[Dixielandjazz] The Ultimate Improvisation?

[Steve barbone]

During 'Pajama' Mishap, Connick Takes a Long Solo

NY TIMES - By DAVID FIRESTONE and CAMPBELL ROBERTSON - June 9, 2006

For Harry Connick Jr. the hardest part about being in a Broadway show is
doing the same thing night after night. Mr. Connick is, after all, a jazz
player, and one who disdains set lists and prepared patter. So it was not a
disaster when, about 12 minutes into Wednesday night's performance of "The
Pajama Game," a mishap on the set called for a bit of improv.

Mr. Connick, the show's star, was in his dressing room at the American
Airlines Theater, playing an accordion and teaching Cajun songs to some of
the cast members, when two desks moving along an automated track onstage
crashed into each other. Roz Ryan, who plays the sassy secretary Mabel in
the show's pajama factory, was riding behind one of the moving desks and
appeared to bump her elbow.

The curtain went down, the theater's announcer declared an unscheduled
intermission, and the house lights came up. Bewildered audience members
began buzzing.

After a few minutes Mr. Connick told the stage manager that someone should
go out and talk to the audience. You know, keep 'em happy. Which he did, for
about a half-hour.

It was not, he said in an interview yesterday, a big deal, nor was it a
chore for a guy who is used to playing concerts. "This stuff happens every
night onstage," Mr. Connick said. "I think jazz musicians are used to that."

Reverting to his New Orleans accent rather than the flat Iowa English of his
character, he encouraged the audience members ‹ who that night included Liza
Minnelli ‹ to bring out their cellphone cameras and take pictures, an act
that, strictly speaking, is against the law in Broadway houses. But after
the flashes were shut down by frantic staff members, and the questions
began, he provided the following information to an extremely eager group of
fans, many of whom were clearly in the theater primarily to see him.

His favorite restaurants in New Orleans are Mandina's and Brennan's.

His three daughters, who don't generally listen to him, had no interest in
taking piano lessons from him. Nonetheless, he bought one of his daughters a
trumpet at Costco, and managed to persuade Wynton Marsalis to give her a
lesson or two. (He then let loose a pretty passable imitation of Mr.
Marsalis.)

New Orleans, he reminded the crowd, has barely begun to rebuild. But a
project that he and Branford Marsalis have begun would build a village of 81
homes for displaced musicians in the city, to be constructed by Habitat for
Humanity. 

He plans to record an album of New Orleans music after the show ends its run
on June 17, but generally hopes to take it easy. "I'm not going to touch
another bottle of hairspray for three months," he vowed, shaking a pompadour
that barely moves during the show.

A pregnant woman in the audience, who asked him to predict the sex of her
child, will have a boy, he announced. He sang "Happy Birthday" to a woman
named Sarah in the front row.

Among other highlights, he said that his favorite song in the show was
"There Once Was a Man," a mock-heroic duet that he sings with his co-star,
Kelli O'Hara (whom he called a legend), and that he played Nathan Detroit in
a high school production of "Guys and Dolls."

"Literally, I could have stayed out there six hours," he said yesterday.
"You put a piano out there, you'd have to pull me off the stage," he said.
(He had offered to play if the technical problems weren't fixed.) "That's
where my heart is. That's what I love to do."

Finally the conductor was alerted that the show was ready to resume, and
motioned with his baton that it was time for Mr. Connick to rejoin the cast.
The show, a production of the Roundabout Theater Company, continued without
a hitch, and Ms. Ryan was apparently unhurt.

Afterward, Mr. Connick said, he had a chance to talk with Ms. Minnelli. What
did she say about it?

"Nothing."

Nothing?

"She's an entertainer, she's old school. She would have done the same
thing."