A “Barb’s Note”: Harry and I were married in August of 1961, and those first few months were either feast or famine as he struggled to make a musical comeback in Chicago. Finally, after many months of financial worry, he got the job he had been pursuing for some time: the 1962 season of Melody Top Theatre. As always, Harry took me backstage for all the shows, where I got to meet some of the performers he enjoyed talking to.
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MELODY TOP was originally a summer stock theater in Milwaukee, Wisconsin that began in 1950 in a tent, but later was converted to a wooden dome-like structure with tent sidewalls that existed until the early 1990s. The date when the second Melody Top tent theater opened in Hillside, Illinois (just outside Chicago) is unknown, but Harry played its last seasons in 1962, 1963, and 1965.
This music-in-the-round theatre was an unusual umbrella-type tent that seated over two thousand people with no seat more than 18 rows from the stage. All rows were in tiers, allowing every spectator an unobstructed view of the stage over the orchestra pit, which was deep enough that the musicians weren’t a distraction to them. The tent was supported by brick and mortar buildings that included rehearsal halls and shops, refreshment stands, and the box office. A newspaper article at that time said the total cost of this complex was $210,000.
Between 1962 and 1965, Harry played traps for sixteen shows at Melody Top (see below), and enjoyed this experience very much because he was working with a good conductor and musician friends he respected.
AT RIGHT: This snapshot was taken during one of the summer seasons in the sixties. (Harry is the tall one in the back row.) Other musicians Barbara recalls from this orchestra but can’t identify in this picture included “Toots” Tootellian (also contractor), Andy Lumbrazo, and Bill Corti.
Outstanding Musicals
Each show at Melody Top normally ran for two weeks, and each featured some of the same Broadway stars that had first done these shows at the Shubert in New York or Chicago. The following musicals were presented in the 1962, 1963, and 1965 seasons:
Annie Get Your Gun (Jaye P. Morgan)
Bells Are Ringing (Phil Ford and Mimi Hines)
Carousel (Howard Keel)
Fanny (Walter Slezak)
Guys and Dolls (Gordon and Sheila MacRae)
Hit the Deck (Ford and Hines)
The King and I (Jane Morgan)
Kiss Me Kate (Jane Morgan & Earl Wrightson)
The Music Man (Forrest Tucker)
My Fair Lady (Sally Ann Howes)
One Touch of Venus (Arlene Dahl)
The Sound of Music (Janet Blair)
South Pacific (Giorgio Tozzi)
The Unsinkable Molly Brown (Jaye P. Morgan)
West Side Story (Anna Maria Alberghetti) and
Wonderful Town (Phyllis Diller).
End of an Era
Melody Top closed at the end of the 1965 season, and the closing was particularly memorable for the fact that the last checks to the musicians bounced. It took several days, and Harry had a hard time keeping his temper as he was bounced around from one place to another, but he finally ended up with the money and got squared away with all the checks that had bounced because of this fiasco.
In January of the following year, it was reported in a Chicago Sun-Times article that Melody Top and other properties related to the operation of the summer theater were auctioned off for $3,025 to satisfy federal tax liens that IRS officials said totaled $46,081.28. The three guys who originally owned Melody Top—Rach, Vaughn, and Mann—split up in late 1965, and Mann took over the Mill Run Playhouse, but it folded shortly after opening with an operating loss of $185,000. Money was reportedly refunded to people who had bought advance tickets, but Harry wondered if all the musicians got paid.
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