Muriel Mandell was born one year and one day after the passage of the 19th amendment giving women the right to vote, and, 103 years later, she attended the Broadway musical “SUFFS,” about the events leading up to that passage; it was a women-only outing.
By that time she had been going to Broadway for 85 years. She started with “The American Way” in 1939 written by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, starring Fredric March and Florence Eldridge, the celebrated married couple who performed together for half a century. Muriel wasn’t especially impressed. But she went on to attend the original productions of many landmark Broadway shows that she loved, starting with the musicals “Oklahoma!” and “South Pacific,” as well as Tennessee Williams’ plays “A Glass Menagerie” with Laurette Taylor and “A Streetcar Named Desire” with Marlon Brando, then continuing all the way through to “Hamilton”
My mother died yesterday, three months shy of 105. She lived a remarkable life – a wartime reporter in Washington D.C. during the Roosevelt administration, covering everything from press conferences by FDR to the efforts by the War Refugee Board to sound the alarm about the Holocaust; a prolific writer of children’s books; a long-time teacher — of English literature to high school students, then of education to graduate students, then of computer literacy to senior citizens; a tech-savvy contributor to digital apps; a relentless reader and reviewer of children’s books way past her own centennial year as a member of the century-old Children’s Book Committee, which issues an annual guide to the latest children’s literature.
It’s a life too full, and ended too recently, to give a full accounting of it here (a theater website) and now (if a full accounting is ever possible.) But it seems the right place to share her love of theater.
Her theatergoing became something of a modest legend. At age 100, with theater recently reopened after the pandemic shutdown, she attended the play “Becoming Dr. Ruth,” starring Tovah Feldshuh as the celebrity sex therapist. Dr. Ruth was in the audience, and, a mere 93 herself, she wanted to meet the centenarian.
At age 102, Muriel was swamped and cheered by the crowd at the La MaMa ETC gala for still going to the theater.
Below are two videos, one in which she is reviewing, the other recollecting:
In 2016, she was amused that five-year-old Iain Armitage had become a theater critic, so she decided on her 95th birthday to become one herself, offering quick takes on some half-dozen recent plays and musicals on Broadway and Off, including Hamilton.
A year ago, at age 103, she agreed to answer questions about her many years of theatergoing, including a play she had seen a few months earlier (“Terrible”), although her focus was on a visit to see her great-grandchildren.
More on Mom from my blog:
On Her 101st Birthday, My Mother Visits the Whitney Biennial
