Word: ain
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...audiences at Broadway's Longacre Theater, they are official marching orders, a direct command from the feet to the brain. Not since Fats was tapping the keys back in speakeasy days has old Manhattan had such a good high-hattin' time as it does in Ain 't Misbehavin', a musical collection of 30 songs Waller composed or helped to make famous. To put it mildly, Ain't Misbehavin ' is behaving wildly. Three days after it opened May 9, it was sold out through June; now the house is booked into September. And besides picking...
Like other recent Broadway hits, including A Chorus Line and Runaways, Ain't Misbehavin' started out in the hinterlands-in its case, a cramped boite (seating 65) in the Manhattan Theater Club. But from the first, Director Richard Maltby Jr., 40, the Yaleman who put Ain't Misbehavin' together, believed that what he had was not just a little revue but a big Broadway show, cut down to cabaret size. Sure enough, he recalls, "after the first three nights, I told the cast they'd better get ready for something really big. In fact...
...there had to be a fresh bottle of gin on his piano when he arrived in the morning and another to take home when he left in the afternoon. But then there was nothing usual about Fats. "He was a man of gargantuan appetites and talent," says Murray Horwitz, Ain't Misbehavin's associate director. "He was 100%. When he was with you, he didn't hold anything back. Everything he had was yours, his heart and whatever else he might talk you into...
Many of the 500 or so songs Fats wrote have been lost. Waller himself could not always remember his compositions, and he would sometimes give away the rights to a song for as little as taxi fare. The world rights to Ain't Misbehavin' went for less than...
Maurice Waller, one of Fats' three sons, came up with four or five that no one could remember hearing. The success of Ain't Misbehavin ', Maltby hopes, may bring a few more out of albums and attics. And that, for all those new Waller fans crowding in to see the show, may be the biggest treat...