By SHARON EBERSON
The easiest decision about celebrating Shirley Jones’ life, career and legacy was that it would take place in Pittsburgh.
“I wouldn’t have wanted to do it anywhere else,” said her son Patrick Cassidy.
On September 21 at the Byham Theater, he will direct and co-host, with brothers Shaun and Ryan Cassidy, a Pittsburgh CLO gala event and fundraiser to celebrate their Oscar-winning mother and Pittsburgh native Shirley Jones.
performs on Broadway in Me and Juliet in 1954;
and costars alongside Robert Preston in The Music Man, in 1962.
(Images courtesy of Pittsburgh CLO)
Perhaps best known as the soprano who soared in three Rodgers and Hammerstein movies – The Music Man, Oklahoma! and Carousel – Ms. Jones also won an Academy Award for her dramatic turn in Elmer Gantry and represented a maternal ideal to a generation of TV fans on The Partridge Family. Growing up in Smithton, PA, she went on to become Miss Pittsburgh of 1952 and was seen onstage at the Pittsburgh Playhouse and for Pittsburgh CLO, first in 1953, just two years before Oklahoma! hit the silver screen.
In 2007, Ms. Jones returned to Pittsburgh CLO as Oklahoma!’s Aunt Eller, and received the Richard Rodgers Award, which recognizes the lifetime contributions of outstanding talents in musical theater. She served as honorary chair for the campaign to build the new Pittsburgh Playhouse, Downtown, and Point Park University awards a scholarship in her name, given to the musical theater major who shows great promise.
SHIRLEY JONES: A Gala Celebration of her Life, Career, and Legacy will be a concert and tribute to the stage and screen star, featuring some of Broadway’s biggest names and voices: Tony Award winners Kelli O’Hara and Jessie Mueller, and nominees Sierra Boggess, Norm Lewis and Adam Pascal. Besides performing some of Ms. Jones’ best-loved and lesser-known songs, each has a personal story to tell, about how she influenced their lives and careers.
The gala marks the first time that the hosting brothers have worked together. Patrick has performed with his mother, brother (and 1970s teen heartthrob) Shaun Cassidy, and his late stepbrother, David Cassidy. Now Patrick can add brother Ryan Cassidy – usually at work behind the scenes, in the art department of shows from The King of Queens to The Lincoln Lawyer – to his list of costars.
“We’re going to tell stories about her as a mom. So I think it’s going to be a really personal and wonderful and emotional evening for the audience,” Patrick Cassidy said.
The gala was originally planned for earlier this year, as a 90th birthday celebration, but it was postponed, as Ms. Jones is unable to travel.
“We have a special thing that we’re going to show the audience about her and from her, but just to make the trip is just, at this time, not possible,” Patrick Cassidy said. “But she’s so honored and so happy that we’re doing it. And again, we wouldn’t have wanted it done anywhere else but Pittsburgh.”
He added that the event will be made into a three-camera recording as a presentation to his mother, and possibly a TV special.
“She’s just thrilled,” Cassidy said, “and she’s going to get to see it, which we’re all so happy about because all the performers are doing it as a labor of love and for the respect they all have for her.”
One of the goals of the event is for the participants to share personal stories, such as Kelli O’Hara seeking out advice from Ms. Jones about balancing work and motherhood.
Patrick Cassidy, a Broadway and screen actor himself, son of the late actor Jack Cassidy and Ms. Jones, knows a lot about that – his mother was pregnant with him during the filming of The Music Man.
He noted that his mother’s “No. 1, bar none” priority was always her family, and that she agreed to do The Partridge Family – at a time when few movie stars were seen on television regularly – specifically to be in one place for her boys.
“When I was growing up, people who loved that show, they’d say, ‘God, I want your mom to be my mom.’ And I’d say, ‘Back off. She’s mine,’ ” Cassidy recalled. “It’s because they could see that warmth and that genuineness, which is exactly who she was. What you saw on film was what she was in person.”
at Acrisure Stadium in 2021. (Image: Matt Polk)
Here’s more of Patrick Cassidy looking back at his life with a showbiz family, and ahead to the gala tribute on September 21.
QUESTION: The last time we spoke was in 2013, when you directed Oklahoma! for Point Park University.
PATRICK CASSIDY: That was my directorial debut, and the start of a slow transition I made from being an actor and a performer to being a director and producer, and now an artistic director. … I also got to teach as a guest teacher there for a semester, and that was amazing. That started me on the teaching road … and then producing and directing, and then a stint in Vegas as the resident director at the Wynn Hotel. And that all brought me to being an AD. I can say with such pride that for the last almost seven years, I’ve been nothing but an artistic director [at Studio Tenn Theatre near Nashville, Tennessee] after 40 years of being an actor.
QUESTION: Like your mother, one of your earliest roles was at Pittsburgh CLO, in 1998 as Lancelot in Camelot, and then you were back just in 2021, at the 75th anniversary of PCLO. How cool is it that you both have that connection to companies in her hometown?
CASSIDY: Well, Van Kaplan and I were very close, and Mark Fleischer and I are very close, which is why the gala for my mom is happening. And I love Pittsburgh – I almost moved there. My wife and I talked about it for a long time, and then this opportunity came up in Nashville.
Q: How did the idea for the gala come to be?
CASSIDY: Mark approached me well over a year and a half ago about it, and I thought we were going to do it for her birthday, but we just couldn’t work out the scheduling of it. But then we said, ‘Look, let’s find another date, and we’ll honor the 90 years of her life, but also her 60-plus year career. But we have to do it in Pittsburgh.’ And, of course, the PCLO has been a huge part, like you said, of my career. I mean, I’ve done five shows there, three tours that came through the Benedum, and then my mother’s connection, too, even my father. So it was a no-brainer to do it there.
QUESTION: With all of those stars, how did you decide on a format?
CASSIDY: Well, as I said, we wanted it to be personal. I mean, her career is her career, and everybody knows the classic stuff, which will all be part of it, obviously. But we’re even doing something where she and my father did a Broadway show together called Maggie Flynn, which is not very well known. And she had a number that closed the first act that’s absolutely spectacular that we’re going to do. And Sierra [Boggess] is going to tell a story about that. …
We wanted the audience to take something away from it that they don’t know about her, that they couldn’t just read about her. And I think we’ve achieved that. Shaun and I interviewed all five stars. I mean, they’re all close friends – Jessie was the only one I didn’t really know prior to this. But Norm and Adam are two of my best friends. And we interviewed them on Zoom, and they told their stories, and Shaun just sort of edited and put it together, and I picked all the music … I think what makes it so interesting and unique is the personal take that each person has. And like I said, what her legacy means – not just the star she was, but as a human being.
QUESTION: You have gathered quite a lot of big names, and I have heard that others wanted to be here, but Broadway obligations are keeping them away.
CASSIDY: Everyone said, ‘ I’m in. I’m in.’ But the hardest part was schedules. I mean, Kristen [Chenoweth], who’s a very, very good friend of mine, she’s done two wonderful things for Studio Tenn, my theater company, she desperately wanted to do it. But she’s doing The Queen of Versailles, and that’s going to Broadway. And Sutton [Foster, on Broadway in Once Upon a Mattress], too, and Audra [McDonald, about to open Gypsy]. We went to all of the great sopranos on Broadway because we wanted my mother’s sound and my mother’s legacy to be represented. And they all desperately wanted to do it, but getting them all scheduled at the same time just couldn’t work. I do know that we got three of the greatest Broadway sopranos – between Jessie and Sierra and Kelli O’Hara, you’re not going to do any better. And at first, I wasn’t even sure about should we add men, but then when I realized there were so many duets that she was famous for, from those movies, that you have to have male voices, and you ain’t going to get much better than Norm Lewis and Adam Pascal, who are very different and very right for their different sections, as you’ll see in the show.
QUESTION: When it comes to her movie musicals, people know your mother for her fabulous voice and as a beautiful sort of ingénue, but I think of her in those roles as a confident, rebellious woman. Is that how you see it?
CASSIDY: Rodgers and Hammerstein, they saw that, too. She was under contract to them, not to a studio. You know, she never thought of herself as a star, and yet she was an incredibly dedicated performer, and also had an incredible sense of confidence and self. I think that’s what Pittsburgh gave her. You know, she was an only child, and everybody I know in Pittsburgh, I know exactly where I stand when I talk to them. They are who they are. Sometimes you might hear something that you didn’t want to hear, but at least it’s honest. And that’s my mom. She is who she because of Pittsburgh.
TICKETS AND DETAILS
SHIRLEY JONES: A Gala Celebration of her Life, Career, and Legacy, a fundraiser for Pittsburgh CLO’s Education and Arts programs, is 4 p.m. September 21, 2024, at the Byham Theater, Downtown. Tickets are $105-$155 at https://www.pittsburghclo.org/shows/shirley-jones-a-gala-celebration-of-her-life-career-and-legacy .
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