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Wednesday, March 20, 2024

Leroy Anderson, Jean Kerr, Walter Kerr, and Joan Ford | "Who's Been Sitting in My Chair?" from Goldilocks / 1958

my favorite broadway musical songs: “who’s been sitting in my chair?”

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leroy Anderson, Jean and Walter Kerr and Joan Ford Goldilocks, 1958

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqnincwVDAA

 

Shockingly, the musical composed by Leroy Anderson, with a libretto by the famous critic/writing-couple of Jean and Walter Kerr, starring the popular Elaine Stritch, co-staring the equally appealing matinee idol Don Ameche, and with choreography by Agnes de Mille, was a total flop on Broadway, lasting just 161 performances.


     Perhaps the silly plot of a retiring movie star, attempting to marry into high society while completing just one last “bad” Hollywood film, Frontier Woman, was just too much for the New York theater audiences of the day. Too much slapstick, particularly when incorporating the original Goldilocks story, was just too difficult to deal with for the New York matinee audiences of the late 1950s.

      Give it to Stritch for her cheeky performance as Maggie Harris, who sings numerous of the musical’s still loveable ditties with great panache. Her wonderful “Who’s Been Sitting in My Chair?” in which she desperately wishes for a visitation from anyone—including even one of the bears—to come spill her porridge or just simply muss up her bed—is a lovely song of loneliness that resonates with her later Stephen Sondheim performance of the Follies’ “Broadway Baby”: “In my tiny flat, there’s just my cat, a bed and a chair.”

 

         Everything is neat as apple pie.

         …..

         Whose been sitting in my chair, just me, just me.

         Seems such a pity when I’d share it willingly.

          …..

          Whose been eating my porridge, just me, that’s who

          I’m just the type to go foraging for a midnight snack for two.

          …..

          I’d like to get a larger mattress….

 

     It’s a totally memorable song, despite the now forgotten status of the original musical. Joan Ford, along with the Kerrs, who wrote the lyrics to Leroy Anderson's music, all of whom ought to have become Broadway legends.

 

Los Angeles, October 24, 2017

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