“I went to folk-singing parties where there wasn’t any food.”His first major break was in an off-Broadway production of The Threepenny Opera (1955), which starred Lotte Lenya, Scott Merrill and Beatrice Arthur: I got that through a friend – you know this business is like one big network of friends. Jo Wilder (Joel Grey’s wife) was playing Polly and she got me the job as the Streetsinger’s understudy. Then I went on in that role and played a lot of smaller roles. Eventually I understudied Mack the Knife and got to go on in that role. Interesting to have a 20-year-old playing opposite Lotte Lenya!During his three years with the show, he studied acting with Lee Strasburg and Mira Rostova, and singing with Mazel Schweppe.
He also married another of the show’s understudies, Marta Curro. (In 1979 he married his second wife, the actress Elaine Cancilla, who was in the cast of Chicago.)A starring role followed in another off-Broadway hit, The Fantasticks (1960), in which, as El Gallo, he introduced its hit song, “Try to Remember”. The whimsical musical (a flop in London) opened to poor reviews and business, but the publicising by celebrated devotees such as Anne Bancroft, Richard Rodgers and Jerome Robbins, its winning the Vernon Rice Award as best off-Broadway musical, and the popularity of “Try to Remember”, turned it into a hit that was to become the longest-running show in the world (over 41 years).Orbach moved to the Broadway stage for a starring role in Carnival (1961), with a score by Bob Merrill and direction by Gower Champion. It was based on the 1953 film Lili, with Orbach as the crippled puppeteer (played by Mel Ferrer on screen) whose latent warmth and compassion are brought out by a fey orphan. In 1964 Orbach played Sky Masterson to Sheila MacRae’s Sarah Brown in a City Center revival of Guys and Dolls, and two years later he was Charley Davenport in a Lincoln Center revival of Annie Get Your Gun starring Ethel Merman. If you are puzzled not to recognise the name of this Holmes story, puzzle no longer. It was written by Alan Cubitt, and although my wife and I thought Everett very good in the role, and enjoyed some of the goings on, the story was shaping up quite preposterously by the time some visitors rang our door bell, and we missed the final five minutes and never found out what happened.
What I was not shocked by was the fact that anyone should attempt to concoct a new story based on 221b Baker Street, even if it did involve inventing a completely new fianc?for Dr Watson.
On Boxing Day on BBC-TV they showed a Sherlock Holmes adventure called The Case of the Silk Stocking, starring Rupert Everett as the great detective. If you have £10m, say, you get an OBE; £25m for a CBE; £50m, and a knighthood automatically follows Earn £5m in a year, and you get a telegram from the Queen. Why not? Only a prig would think his hard-earned charity-based CBE is any way devalued by the proximity.To be honest, I’ve rather changed my mind about the honours system over the years. I used to think it a complete absurdity which anyone of principle ought to avoid Now, I have to say, I rather love it. It gives harmless pleasure to many people; not just the recipients, but to the acquaintanceship of everyone on the list. I love it when an acquaintance gets something, particularly if it seems unlikely.
Of course, one regrets the fact that it sometimes gets it wrong, in the case of Dusty Springfield or Benjamin Zephaniah.But who would want to lose that twice-yearly appearance of the list, the amused chuckle at the discovery that – crikey – Alan Whicker can now call himself the Commander of something nebulous in the long-disappeared British Empire?
More from Philip Hensher. The source of the uneasiness, of course, is that nervousness about any explicit relationship between wealth and honour which has prevailed since Lloyd George. If honours citations included, as well as “for services to education” the formula “for being rich”, it would liven things up no end.I’m perfectly serious about this. So long as no bribery is involved, it wasn’t inherited, and the money was made legally, there should be a sliding scale. But there seems an obvious way in which the honours system can usefully expand.Commerce and finance have an uneasy relationship with the honours system. What better way than showering honours on derivatives brokers? Why not make it clear that your service to the country may come in the form of years drudging away in the Treasury, or in running jolly fast, in hitting that top C in Tristan at Bayreuth or just being ever so rich? One would have to try quite hard to be rich in this country without indirectly benefiting a lot of other people.