Show Business

The first thing anybody needs to know about Ludwig Live! is that the cabaret show, playing at the Kimmel Center's Innovation Studio, has little to do with Beethoven or even having laughs at his expense. Using tired devices such as the clash of high and low art, Ludwig Live! , which opened Friday, explores how intentionally ramshackle showbiz somehow holds the stage. The concept is that cranky old Beethoven - played by Charles Lindberg, in the cheapest wig imaginable - is somehow back from the dead and taking his story on the road with a troupe of actors.

Allen Shore found his inspirational message, the one that turned his life around and made him "angelic," in the Wall Street Journal. He was drinking coffee from a big mug that morning in 1984 with the newspaper spread across his desk. A lean, athletic-looking businessman, he was, at age 57, successful, active and almost happy. Then he saw the message that would make him happy. "It was a little ad, saying they were looking for someone to invest in the making of an original-cast record album," Shore recalled, drinking coffee from a big mug on his desk at the Elkins Park headquarters of his company, Perfect Host Enterprises.

The smell of smoke still hung yesterday over what little remained of the costume shop owned by Elaine Scanlan and her mother, Doris Jester. But the pair insisted that the Merry Makers troupe would still march up Broad Street in the Mummers Parade. "While I stood and watched the shop burn, Mom was on the phone in the restaurant across the street getting the measurements so we could remake the Mummers outfits," Scanlan said at her home, where the family set up a makeshift sewing factory almost immediately after the Monday morning fire.

Liberace. When you say the name, people either smile with pleasure . . . or smirk with disdain. The name conjures up his wide toothy grin, his elaborate, foppish outfits, his rhinestone-studded piano with candelabra on top. He has been Big Box Office in America for 35 years now - ever since his dimples made their debut on a network TV show in 1952. Today, at the age of 67, he lies gravely ill at his Palm Springs, Calif., mansion, breathing through an oxygen mask, with doctors at his bedside round the clock.

Yesterday's miserable weather couldn't dampen the turnout at the 17th annual Arts and Business Council's award luncheon. A record number - 1,500 people, from the world of the arts and business - showed up in the train-shed ballroom of the Convention Center. They came to celebrate the partnership of arts and business in the region. And they came to learn the winners of this year's awards for arts management excellence and business-arts partnership. The foundation that exists for the benefit of one of the city's oldest institutions - the Free Library, now celebrating its 107th birthday - was named the sole winner of the arts management excellence award - an award given in past years to two institutions.

Rex S. Morgan Sr., 67, the robust, red-haired Channel 6 personality who hosted a morning television show during the 1960s with his homespun humor and an indolent basset hound, died Tuesday at the Fairfax (Va.) Nursing Center after complications from Parkinson's syndrome. In an era with greater emphasis on local programming, Mr. Morgan was the easy-mannered anchor of Morgan in the Morning, an hourlong show that featured everything from celebrity interviews and nightclub acts to brief newscasts and daily exercise routines.

Jack Steck, 97, vaudevillian and Philadelphia radio and television broadcast pioneer, died Friday at the Bryn Mawr Terrace convalescent home in Haverford. He had lived in Havertown for 42 years. A 35-year veteran of WFIL radio and TV (now WPVI), where he was producer, programmer and talent scout, Steck hired Dick Clark, who later hosted the live TV dance show American Bandstand in the 1950s. He launched Larry Ferrari's television organ program, and he created Happy the Clown. "He is an era all by himself," said WPEN radio disc jockey, Bill (Wee Willie)

The 75-year-old woman behind the musical Bubbling Brown Sugar looks as though she would be more at home in a church than in the nightclubs of 1920s Harlem glorified in the musical, now at the Walnut Street Theater. But actress Rosetta LeNoire knew the nightlife of Harlem well. As a child, she recalled in a recent interview, "we lived at 137th Street and Seventh Avenue, facing the Renaissance Theater. " She pointed to a picture on the wall of her office at the Manhattan-based AMAS Repertory Theater, which she founded 17 years ago. "My godfather, Uncle Bo - there he is over there - there is no place he wouldn't take me. " No ordinary uncle, Uncle Bo was Bill Robinson, the legendary "Bojangles," perhaps the most famous tap-dancer of the century.

They don't take bets at Garden State Park like the kind Stephen Gorse made a few weeks back. Gorse was so sure the forthcoming Kenny Rogers concert at Garden State's Pavilion Theatre would be a winner, he put his home on the line to make sure the show would get proper financial backing. "Let's just say that I signed a note," said Gorse, president of the Greater Cherry Hill Convention and Visitors Bureau. "The note's been paid off. It was paid off two weeks early, that's how well the ticket sales went.

The Anthony Wayne is back in business. After sitting vacant for nearly a year and generally decaying for long before that, the landmark movie theater in Wayne is slated to reopen late this year under the management of Clearview Cinemas, owner and local developer Steve Bajus said yesterday. Clearview, a Chatham, N.J.-based cinema company that specializes in small suburban theaters, has signed a 30-year lease with Bajus, who promised when he bought the building last year that the historic 700-seat theater would remain a theater.