David Cassidy in the News
Teen Hero Cassidy In A George Cohan Musical?
June 21, 1981
By Robert P. Laurence
Santa Cruz Sentinel
Copley News Service HOLLYWOOD – So David Cassidy's starring in George M. Cohan musical.
Isn’t he the young fellow who was on "The Partridge Family" and then became a rock star?
Yes and no. He's the same person, but that isn't exactly the way he looks at it.
Cassidy. whose face at 31 is still round and sweetly boyish, once filled. 50,000-seat sports stadiums during a worldwide rock tour. He now says that "rock sort of interrupted my career."
Cassidy was born into the world of the theater, and went from there into television, acting the role of a young man who becomes part of a family musical group. So it was an easy step from the television sound stage to the rock concert stage.
He was obviously perfectly at ease backstage, puffing an occasional cigarette and alternately donning and doffing a battered newsboy cap while he waited to rehearse "Little Johnny Jones," the 1904 Cohan hit.
This was the show that spawned the songs "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "Give My Regards to Broadway," and Cassidy will play Cohan's own role of the American jockey in England. The son of Broadway and film actor Jack Cassidy (a Tony Award for "She Loves Me") and actress Evelyn Ward, David got his own start in a West Coast stage show called "And So To Bed," and soon thereafter, in 1969, went to Broadway for a musical by song satirist Allan Sherman, "The Fig Leaves Are Falling." Cassidy said it was the Sherman show that gave him his first professional experience, adding candidly that "it was not one of the all-time greats. It was not a good show, but it was good experience." After a few weeks out of town and three weeks of previews, it closed one week after opening. But executives from CBS Films saw it and liked Cassidy. So he returned to the West Coast. He never made a movie, but he did land the part of Keith In "The Partridge Family," the series based loosely on the Cowsills, a popular mother-and-klds rock band of the late 1960s. Shirley Jones, his real-life stepmother, played his mother. Soon David Cassidy and Jones were making records together, and later he began his solo rock career. Young fans adored him, but the critics looked down their noses. "I didn't find it hard to be accepted by folks," Cassidy said of his early-1970s rock career. "But I was not accepted by the clique of rock 'n' roll elitists. I was never heavy enough, never serious enough. The prejudice was In favor of heavy metal. It was a closed scene. It was easy to take a pot shot at someone who was just trying to entertain." He resented the disdain he encountered, but a world tour in 1974 and 1975 was, nevertheless, a popular success. In many ways, too popular. Fan hysteria was the rule. In Britain's White City Stadium, a young girl with a heart condition suffered a fatal attack. Suddenly rock 'n' roll success lost some of Its attraction. "The critics would come and ignore the show and, instead, review the phenomenon. The kids fainting, the wildness. One compared the scene to World War III. I felt I was the target for all this negativity. It was a plague that followed me around," Cassidy remembered. "The death of that girl left a bad aftertaste in my mouth." So he left the music scene, though he cut a moderately successful album, "Home Is Where the Heart Is," in 1978.
