Interview with Glenn Rosenblum, who will host three Cabarets at CVRep.

by Audrey Liebross

I interviewed Glenn Rosenblum, who will be doing three cabaret performances this summer at Coachella Valley Repertory (CVRep) as part of the company’s summer cabaret series.

Glenn has been seen at CVRep in Ballroom, Chess, Glenn Rosenblum is the Musical Man, and his Broadway Showstopper series, which was originally created for theatre-hungry virtual audiences during the pandemic.

Glenn’s New York credits include Lucky Lucy with Blythe Danner and The Rise of David Levinsky, both off-Broadway. In the Los Angeles area, he has performed in Grey Gardens, Promises, Promises, Sugar, Mame, Zorba, Minnie’s Boys, and most recently Follies, all with Musical Theatre Guild at the Alex Theatre (www.musicaltheatreguild.com). He has also appeared in Man of La Mancha, starring the late Ken Howard and Marilyn McCoo. Regional roles include Guys and Dolls, Cabaret, and Little Shop of Horrors. He has been seen on television in Bones, Miami Vice, and an Old Navy commercial with Kristin Chenoweth.

Glenn, who earned a BA in theatre from UCLA, has lectured extensively about Broadway for Crystal Cruises, CVRep’s Conservatory, and David Green’s Musical Theatre University (MTU). He owns Celebrity Access, Inc., which books celebrities for media tours, product endorsements, and personal appearances.

For more information about Glenn, see his web sites, www.glennrosenblum.com and www.celebrityaccessinc.com.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and length, and to clean up minor grammatical and syntax errors.

Coachella Valley Theatre World’s review of Glenn’s first 2024 summer cabaret is available at https://www.cvtworld.com/reviews/fabulous-cabaret-show-this-summer-at-cvrep.

Coachella Valley Theatre World (CVTW): I know you do a lot of stuff with CVRep [Coachella Valley Repertory].

Glenn Rosenblum (GR): I do.

CVTW: I figured I'd ask you about your cabarets and the rest of the summer at CVRep. I know you teach theatre classes, too.

GR: I teach the kids at Musical Theatre University.

CVTW: Tim Dunn, CVRep’s PR person, said to ask you about all your Broadway stories. So I'll do that, too, if that's okay.

GR: I don't know if I have any, but if you ask, I know I'll answer.

CVTW: I know that there have been a lot of cabaret programs, both in the summers and otherwise with Coachella Valley Rep. I'm wondering if you could tell me a little about it.

GR: They’re doing Wednesdays and Thursdays now. It used to only be Thursday nights. And the Thursday thing started during the pandemic. Ron Celona [the previous artistic director] started the Theatre Thursdays, which was a Zoom show every Thursday night during COVID. I did a lot of those.

CVTW: There's certainly plenty of theatre in this area.

GR: It's just thriving, isn't it? I feel like we're at the beginning of a really good thing going on here. I think that the public is really hungry for it here. The Coachella Valley community is hungry for theatre, and it's a sophisticated audience out here. There are a lot of transplants. It is a smart audience, and I think it's just going to grow. And CV Rep is only one of the companies that are thriving here, for example, there’s Dezart (Michael Shaw's company) and Revolution Stage. Gary [from Revolution] is certainly upping the game. There's room for everyone, community theatre, professional theatre. It's all good here. And everyone supports one another, which is very nice. It's a mighty community.

CVTW: I would assume that the summer theatre program is geared towards the local community.

GR: So many people do stay here during the summer. I certainly do with my partner, and we love it. I love that the pool is warm, that you can find parking at Trader Joe's. There’s nothing wrong with the summers. We have air conditioning and it's all fine.

And it's so exciting that there are a lot of things to do. I used to see all the other summer resorts on the East Coast, like Provincetown, who brought in the greatest cabaret artists from all over the country. And now we rival that — we just had Faith Prince, and Brent Barrett is coming.

CVTW: Yes, I've met Brent Barrett because I'm an insane Phantom Phan.

GR: Oh, he's wonderful.

CVTW: I tend to follow Phantoms when they show up in a nearby area. And I got to speak to Brent Barrett after the show when he was here, at the McCallum Theatre.

GR: I hope I get to meet him. I've been such a fan of his for over 30, oh, my God, 40 years at least, because he was doing shows on Broadway when I lived in New York in the '80s.

He was in one that I actually showed last year in one of my lecture shows. We don't call them lectures, really, because they're interactive, and I have performances, so they're not really a dry lecture. But Brent was in a musical called Dance a Little Closer, by Alan Jay Lerner and Charles Strouse. He played one of the first openly gay characters. That was really something. There was ice skating on stage.

CVTW: Oh, my gosh. That's hard to do.

GR: Melissa Errico is coming. It's just incredible, the people [Adam Karsten, the artistic director] has coming this summer.

CVTW: And of course, I see you're doing three shows. Are these lecture shows or are they traditional cabarets?

GR: I present a combination of videos that I love, live performances by myself, and I bring some guests on to talk about some of the shows. The first one on May 22nd is with Alix Korey, who lives here full-time. I was a fan of hers also since the '80s. I was so thrilled when not only did I get to meet her, she's a friend now. We're going to focus on May 22nd on the leading ladies and gentlemen of Broadway. That's a wide range of people from John Raitt and Georgia Brown and Joel Grey to Ethel Merman. I always give my own opinions about stuff, and we're going to focus on all the actresses who were in Hello Dolly in the '60s, and that's going to be a real highlight of the evening.

On June 12th, I focus on the golden age of Broadway. What really is the golden age of Broadway? They always say it's about 1943 to 1959. But, after 1959, you have Bye Bye Birdie and A Chorus Line and Fiddler on the Roof.

I'm bringing Alix Korey back because I'm greedy. And then one of my dearest friends, Kelly Lester, who I've known since our days in the theatre department at UCLA, is joining me. And Kelly and I go back a long, long time. She's from a big theatrical family. Her dad was Peter Mark Richman, who was in the original Zoo Story by Edward Albee and every tv show you can think of from the seventies. And Kelly just finished playing in cabarets at two of the major regional theatres here in the country, the Asolo Repertory in Sarasota, Florida and the Old Globe in San Diego. We're going to reminisce about our times at UCLA. And FYI, Kelly's daughter, Julia Lester, was nominated for a Tony last year for the revival of Into the Woods. And she was also just in the revival of I Can Get it for You Wholesale in New York. Julia played Miss Marmelstein, who was created by someone named Barbra Streisand. So Julia is her, and of course, she's in High School Musical the Series. And she has a Hulu movie now.

And Kelly's husband is on Broadway, making his Broadway debut in the new Cabaret starring Eddie Redmayne. So it's just going to be fun to have an old friend on stage. And the other person joining us is Susan Edwards Martin, who was the original cast member of Torch Song Trilogy with Harvey Fierstein. She made her Broadway debut in a musical called Bubbling Brown Sugar. And Susan's going to tell the story of how she got that. And it's one of the most amazing stories of being in the right place at the right time. I did a production of Minnie's Boys with Susan a few years ago at Musical Theatre Guild in LA. Susan played the part originated by Shelley Winters. It's about the Marx brothers and I've asked her to sing one of my favorite ballads from that.

CVTW: Oh, wow.

GR: We dig deep, you know. And so that's going to be a blast. And last but not least, on July 17th, we're going to do an evening celebrating the great composers and lyricists. And, you know, there's more than just Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe. Eileen Barnett, a friend, is going to join me. She made her debut in Company in the early seventies and then she played in Nine on Broadway. And I think that Maury Yeston, who wrote the music and lyrics for that, should be celebrated. So she's going to sing some songs from that. And then another local who lives here who we met when my partner sold her a home and we just smelled a whiff of theatre. Her name is Gwendolyn Coleman. It turns out that she was in one of my absolute all-time favorite shows in the seventies called The Magic Show with Doug Henning.

This was written, of course, by Stephen Schwartz, who at that time had already had hits with Pippin and Godspell. Now most people just know him from Wicked. But we're going to explore some of the songs from Magic Show and Pippin. And my greatest joy would be for audience members who are younger, in their teens or twenties, who only know him from Wicked to come hear some of the music that he did before that. So we're going to just have three fun evenings.

I've got 600 seats to fill in all, so it'll be fun. And the, oh, everyone is so nice when I meet them afterwards and people have memories and they tell me, oh, I saw such and such originally. And that's the best part of it. You know, I just got back from a four-week crystal cruise from Australia to the Seychelles Islands, where I did six of these lectures. They were a little drier than the ones that I do at CVRep. You know, we amp it up with guest stars and singers and people are so wanting to talk about theatre and their theatre experiences and even non-Theatre people come up and they're so emotional about it. One man came up to me on Crystal Cruises in tears and talked to me about seeing A Chorus Line with his sister, who had passed away in the seventies. And it's very touching to know that musical theatre, which I'm obsessed with, really touches so many different people.

And musical theatre is the only American art form that we can call our own.

CVTW: Of course, it's really not only our own anymore, obviously, with the Brits. And what about the shows that never seem to make it here? I'm thinking of, oh, I guess it was 2012. They were supposed to bring Rebecca here. And that's all over Germany, I think, and elsewhere, and they just can't open it here.

GR: Exactly. But the Brits have it all going on. It's funny you should bring that up, because I talk about the British a lot in my lectures, because sometimes the British take our musicals and they look at it from another angle and it just blows me away. And the one that I was on board forever and ever was Nicholas Hytner’s Carousel from the National Theatre, which just blew me away. He just looked at it from another angle. And then when they brought it to America, they recast it, and Audra McDonald played Carrie Pipperidge, and that was her first big thing. That production just blew me away. And then since the British have taken another look at Oklahoma — the one with Hugh Jackman. They did Follies recently at the National Theatre with Imelda Staunton. And I feel that they just take a surgery knife and they really do find a lot of wonderful things. Last summer, I saw a production of La Cage aux Folles at the open air theater in Regents Park. It was the best La Cage aux Folles I've ever seen, directed by a Brit with British actors that I'd never heard of. And they just got to the heart of it. I'm glad you brought up the Brits. They have it all going on. There's room for everyone.

CVTW: I kind of laughed when Hamilton opened in the West End. I've only been overseas once so far. And it happened to be over the 4th of July. And at least one British bar was welcoming what it called American friends to celebrate the holiday. And I thought, wow, things have changed a lot in 300 years.

GR: Hamilton has a universal theme and they do poke fun of their king. They're diving into their own history. The British aren't as stuck up as we think. I think we're more tightly wound than the British, quite frankly. We really are Puritans at heart, aren't we?

CVTW: Well, yeah, not all of us, hopefully. Oh, and you mentioned Yeston and Kopit. I always forget which one is which. I don't know if you're familiar with the Yiddish term schlimazel [meaning the guy who always has bad luck]. I consider them the schlimazels of American theatre because of what happened with their Phantom. It's lovely. And he's a more sympathetic character, I think, than Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom. But, man, you can't get it to Broadway. I'd like to see that one. That'd be a great one for CVRep to do.

GR: Yes, it would. CVRep has a nice season coming up, though. Adam [the artistic director] picked some really great shows. When I moved here full-time with my partner maybe six years ago, I wasn't that familiar with CVRep, but then I found out that it was an Equity theatre. I did Chess, which was the first show in their brand-new theater.

CVTW: I was there. I reviewed Chess. It was lovely, except I really didn't like the male lead. The guy who played the Russian was wonderful. But Freddie Trumper, and I could not believe that name, I thought he did too much shouting and he was kind of one-dimensional.

GR: When people asked me years ago, what are some of your musicals that you don't like at all, Chess was always at the top of the list. I just never got it. But it's not until I did it that I understood it. And I actually could not believe how sophisticated the score is. It really is sweeping and beautiful. And then, of course, then about right before COVID I did a production of Ballroom that CVRep did, which was very exciting. And they brought in the authors to help with the revised version. Billy Goldenberg, who's now since passed away, came out here and worked on it with us, and so did Alan Bergman of the famous Marilyn and Alan Bergman team. She was infirm and couldn't travel, but he was here, helped us with it, right in our own backyard. That was incredible.

CVTW: I think Marilyn Bergman died about a year ago or so.

GR: Oh, yeah. What a contribution. Oh, my God. But I tell you that the theatre scene is really thriving here, and I think it's just going to get better. And so many people from New York and LA and Chicago are moving here, so we're just at the beginning. I really feel like we are at the beginning of quite an explosion of professional theatre. I'm a big union person, so I don't say it to be snobby, but when I got my Equity card in 1983, you had to work hard to get it — really hard. And I got it. I was cast in an off-Broadway show that was allowed to have nonunion people in it. There were three of us, including the lead, and the show was called The Rise of David Levinsky, at the 92nd Street Y. It got a great review in the New York Times, and it got a little buzz, and they said, oh, it's gonna move. Liza Minnelli came to see it, I remember. And they said, well, we can extend for three weeks at the theater, but the entire company needs to go Equity for that to happen. So I got my equity card. It was the most thrilling day of my life.

We're going to have a new union president soon. I'm almost positive it's going to be Brooke Shields. I think that she's a tough cookie and she's been in the business a long time, and she's seen the rotten sides of it and the good sides. I think she'll be vocal. She'll be a surprise like Fran Drescher was to a lot of people who thought that Fran Drescher was like her sitcom character, the nanny. And of course, she's not.

Brooke Shields may have a reputation as a model, but she's done a lot of musicals on Broadway. She was in Grease and Wonderful Town, and Leap of Faith. That started at the Amundsen.

I subscribe to as many of the theatres as I can here. I'm an acting member of a company, the Musical Theatre Guild, in Los Angeles. We're like Encores, which is in New York. We do staged readings of musicals that aren't done that often. Like, for instance, last year we did Follies, and the year before that, Grey Gardens, and we've done Hallelujah Baby. It's a wonderful company that was founded about 30 years ago by actors in LA from Broadway who wanted an outlet and it's a wonderful outlet. I'm also on their executive committee. That's a fancy word for the artistic team. We pick the shows. And that's musicaltheatreguild.com.

I got Musical Theatre Guild to have a marriage with Musical Theatre University, here at Rancho Mirage High School. We did a Sondheim revue last year out here with Jason Grah and Teri Ralston and members of our company. They got to work with the kids.

We brought that show to the Colony Theatre in Burbank. So the kids got a sense of performing it twice in two different venues with two different types of staging. Oh, that was just fantastic. And, you know, I have been doing my specialty lectures with the kids. I do about one a month right now. I open their eyes and ears to performers that they don't know. This is what I say to them: “If you're going to go out and perform and do this as a career, you have to know the history. You can't be in Hamilton and not know what Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar are. You have to know where you fit in with the history and the legacy.

When they did Sunset Boulevard here, I did a lecture with the kids all about Andrew Lloyd Webber. And I was very honest with the kids about him, what the audience's expectations are. I said, I'm just a regular theatregoer, too. I'm there to hear the big hit songs. I said, when she opens her mouth and sings “As if we never said goodbye,” and you're all on stage, if one of you moves an iota that takes focus away from her. Watch her the whole time. We're all there to hear this song. Memories, Don't Cry for Me Argentina, The Music of the Night. There's that one part of each of his shows I just want them to understand where they fit in with the history of shows.

And I also tell them how lucky they are because they did The Prom without any edits — a show about two gay women who want to go to the prom together. And I said, you know, not every community in this country can do a show like this in their high schools. I love that it's such an open theatre community for the kids here.

CVTW: Could you address the question of ethnicity in casting — especially the racial controversies that arise.

GR: It's an interesting part of my lecture, and I'm going to hit upon this a little on Wednesday. I talk about David Merrick doing an all-Black production of Hello Dolly. And I applaud that. I also applaud that Diahann Carroll and Richard Kiley did No Strings in the sixties. I just lectured about this, that I feel that theatre has always been ahead of Hollywood — Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner wasn't until 1968. Theatre has always pushed the boundaries, which is very exciting. An all-Black production was a big deal. And I'll say in my lectures, do I need to remind anyone what was going on in our country during that period? I never saw it, but in the original production of No Strings, I don't think race was ever discussed, that she was Black, and he was white. It was just a love story of two people in different parts of their lives.

I truly believe you can learn about history through musicals. You can learn about the Depression from Annie. And that's why I tell kids, go to school. You must go to college and learn everything. You can't just learn how to sing and dance. How are you going to be in Hello Dolly if you don't understand what it was like to be a single woman trying to earn a living in the 1890s in New York? You have to know history. You can't even be in The Sound of Music unless you know about the Nazis and World War II. You have to know everything. I find a lot of the kids feel that they can just sing and dance and don't have to know anything. I remember the period when I got older, when I realized that, in The Sound of Music, they were escaping from the Nazis. I don't think I got that in 1965, but I certainly understand it now — it's a very serious story.

I think the main reason I love that I have a forum for these entertainments, we'll call them, is just to give people a sense of history. There would be no Idina Menzel without Ethel Merman and no Sutton Foster without Mary Martin.

CVTW: I'm looking at the clock and thinking they may cut us off at twelve. You are one of the best raconteurs I have ever interviewed. I really hope we get a chance to sit down and have a cup of tea or coffee or whatever. God, have you got stories!

GR: Well, this has been wonderful.

CVTW: Thanks so much!

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