Charles Petzold

In early 1977, I had been living in New York City for about a year and a half, and working at New York Life Insurance Company, when I complained to my workmate Michele Singer about not being able to think of a birthday gift for my mother. “Why don’t you take her out to a Broadway show?” she brilliantly suggested. “Huh!” I probably replied.

Going to a Broadway show was not uncommon in my family. From my mother’s house in Jersey to midtown Manhattan was only about a 45-minute drive or bus ride. In the spring of 1951 (before I was born), my parents saw South Pacific with Mary Martin and Ray Middleton; in 1958 it was The Music Man with Robert Preston and Barbara Cook; and in 1960, it was Maurice Evans in Tenderloin, a musical comedy about 1890s sex workers in New York City. The soundtrack albums for these shows and many other classics of American Musical Theater contributed to the sounds of my youth. (“Reform, reform, whenever it’s getting warm,” the chorus of sex workers sang in Tenderloin, “we hide inside our rooms and count to ten. Then hit the streets again.”)

In my teens (and after my father died), my family (and usually another family) would occasionally go into the city and see shows such as Oliver!, Man of La Mancha, and Jesus Christ Superstar. In 1968 (when I was 15), my mother and I went just by ourselves to see The Happy Time with Robert Goulet and David Wayne.

But taking my mother to a show to celebrate her birthday was a new experience., and it got to be something of a tradition: A tradition that lasted for 43 years.

While clearing out my mother’s house after her death, my brother and sister found a box filled with playbills, and I was able to assemble the following list of (mostly) Broadway shows that I took my mother to, mostly as birthday presents, but other times as well:

In 1999, my then girlfriend Deirdre began accompanying us, and that continued through our engagement and marriage. In 2009, we saw South Pacific at Lincoln Center, where the role of Cmdr. William Harbison was played by Sean Cullen, who had worked with Deirdre during her theater days about two decades previously. Afterwards, he took us backstage, autographed my mother’s program, and planted a thrilling kiss on her cheek.

In the later years, as my mother’s eyesight had worsened, I would try to get front-row seats, which were exciting for us as well as for her. We had front-row seats for the March 25, 2020, matinée of Wicked, but that was cancelled, of course, and my money promptly refunded.

Unbeknownst to my mother, I had also planned our 2021 outing. In September 2019, tickets went on sale a year in advance of the opening for a new production of The Music Man starring Hugh Jackman and Sutton Foster. Since my parents had seen the original production 60 years earlier, I thought she would enjoy that, so I coughed up a painful $1545 for three front-row seats for a February 2021 matinée.

Had there been no COVID, my mother would have been able to see that. She died about a month later. But by that time, the opening of The Music Man had been bumped to the spring of 2021 (with our performance scheduled for September 25, 2021), and then it was bumped again. Previews are now scheduled to start in December.

As of the time of this writing, Deirdre and I have three tickets for what I can only regard as the tentative matinée performance of The Music Man on June 11, 2022, which will be almost three years after I purchased them.

Whether Deirdre and I will see this or not, we’re not sure. Going by ourselves, it just wouldn’t feel the same.