Dark Shadows Discussion Thread

[Soaplovers]

According to the original bible of the first six to nine months of story projections...Maggie/Joe was not even a thing...and that Carolyn/Joe were eventually to marry with the class differences between the two becoming the conflict in their marriage.

Over all, I think the show noticed Maggie/Joe had more chemistry and spent several weeks slow burning them (i.e. going from friends to lovers).

Because the original arc was changed...Carolyn was aimless especially after the Jason McGuire story concluded..and her mother/daughter conflict with Liz was resolved.

 

 

And in that Zoom holiday reunion special, Alexandra Moltke stated how she managed to get out of her contract with the show.  Apparently it wasn't due to pregnancy difficulties..but not being paid for all the episodes she had a voice over for and didn't actually appear in the episode....her lawyer told her this.

[danfling]

I would also love to know which actors auditioned for roles for the beginning of Dark Shadows.

I know that Nancy Barrett (Carolyn) auditiioned for Victoria Winters.

I know that Robin Strasser (who was later in Another World, All My Children and One Life to Live) auditioned for a role.    I was thinking that maybe this was for Victoria, but it just occurred to me that it may have been for Maggie.

[DRW50]

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[danfling]

I just learned something about Denise Nickerson (Amy, Nora) that I had not previously known:  that she auditioned for the role of Princess Leia in the Star Wars motion picture.

[Broderick]

I've often wondered how the voiceovers were done -- whether she had to go to the studio daily to do them, or whether she recorded several of them at a time, on a day when she happened to be there.  

[danfling]

This appeared on Playbill's website.   It is about Jonathan Tunnick, the husband of Lee Beery.

 

HOW DID I GET HEREHow 2 Phone Calls Changed the Life of Frequent Sondheim Orchestrator Jonathan Tunick

The Tony-winning orchestrator, currently represented on Broadway with the revival of Sweeney Todd, also penned the orchestrations for the upcoming revival of Merrily We Roll Along.

BY ANDREW GANS

JULY 07, 2023

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Graphic by Vi Dang

Tony winner Jonathan Tunick, currently represented on Broadway with his orchestrations for the Tony-nominated revival of Sweeney Todd, was Stephen Sondheim’s orchestrator of choice, arranging nearly all of his musicals. And, we do mean nearly all: Tunick's credits include the original Broadway productions of Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods, Passion, and Merrily We Roll Along. He also penned the orchestrations for the recent, acclaimed Off-Broadway revival of Merrily, which begins previews on Broadway this fall.

The New York native, who has orchestrated over 50 Broadway productions—including the original stagings of the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Chorus Line and the Tony-winning Nine—won his Tony in 1997 for Best Orchestrations for Maury Yeston's Tony-winning score for Titanic. It was the first Tony to ever be given in that category. 

Tunick, who was inducted into the Theater Hall of Fame in 2009, is also one of the few artists who has achieved EGOT status, with an Emmy in 1982 for Night of 100 Stars (Outstanding Achievement in Music Direction), a Grammy in 1988 for No One Is Alone (Best Instrumental Arrangement Accompanying Vocals), and an Oscar in 1978 for A Little Night Music (Best Music, Original Song Score and Its Adaptation or Best Adaptation Score).

In the interview below for the Playbill series How Did I Get Here—spotlighting not only actors, but directors, designers, musicians, and others who work on and off the stage to create the magic that is live theatre—Tunick shares how two phone calls changed his professional life and how he's never worked a day job in his career.

Lonny Price, James Weissenbach Ann Morrison, George Furth, Ron Field, Jonathan Tunick, Stephen Sondheim, and Harold Prince in rehearsal for Merrily We Roll Along

What made you decide to become an orchestrator?
As school children, we heard records such as Peter and the Wolf and Tubby the Tuba that showed me that musical instruments could portray characters and tell stories. This idea grew into an obsession that has dominated my life.

Was there a particular production or performance that influenced your decision?
Bye Bye Birdie, which caught my attention as the first really hip musical, and introduced me to the work of Red Ginzler.

Tell me about a time you almost gave up but didn’t.
Although I was a performed composer at 19 (Take Five) and orchestrated my first Broadway show (From A to Z) at 21, my 20s were a steady stream of false starts and disappointments. Nevertheless, I was very stubborn and persisted.

Josh Groban, Annaleigh Ashford, and cast of Sweeney Todd Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman

How did you get your first job in the theatre?
I spent the summers of 1959 and ’60 at Tamiment, a resort in the Poconos that provided entertainment for its guests in the form of an original musical revue each week. There was a resident staff of performers, writers, composers, designers, director, choreographer, an orchestra and…an arranger. I was still working on my masters at Juilliard, and Tamiment was the link between being a student and a professional musician—my first experience as a paid arranger.

I was paying my way through Juilliard by playing clarinet and saxophone or piano in bands. A trumpet player friend told me he’d gotten a job for the summer playing at Tamiment, and thus inspired, I called the musical director, Milton Greene (who was later the conductor of Fiddler), to inquire about the possibility of a job in the band for myself.

“What I really need,” he said, "is an arranger. The arranger that I’ve had for the last few years isn’t coming back.”

“Well,” I said, “I don’t have any experience—or credits—but I am a composition major at Juilliard, and I can do arranging.”

He was over a barrel; he couldn’t find anyone. And so, not without trepidation, he gave me the job. Once at Tamiment I immersed myself in musicals and theatre orchestration. We did a show a week for 10 weeks, the last a full musical, as opposed to a revue. Milton was a bit of a martinet—a real stickler and methodical, but he knew his trade, and gave me a good deal of advice and guidance that’s held true to this day.

It was at Tamiment that I learned many of the basics of working in the theatre, and made some of my first contacts that led to work in the time to come. Some of these were Dorothy Loudon, Mary Rodgers, Fred Ebb, Gary Geld, Woody Allen, and Michael Cohen—who, in addition to being a fine composer, ran the music department at Grey Advertising for many years and often called me in to provide music for TV commercials.

What do you consider your big break?
It would have to be the call, seemingly out of nowhere, offering me Burt Bacharach’s Promises, Promises—the show that first really put me on the map.

What is the most memorable day job you ever had?
I am proud to say that I’ve been able to support myself solely by music, even at the beginning. I have never had a day job or collected unemployment.

Jonathan Tunick

Is there a person or people you most respect in your field and why?
Robert Russell Bennett, the Grand Old Man of theatre orchestrators—a great musician and a great man. Red Ginzler, who I consider the greatest theatre orchestrator of all time.

Tell me about a job/opportunity you really wanted but didn’t get.
I really would have liked to do 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue;  I had worked with Bernstein on Mass and found him endlessly inspiring. Also, I really would have liked to have put in some time on the road with Woody Herman’s band.

What advice would you give your younger self or anyone starting out?
Don’t turn up your nose at a job that doesn’t pay enough, or for which someone else will snag the credit. As long as you think the gig will bring you some profit in the form of experience, a promising connection, or some musical or professional growth that will help your progress. In the early stages of your career, you will be exploited. It’s all right to let this happen as long as you’re compensated in other ways.

What do you wish you knew starting out that you know now?
Being right is not an effective defense.

Your work is so associated with the music of Stephen Sondheim. Can you share what that means to you and/or something that Sondheim said to you over the years that was particularly meaningful?
While planning the score for Merrily We Roll Along, Sondheim quipped to me, “Since the plot runs backwards in time, maybe we should put the overture at the end of the show, rather than at the beginning.” 

“Yes,” I agreed. “And the overture should end with a timpani roll.” [Editor’s Note: This humorous plan didn’t happen, though Sondheim did place ‘reprise’ versions of songs before fuller arrangements of the same tunes later in the evening.]

What is your proudest achievement as an orchestrator?
I’m still here.

[Paul Raven]

TV Guide article July 68

A VAMPIRE FOR ALL SEASONS

By Robert Higgins

Jonathan Frid's fang mail proves his appeal as the Nation's most lovable ghoul

The fang club mail cascades in at the rate of 1500 letters a week. From Newark, Ill, a smitten matron air-mailed: “I wish you’d bite me on the neck. I get so excited watching you I could smoke a whole pack of cigarets.” In New York, a teeny-bopper penned: “I just sit there drooling over you.” In San Francisco, meanwhile, an otherwise level-headed housewife pledged to beef up her iron-poor plasma with Geritol if the neck-nipper would drop by for a cup of corpuscles.

The cause of all this commotion is a 175-year-old vampire named Barnabas Collins, who is chief ghoul around ABC’s weekday Dark Shadows, TV’s  first spook soap. Shadows, set in a Gothic mansion on the storm-lashed Maine coast, comes complete with a gaggle of flesh-and-blood characters (a reclusive mistress of the manse, dozens of bosomy cousins, “teched” medicos) along with gore galore, madness, the supernatural (ghosts are as plentiful as pockmarks were in the 13th Century) and, you can imagine, lots of worried-looking actors.

With hemoglobin-happy Barnabas around, who wouldn’t be worried? So far he’s bitten to death nine AFTRA card holders. But they didn’t all go from a nip on the neck. One luckless lady expired from fright when she accidentally caught Barnabas climbing out of his coffin after a day’s nap. Yet Barnabas’s ghastly carryings-on haven’t bothered the estimated 15,000,000 weekly viewers—with nine times as many teen-agers as adults tuned in—one iota. Far from it.They’ve catapulted Barnabas TV’s hottest cadaver.

No cadaver is Jonathan Frid, the 44-year-old Canadian actor who has ridden to daytime television’s stellar heights on Barnabas Collins’ coattails. Without the fangs and the Raggedy Ann bangs he sports as Barnabas, Frid is a gangling, organ-voiced man who, before slipping into Barnabas’s coffin, split his time between jobs as a Shakespearean actor (the American and Toronto Shakespearean Festivals); TV (shows like Look Up and Live and As the World Turns); and the unemployment line. Thanks to Barnabas, however, Frid has kissed both the Bard and unemployment insurance bye-bye. “I’m so busy,” he gulps between sips on a martini in his bachelor quarters, “I haven’t time to pick up my laundry. I find myself wearing bathing suits for underwear.”

Days were when the only biting Frid got to do probably came at mealtimes. As a relatively obscure actor, he stumbled onto the part of Barnabas after auditioning with a dozen villainous “look-alikes,” and, he says, “harbored little hope” of getting the part. “I’d been turned down for roles so often,” Frid continues, “I just assumed I wouldn’t get it.” It didn’t matter much to him, though, because, back then he was seriously toying with the idea of teaching. “The middle-class security of a shady campus,” he says, “was appealing.”

The shady campus was forgotten when Frid found himself riding high as Barnabas Collins. And today, a year after landing the role, Frid is grappling with his new-found celebrity status as soap-opera spook, complete with fan clubs, public appearance ballyhoo (“ABC wanted me to be paraded through town in a hearse,” Frid reports. “But you have to draw the line somewhere”); and an upcropping of Barnabas Collins jokes (Question: Do you know how Barnabas Collins will finally get caught? Answer:: He’ll be overdrawn at the blood bank).

It’s all notoriety, of course, if a bit on the pop plane. And in a lot of ways, the circusy trappings surrounding his popularity bother Frid. Born into a well-to-do Hamilton, Ontario, family (his father was in the construction business), Frid enjoys telling how his parents always considered the theater “the dramatic arts—something associated with- Yale Drama School (Frid has a master’s degree from Yale) and fraternities.” “That part of the theater was fine,” Frid continues, “only keep it off Broadway.” Frid learned that, for an actor who likes to eat, Broadway was the theater. But he still shares some of his folks’ hightoned views of the acting profession. To say nothing of the proper behavior of fans. Appalled, he says, “Teenagers come up to me and kiss Barnabas’s ring.”

Ring-kissing kids aside, Frid nonetheless admits to enjoying “all the attention,” adding, “after all, no one wants to be alone in the world.” Actually, Frid hasn’t had all that much thinking time to devote to his recent good fortunes. “I’ve had problems with Barnabas,” Frid says. “But at least they’ve been unusual problems.”

Théy’ve been that. The problems started the day the weak-rated Dark Shadows—then a Gothic melodrama with supernatural undertones—decided (as Dan Curtis, Shadows creator, puts it) “to go all the way with the spook stuff.” First spook out of the ghoul bag was Barnabas. Why a vampire? “They had always scared me,” Curtis explains. “They still do!” But Curtis wasn’t sure Barnabas would scare Mrs, America. Preparations were made to bump Barnabas off, if necessary. It would have been a dandy demise, too. The plan: Cut off his head, stuff his mouth with garlic and burn him on a funeral pyre.

Happily for the New York Fire Department, Shadows’ sagging ratings started to climb soon after Barnabas cracked open his coffin.

To satisfy the viewers’ craving for the vampire, Shadows spent five months showing how Barnabas had been made into a blood user by a sultry witch back in 1795. The ratings soared, Which was swell for Shadows but “hell on earth” for Frid. Unaccustomed to the rigors of five-days a-week soap acting, he became a self-described “total nervous wreck.” Part of the trouble had to do with what Frid calls Shadows’ “incredibly complicated script.” “There are times,” he confesses, “when I have absolutely no idea what’s going on!” Frid feels Shadows’ tangled dramaturgy accounts in part for his popularity. “I’m sure,” he says, “people get together to speculate on what the show is all about.”

Frid’s jangled nerves have since been semistabilized. Explains Frid: “There are vast inconsistencies in Barnabas’s character. Being an involuntary vampire (are there any voluntary vampires?), Barnabas murders one minute and, in the next,he’s joining the family to pass judgment on someone else’s behavior. He is rather presumptuous. I play him as a combination Macbeth and Richard III. When he’s guilty he’s Macbeth and when he’s cunning and ruthless he’s Richard. It works out splendidly.”

At any rate, Barnabas Collins has now settled down to his reign as prince of daytime TV players. And although Jonathan Frid has found the path to popularity taxing at times, he says he’s prepared for an even rougher tomorrow. “I can’t help thinking,” he says, “‘When is all this going to end?’” If it does end, Frid won't feel too bad about it. “The show’s been fun,” he concludes. “It’s high-brow soap opera. Instead of the house down the street, it’s the scary mansion off the coast of Maine. And Barnabas has an incredible range. He’s a lover, a murderer, a neck biter

...I love him!” Bloody well said.

 

Edited August 9, 2023 by Paul Raven

[danfling]

I would love to read a reprint of the T V Guide article about Kathryn Leigh Scott.   I remember reading back in the 1960s, and it was the first article about a soap opera star in that magazine that I ever noticed.

 

Could someone share that article?

 

[Paul Raven]

@danfling Enjoy!

More Perils Than Pauline

Kathryn Leigh Scott is the Super Victim of daytime TV

By Robert Higgins

The day Kathryn Leigh Scott stood before an ABC camera and uttered the words “You jerk!” (not too classy a line, but that was it), the curtain rose on Dark Shadows. That's the daytime soap crammed with vampires, ghosts, et al., which insiders predicted would be buried in 13 weeks. Today, 156 weeks later, ABC’s teatime harpy hour is not only alive (well, comme ci, comme ca) but kicking up a ratings storm to boot. Miss Scott, in her role as governess Maggie Evans, has grown to be the Jinxed Jane of ironing-board TV. Between gulps of coffee that she lugged into our Manhattan offices, Kathryn lost no time telling why: ‘‘Maggie’s a Super Victim! Always running around screaming, ‘Run! Run! Here come the ghoulies

The ghoulies are fast steppers. Maggie, it seems, gets mangled more than Silly Putty. Werewolves maul her, vampires partake of her plasma, and, once, none other than the devil had his way with her. If that wasn’t enough to make Mag feel jinxed, Kathryn reports: ‘‘Then he jilted her!”

Poor Mag. Poor Kathryn, too. Life upon a Shadows stage, one learns, is roughly akin to traipsing across the Hollywood freeway blindfolded. Miss Scott has been hurled off cliffs and tossed through windows—‘‘backwards, yet.’’ Even makeup’s a problem. To simulate lumps from a beating, she once had split ping-pong balls glued to her face. The effect was swell—but Kathy’s skin turned ‘‘raw.”'

Happily, Kathryn Leigh Scott comes from hardy stock. Born Kathryn Kringstad to a Norwegian couple in Robbinsdale, Minn., she was a farm girl until her late teens. She entered college to study journalism. In 1962 she quit to study acting in New York. “In high school,’ she explains, ‘I toyed with both writing and acting. Acting won out.’”’ After getting her diploma in ’64, she found parts scarce. At liberty, she took the typical (selling in stores) and not-so-typical (walking dogs) jobs.

Such work kept Kathy out of the poorhouse. She’d embarked for Manhattan with only $200. “My father,” she continues, ‘thought I had $600, otherwise he’d never have let me come.” Still, $200 was probably more than Mr. Kringstad had in his pocket when he immigrated from Norway. ‘I’m first-generation American,’ Kathy says, “My family—uncles, aunts, cousins— are ‘over there.’

“Although I was born in Minnesota,” Kathy continues, ‘I became involved with my Norwegian relatives early.” The involvement came at the end of World War Il, when Mr. Kringstad took his family to Norway to help resettle lands devastated by the Nazis. ‘‘When we arrived,’ Kathy remembers, ‘‘three of my uncles, like many Norwegians, were still in the mountains, where they were in the Resistance movement.”’ Memories of the valorous atmosphere remains with Kathy, although the experience was no picnic. “Food was scarce,”’ she recalls. “On the boat coming home my brother and I would sneak around the dining room swiping leftover butter and sugar."

Miss Scott enjoys talking about herself and she’s not a bit shy about mentioning her many good qualities and attitudes. Such as: 1) she ‘has a need to do things,”’ doesn’t believe in ‘‘negative answers” and thinks “where there’s a will there’s a way’; 2) she’s ‘open, honest and outgoing’; and 3) she’s “independent.”

Boy, is she “independent.” The word, in fact, came up nearly a dozen times in our talk. It ranged from the “‘independence” that permitted her to ‘‘come to New York and become an actress” all the way over to the ‘‘independence”’ that started her sewing all her own clothes. (‘I refused to pay the prices for ready-made things.) She opposes the war in Vietnam and resents “paying taxes to support it.” Civil rights has her all in a lather. Yet she won't join picket lines. “I’m too independent.”

The “independence” showed up on the set, too: “When I first started, people were always fussing with me— telling me how to do things, how to stand. I felt |Ihad contracted my mind and body to somebody else.”

Such cheery bull-horning of ‘‘virtues’’ and “independence” hasn't made Miss Scott greatly loved in some quarters. “She's a bargain-basement Saint Joan,” opines one actor. Another: ‘Anyone who ballyhoos her ‘independence’ has a nest of insecurities somewhere.”

Self-confidence comes in handy on a show like Dark Shadows, where keeping one’s head at all is a chore. But Shadows characters seem to have the proverbial nine lives. Consider hapless Maggie. She’s entered rigor mortis twice. With luck, she has seven more shots before giving up the ghost.

 

[Mona Kane Croft]

Was there ever a writer's strike during the original run of Dark Shadows?  I'm a long time DS fan, and have recently been watching DS on Tubi. I noticed a couple of strange episodes just a few weeks into the werewolf/Quentin storyline.  In what I believe is Joe Haskell's final episode, there is a strange lengthy and unnecessary dream sequence that goes on for several minutes. Franky, it just seems like some kind of time filler.  And in the very next episode there is an extremely lengthy and unnecessary flashback of Barnabas telling Julia about his vampirism in 1795. This 1795 flashback consumes most of the episode, and is only vaguely connected to what is going on in the current plot.  Again, it really seems like nothing more than a time filler.   I don't recall other episodes of DS ever including this type of interruption in the action for something that seemed so out of place. 

I'm wondering if they included these two lengthy scenes in order to avoid writing new material and dialogue for the actual episodes.  Writer's strike, perhaps?  Has anyone else ever noticed these?  Any speculation on what might have influenced the decision to do this? 

Edited August 17, 2023 by Neil Johnson

[danfling]

I do remember that in the spring of 1967, when most of the shows were not being produced due to the big writers' strike, the production of Dark Shadows was not interrupted.   I had been curious about this, and I was told (probably here) that the show managed to get a waiver.  Robert Gerringer was replaced because he refused to work during the strike.    I think that maybe Daniel Keys was also replaced due to the same problem.   (These gentlemen played Dr. Woodard and the Eagle Hill Cemetary caretaker.)

During that time on CBS, reruns of The Jack Benny Program and The Millionaire were among the shows that were aired.

I also wonder how many shows were then airing live.   I know that As the World Turns and The Edge of Night were, but I wonder if others were.    If a soap opera were normally live and then resumed being produced following the writers' strike, I wonder if the initial episodes were live or pre-recorded.

I would love to hear some of the living performers (such as Jada Rowland, Victoria Wyndham, Millette Alexander, Don Hastings, Marie Masters, Judith Barcroft, Robin Strasser, etc.) talk about this time.

I do not remember the episodes that you have mentioned.   I do know that there was one episode (I thought during the 1897 series of episodes) that there was a recapitulation of the show (for fans to "catch up" with the plots.

Now, I really want to see the episodes that you mentioned!

[Mona Kane Croft]

I looked up the numbers of each of the episodes, and I was wrong -- the episodes I described are not two in a row.  But they are very close together.  The episode numbers are #658 and #661.  Just in case you want to watch them.   There is something about those lengthy inserted scenes that seem very awkward. In addition, they are edited badly.   

Edited August 18, 2023 by Neil Johnson

[Soaplovers]

From what I understood...Dan curtis paid the fines the actors got for crossing picket lines during this strike.

[danfling]

I had not heard that (that the executive producer paid performers' fines).    Thank you for sharing that information!

[Mona Kane Croft]

If Laura Collins was Jamison's mother, and Jamison was Roger's father -- does that mean Roger married his own grandmother? I had never thought about that until a few days ago.