- State Fair Auditorium -

CASTS AND FORECASTS:
Garland Show Opens Musicals
Dallas Morning News, June 9, 1957

The 1957 season of State Fair Musicals will get off to a whirlwind start Monday night in the State Fair Auditorium with the southwestern debut of Judy Garland who will appear with her own stage revue as the opening attraction. 

Miss Garland is bringing her revue here intact from engagements on Broadway at Las Vegas and, during last week, in Detroit. 

Miss Garland is a top stage personality in her own right and she has surrounded herself in her revue with some of the top acts in their fields. For instance, the Judy Garland Show will introduce to Dallas Alan King, a comic who has received top reviews for his part of the show. 

Another young artist is Sid Krofft, a puppeteer who works with over-sized marionettes. The Amin Brothers with their tumbling act and a dance team, the Szonys, complete the supporting features. 

For her part, Miss Garland will run the gamut of the songs that have made her a singing favorite. There will be the nostalgic songs, the rhythm numbers and the enchanting "Over the Rainbow." Miss Garland will be assisted in her act by "Judy's Eleven Boy Friends", a dance group. 

While the Judy Garland Show is holding forth for the next two weeks in the auditorium, rehearsals will begin Monday for the singing and dancing ensembles that are to appear in the five succeeding productions. 

Beneath a large photo of Judy in her "Gotta Have Me Go With You" outfit is the caption, "Here she is, Miss Show Business...  The inimitable Judy Garland."

Judy Garland and her two older sisters began one of their longest annual "reunions" in Dallas this weekend. 

And when Miss Garland steps to the center of the State Fair Auditorium stage Monday night for her first song, two of the most enthusiastic members of the audience will be these sisters--Mrs. Jack Cathcart of Los Angeles and Mrs. John Thompson of Dallas.

The three sisters were last together when the Judy Garland Show, the same revue that is opening the State Fair Musicals season, had its debut at the Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, Nev., a year ago. 

Mr. and Mrs. Thompson both made the trip from Dallas to attend the show opening and Mrs. Cathcart accompanied her husband, who is musical director of the show. 

"We were together only a day or two then," Mrs. Cathcart said Sunday. "but we're going to be together for the whole two weeks at the show here." 

Both Mrs. Cathcart and Mrs. Thompson were among the handful of spectators in the darkened auditorium Sunday afternoon as the members of the show held a "run through" rehearsals with Cathcart directing the Musicals orchestra. 

In between her own appearances on the stage, Miss Garland spent the time with her sisters, catching up Mrs. Thompson on what had been happening since Mr. Thompson saw the revue open. 

From Las Vegas, Miss Garland took the show to the Palace Theater in New York, and came to Dallas from an appearance at the Riviera Theater in New York. The show will go from Dallas to Los Angeles where it is booked for the Greek Theater. 

This is, one might say, Miss Garland's first real visit to Dallas. She was here for only a few hours during the recent war to appear in bond rally (sic). And oddly enough, the show was presented in the Cotton Bowl, a few hundred yards from where Miss Garland is appearing on the auditorium stage. 

"But that wasn't a visit," Miss Garland said Sunday. "We were traveling by train and went directly from the station to stadium and back to the train after the show. 

"This time I'm really going to see Dallas." 

Although Miss Garland arrived in Dallas only Saturday, the inevitable question followed: 

"How do you like Dallas." 

"I've haven't had a chance to see much more than my hotel (the Stoneleigh), but I know I'll like everything I see because this is where Jimmie (Mrs. Thompson) lives," she said. 

As Miss Garland talked, she had her arm around her oldest daughter, 11-year-old Liza Minnelli, who was dressed like her mother in blouse and toreador pants. 

Liza had already been on the stage and sang a bit with the orchestra. 

"We'll just have to put her in this show yet," commented her mother. 

And if Liza should make the show at 11 years of age, she would be following somewhat in the steps of Miss Garland. 

Miss Garland and her two sisters teamed up in a trio some 25 years ago in an act which was billed as the Gumm Sisters--their parents were Frank and Ethel Gumm, both theatrical entertainers. The name of the act was changed to the Garland Sisters at the suggestion of George Jessel. And the Baby sister of the trio, born Frances, became Judy from the inspiration of the Hoagy Carmichael song of the same name. 

Miss Garland and her husband, Sid Luft, who produced the revue, brought the other children of the family with them to Dallas--John Luft, 8; Lorna Luft, 4, and Joe Luft, 2. 

Curtain time for the Judy Garland Show is 8:15 pm Monday. Others in the show include Alan King, a comic; Sid Krofft, puppeteer; the Amin Brothers, tumblers; the Szonys, dancers and "Judy's Eleven Boy Friends," a dance group.

As the State Fair of Texas began its sixteenth season of summer musicals Monday night, it chose once again to present a non-musical. The Judy Garland Show will be, however, the only digression from lyric theater this summer. As for music, it has it.

The quondam movie star, a high favorite for more than two decades, registered top appeal Monday night, which happened also to be her thirthy-fifth birthday. The audience, which was disposed to like everything, was the largest for any starting session of the Musicals' Indoor history. 

As for Miss Garland, whose figure may now be too matronly for the cameras, but is youthful enough to the naked eye, she remains a phenomenon to this critic. She's about twenty times as good as she seems to think herself, which is a matter for her psychiatrist and not her large audiences and their pounding palms. 

If she ever gains a stage assurance to match her gifts, one of the greatest stage careers imaginable is just beginning. 

Despite the nervous, timorous Judy who fusses with a detachable microphone, says "louder" when she means "later" and frequently looks as if she would like to drop dead, she is already a wonderful show in herself as thing snow go. 

For Judy Garland is the best pops song singer we know. The voice is voluminous and colorful. It can take on the timbres of joy or torch-sorrow. We surmise she never had a voice lesson in her life but her sense of pitch is infallible. Her rhythm and her feeling for song-line are inspired. 

Not even Ethel Merman can belt a song further or more ardently and we would give Judy a couple of additional credits for emotional warmth. 

The Garland personality is so genuine, lovable and persuasive, that it doesn't matter that her first songs, all about bereft and forsaken dames or damsels, are none too good. The better ones, interwoven as medleys, are the oldies, "Mean to Me"... and "After You've Gone." 

She has, though, other things such as two Jolson standbys, "Rockabye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody", and "Swanee," which were sheer magic as she bawled them Monday night. We also loved the revival with Jimmy Brooks of that tattered toff number she once did with Fred Astaire in "Easter Parade." 

Then there was a coy bit about makeup and mike after which she squatted over the footlights and intones "Over the Rainbow" to the squealing delight of the public. May we say she still needed a mike and it would have gone twice as well with one? 

Today Miss Garland affects black dresses with silver sequin sunbursts, or negative black chiffon, or black shorts with ample display of a pair of classic gams. 

She is not singing lieder, it is true, but her divination of the meaning and import of her songs, her balance of words and music, and above all her infectious musicality, make her a greater talent than ever her art, which periodically flashes showmanship. 

She is assisted by the "Eleven Boy Friends" who are so many lithe, young and good-looking males who can sing a bit, dance a bit and kill time while she changes--which they admit is their function. 

Anybody who thinks this show is vaudeville doesn't know vaudeville. It is a typical Hollywood "presentation" in which no self-respecting start would think of appearing until the second half around 10 pm and with all else onstage pointing to her splendor. Judy, let it be said, is basically more modest and humble than her format. 

The first half of these shows usually is filled with such dull miscellania that the start is a  welcome relief. Miss Garland does better. In the first place the pacing is brisk and as terse as television. 

The Amin Bros. are a pair of capable acrobats worth coming early to see. Sid Krofft's marionettes are unusual, being larger than standard--and embracing stripteases and an Oriental dance with neck jerks. Then one doll actually lights a cigarette. 

Giselle Francois Szony are good cabaret adagio dancers, really smooth and tidy in art that always has been lost on us. Then it was a pleasure to meet monologist Alan King, whose humor is surprisingly exurbian in the vein of the people who can buy
$3.75 seats at the State Fair Musicals.

Hyman Charninsky of Dallas conducted the acts and Jack Cathcart, a Garland brother-in-law, was very first-class among the over-dressed arrangement of the Garland segment. Bob Alton staged the Garland sequence.

The Judy Garland Show Monday night broke all records for the opening night of a State Fair Musicals season. 

The show, starring Miss Garland, was attended by 2,400 persons, the second largest crowd ever to attend an opening night of any show presented by the musicals. 

The 1957 season of the Musicals is off to a flying start with another record broken--the greatest advance ticket sale in the 16-year history of the summer-time shows. 

One of the unusual features of the season ticket sale is the fact that purchases were made by persons living as far away from Dallas as New Mexico, Mississippi, Alabama, Illinois, and Louisiana. 

Tickets have been purchased by persons living in even more distant places for the Judy Garland Show, which opened the Musicals season Monday night--from Hollywood, New York and Ohio.