Blair replaced Dorothy Collins for the last three weeks of the post-Broadway Los Angeles run of Follies. I guess they still hoped at that time that the production would move on to Toronto and D.C. but dates had not yet been set and it simply closed.
She played Mame on the third national tour, with Elaine Stritch as Vera. (Stritch would move right on to Mame in a stock tour.) In a column some years back, Ken Mandelbaum wrote that he felt she was the second best Mame of all the ladies who played it on Broadway and tour. Still, that tour seems not to have been a great success at the box office as it lasted only four months. I would think that they would planned a longer tour. A few years ago TCM showed some TV episode from the 1950s in which she played a character with the type of sophistication that made it easy for me to believe that she probably was a very good Mame (and perhaps indeed the best of the post-Lansbury Mames).
The year after Follies, at the age of 52, she played Nellie Forbush again, on a stock tour opposite Ricardo Montalban. Those were the days!
In stock, she did some of the other roles you might expect, like Maria in The Sound of Music. She was supposed to play Julie in Carousel at City Center in 1957, but she quit when she found out that she was expected to play it according to Howard Keel's ideas on how the role should be played. Barbara Cook replaced her.
She can also be seen as Sandy in the rather dull TV production of A Connecticut Yankee. |
