Price’s political sophistication has been essential. Price asked him to find a Sandy for the original “Annie,” said Goodspeed’s similarity to “Holiday Inn” goes only so far: In real-life Connecticut, Mr. Filled with nostalgia-tinged tunes including “White Christmas,” it’s adapted from the 1942 Bing Crosby-Fred Astaire movie about an entertainer who abandons big-city ambitions to put on shows in Connecticut.īut William Berloni, the Broadway animal trainer who got his start at 19 when Mr. The world premiere at the opera house now, “Irving Berlin’s Holiday Inn,” in some ways mirrors the enterprise Mr. Goodspeed built its endowment on the first two decades of income from the show, some years as much as $600,000. Price called “a very nice royalty,” about $2 million over the past seven years. That decade was the height of Goodspeed’s Broadway success, which would be rare later, but its one blockbuster, “Annie,” still provides what Mr. Price said he once considered “the be-all and end-all.” Price, a half-dozen more Goodspeed shows - including “Shenandoah” and “Very Good Eddie” - moved to Broadway, the destination that Mr.
It was in the 398-seat opera house that audiences saw a new musical, “Man of La Mancha,” in 1965, before it became Goodspeed’s first Broadway hit.
“It’s like running a general store,” he said. Price, a small, slender Chicago native with bright white hair and a flashing smile, can often be found working the crowd. Inside the lobby, at the foot of the stairs, Mr. The opera house - a frosting-white, six-story Victorian overlooking the Connecticut River - is at one end of a century-old swing bridge, which often opens just before curtain time. Price assembled a thriving little musical-theater empire in this postcard-pretty town of 9,100. Michael Gennaro, of the Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., is on deck to succeed him.Ī tough, old-style producer with a glad-handing public persona, Mr. Price will retire as executive director of Goodspeed Musicals, the company he nurtured on the proceeds from its biggest hit, “Annie” (1976). In 1968, Goodspeed invited him back to run the place, and he’s been there ever since, ensconced in a theater with such a frozen-in-time feeling that even he has likened it to “Brigadoon.”
After that early debacle, he went off to a theater in Salt Lake City and worked his way up from stage manager to producer. It’s been a while since he’s been out of a job. “The shock of being let go - I talk about it very glibly, but they were right,” Mr. Fresh out of the Yale School of Drama, he was a young, brash production manager, and he lasted all of four months before he was fired. Price went to work at Goodspeed Opera House, during its inaugural season in 1963, things didn’t go so well.
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