff Douglas, American tourists, come upon on Bridagoon when they get lost in the highlands, and when they cross the bridge into the village, they find themselves transported back to the 18th century.

It takes them a while to find all this out, but Tommy is already more than halfway in love with Fiona McLaren, the older sister of the bride Jean McLaren. Tommy wants an explanation of the mystery of Brigadoon and Fiona takes him to Mr. Lundie, the village schoolmaster, who divulges the secret. It seems that Brigadoon disappeared into the mists after the minister prayed that God would protect the village from encroachment by the outside world. The village will stay as it is, immune to change, as long as none of the inhabitants leave the protected area. Tommy asks if an outsider could stay in Brigadoon, and Mr. Lundie says that could happen, but only if the outsider loved someone in the village very much.

Tommy returns to New York with Jeff, but is unhappy, realizing that he loves Fiona. He persuades Jeff to return with him to Scotland and they go to the locality where Brigadoon stood, but there is nothing there. Heartbroken, Tommy turns away and is stopped by Mr. Lundie, who tells him that, because his love for Fiona is so great, he can come into Brigadoon. Tommy runs across the bridge to join Mr. Lundie, the village disappears again, and Jeff is left standing alone on the hillside.

The bride and groom are, of course, Jean McLaren and Charlie Dalrymple ''Go Home with Bonnie Jean'). Meg Brockie is a dairymaid who is always looking for love in all the wrong places ('The Real Love of My Life'), and Harry Beaton is the man who almost breaks the spell of Brigadoon by attempting to leave after Jean, whom he loves, marries Charlie. Maggie Anderson is the girl who loves Harry.

Songs from the show include 'The Heather on the Hill', 'Come to Me, Bend to Me', 'Almost Like Being in Love'.

Answer: Joseph and Liat

'South Pacific' roused a storm of controversy in parts of the US because it dealt with racial prejudice. While Nellie Forbush, the army nurse from Little Rock, Arkansas, can't bring herself to accept the half-French/half-Polynesian children of Emile de Becque, the man she loves, Lieutenant Cable, who is in love with Bloody Mary's daughter Liat, knows that if he marries her, Liat will be subjected to prejudice back in the States. His song about racial prejudice, "You've Got to Be Carefully Taught", was called indecent and pro-communist by some. Lawmakers in Georgia went so far as to introduce a bill outlawing any entertainment containing "an underlying philosophy inspired by Moscow", and one legislator said that "a song justifying interracial marriage was implicitly a threat to the American way of life." (Keep in mind that 'South Pacific' pre-dated by 18 years the US Supreme Court's ruling in the case of Loving vs Virginia.) Rodgers and Hammerstein refused to pull the song, maintaining that the number represented what the show was about.

Despite (or perhaps because of) narrow political minds, 'South Pacific' was a smash hit, and continues to be performed 62 years after its Broadway first-run, and its songs have become enduring standards - 'Some Enchanted Evening', 'This Nearly Was Mine', 'I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair', 'There is Nothing Like a Dame', and 'Bali Hai', for example.

Bloody Mary is Liat's mother, a woman who do anything for a dollar! Luther Billis is one of the sailors serving in the South Pacific, and Ngana and Jerome are Emile de Becque's children (whom Nellie eventually comes to love, so all ends happily for her and Emile).

Answer: Percival Brown and Madame Dubonnet

'The Boy Friend', by Sandy Wilson, premiered in London in 1954, and ran for over four years. It was the musical which introduced Julie Andrews to American audiences, when she played Polly in the Broadway production. It was while Andrews was playing Polly that she was spotted by Lerner and Loewe who tapped her to play Eliza in their new musical 'My Fair Lady'. Until my dying day I will maintain that Andrews should have played Eliza in the movie version, too! Audrey Hepburn was lovely but definitely not believable as a Cockney!

'The Boy Friend' is an inspired spoof of all the musicals of the 1920s ('No, No, Nanette', 'The Girl Friend', and so on), and the plot centres on Polly Brown (who doesn't have a boy friend) and her classmates Dulcie, Maisie and Fay (who have boy friends), at the Villa Caprice, Mme. Dubonnet's exclusive finishing school on the French Riviera. The girls are all looking forward to the coming masquerade ball, and Polly, dateless, will go as a lonely Pierette.
Tony, the young man who delivers her Pierette costume is quite taken with Polly, and she with him, and they agree to meet at the masquerade ball.

Meantime, Percival Brown, Polly's widowed millionaire father, arrives to visit his daughter and is startled to find that Mme Dubonnet was the lost love of his youth. Polly, believing Tony to be a thief, repudiates him, and Lord Brockhurst indulges in a flirtation with the mischievous Dulcie, much to the disgust of his wife, who catches him in the act!

After several mix-ups and misfires, Tony is revealed to be not a thief, but the son of Lord and Lady Brockhurst. Polly and he are reunited, Lord and Lady Brockhurst reconcile, Mr. Brown and Mme. Dubonnet announce their engagement, as do all the the girls and their boy friends, so all ends happily.