BACKSTORY

Early in her career, Lee announced that she wanted "to try everything
in acting," so when Lee found a letter in her mailbox from Broadway
playwright, Arthur Laurents, asking if she would consider auditioning
for a musical he had written, she was thrilled – yet frightened. Was her
voice good enough and strong enough to sustain her in a musical?
Her answer to Laurents' query was, "I'll let you know." Then she
rushed to find a voice teacher.

Finally, Lee called Laurents and Stephen Sondheim to her music
teacher's living room, where she sang, "Bewitched, Bothered and
Bewildered for her audition. "I suspect I sang it very badly," Lee
recalled, but Laurents disagreed. "You can sing! Terrific," he
exclaimed, and Lee was signed to play the lead role of Nurse Fay
Apple in the Laurents / Sondheim musical, Anyone Can Whistle.

Though Lee was a bit nervous about this new experience, she was excited too. “It’s a marvelous feeling to discover ability you didn’t suspect. This musical means many new things for me. My first Broadway musical, my first singing and dancing, and my first Broadway stardom. It is important to me."

Herbert Greene, the show's musical director, became Lee's and
Angela Lansbury's vocal coach during the show's musical rehearsals.
And though he had coached many an actor for their Broadway debut,
Stephen Sondheim believed he nearly destroyed Lansbury's voice with
his unusual and possibly dangerous technique for relieving tension in
the throat. "He would press two of his fingers against a singer’s larynx,"
and then demand that they sing. “Trying to sing while he had his fingers
on your throat,” Angela recalled, “was like being strangled.” Could this
have been the reason Lee developed a bad case of tonsillitis?

Despite her throat ailment, the critics praised Lee's performance and
none found fault with her singing. The critics did, however, find plenty
to complain about with regards to the show itself, and though the
cast and crew had "poured [their] hearts and souls into it," the show
closed after only nine performances.

“It was a colossal flop," Lee said, "but I never had so much fun in my life, from the day rehearsals started until we closed the week we opened. Perhaps I got so much pleasure from the contact with real people out there in front.”

Wanting to improve her singing voice, Lee studied with the renowned
vocal coach, David Craig, which proved to be, she said, "the most
extraordinary and rewarding experience of my life.”

The following year, Craig felt Lee was ready to take on the role of Annie
Oakley in the musical, Annie Get Your Gun. "That was the true test," Lee
explained, "because Annie Oakley never shuts her face." After the eight-
week, multi-city tour, Lee said she would rather sing and dance onstage
"than eat."