While listening to the interview with Nancy Dussault in the “Giants in the Sky” podcast, I was reminded that I had actually seen Chita Rivera back in 1965. Along with Herschel Bernardi, Paul Sorvino, Herb Edelman, and Nancy Dussault herself.

In high school I belonged to the Hi-Y club. The Hi-Y and its female counterpart the Tri-Hi-Y were affiliated with the YMCA and thus were nominally Christian organizations, and I have no memory of participating in any meetings or activities throughout the school year, though I must have done so, as the one and only reason that I belonged to that group was that in the spring of every year they organized a trip to New York City, the highlight of which was a Broadway musical. That’s what interested me.

In my first year in Hi-Y, 1964-65, the musical that we got to see was called Bajour. April 15, 1965. I still have the ticket stub.

And the Playbill.

 

I remember very little about that show other than I enjoyed it but not enough to run out and buy the Original Cast Album. The show was about a band of gypsies in Manhattan that are planning to swindle (that’s what Bajour means) someone to raise money and Nancy Dussault played a student who was studying them.  I don’t remember Chita Rivera at all, though I do vaguely recall Herschel Bernardi in full gypsy regalia, and the only song I remember being performed is Nancy Dussault singing about tsetse flies. I think her performance of that song is what got her a Tony nomination. (I did get the CD many years later, and I probably only ever listened to it a total of one or two times; it’s not a memorable score.)

Here is Chita Rivera and the company of dancers performing the title song on the TV show The Entertainers, which ran on Friday nights on CBS in the 1964-65 season. In the musical Herschel Bernardi sang the song although I don’t think he did much of the dancing. If you look real closely you can see a very young and very slim Paul Sorvino among the dancers, as well as Michael Bennett, although Bennett is not credited in the Playbill that I have, so perhaps he had left the show by the time we saw it.

Alas, there is no video of Nancy Dussault in her Tony-nominated performance, so we’ll have to make-do with this audio-only version from the Original Cast Album.