Years before he found fame as red-headed prankster Ralph Malph on the ’70s sitcom “Happy Days,” Donny Most was a red-headed 14-year-old kid spending his summer as part of a youth vaudeville troupe that performed in New York’s Catskill Mountains.
“Music was my first love,” says Most, 71, who now lives in Longmont. “I grew up in Brooklyn, and when I was 13, I would take the subway into Manhattan every Saturday to go to a school that was run by an old vaudeville performer named Charlie Lowe. Charlie would handpick students every summer to be part of a nightclub revue, so I spent the summer I was 14 singing in a nightclub revue up in the Catskills.”
That experience solidified an appreciation for the Great American Songbook that began when Most first watched “The Jolson Story” (a biopic of singer Al Jolson) at age 9. Though Anson Williams’ Potsie Weber did most of the singing when Richie Cunningham’s band rocked Arnold’s Drive-In on Happy Days, Most has returned to his first love in recent years, teaming with big bands to perform standards like “Luck Be a Lady” and “Mack the Knife” in venues in California, Florida, New York and his new home state of Colorado.
“I did a bunch of musical theater over the years, and sometimes I’d get occasions to sing on telethons and charity events,” Most said. “But it wasn’t until about 10 years ago when it hit me, because I was still listening to jazz standards and the legendary artists who performed them. I said, ‘If I’m ever going to do it, I’d better start,’ because I wasn’t 20 anymore. So I put together a show the way I always wanted to do, working with a musical director I knew from the East Coast. We tried it out at a jazz club in L.A., and it went great.”
Most has continued performing his big band concerts regularly since then; in 2017, he released an album, “Mostly Swinging,” featuring his versions of such classics as “Let’s Fall in Love” and “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” When he and his wife moved to Colorado in 2023 to be closer to their daughter and son-in-law and their new baby, he got connected with the Denver-based 18-piece Metropolitan Jazz Orchestra, with which he has performed at Nissi’s in Lafayette and Dazzle in Denver. His most recent show at the latter venue was on July 10.
“I love performing live, whether it’s acting in theater or singing in clubs,” he said. “It’s just more visceral. Interacting with the audience and feeling the audience and the musicians feeding off each other and me feeding off them — that’s what jazz is. Musicians doing things the way they feel, and it’s never the same thing twice.”
On stage and on his album, Most pays tribute to the jazz singers he listened to as a youngster — such artists as Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and his all-time favorite, Bobby Darin.
“He was my main man,” Most says of Darin. “A lot of people hear his name and they think of him from his early part of his career, when he did rock ’n’ roll, but that was a means to an end for him. That’s not what he was really into. I got to see him at the Copacabana in New York twice, and then a third time in Central Park, and he could swing with the best of them.”
Most is happy to see the accolades actor Jonathan Groff is receiving for his starring role in the Broadway musical “Just in Time,” based on Darin’s life — and he was just as happy to see Kevin Spacey’s portrayal of Darin in the 2004 film “Beyond the Sea” — but both projects make him think back to the mid-1970s, a few years after Darin’s death, when Most was in talks to produce and star in a Darin biopic.
“I had a vision of how to do it like the movie ‘Lenny,’ which was about Lenny Bruce,” he said. “I got past the first meeting with an executive who thought it was a good idea, and they sent me up the ladder to somebody else in the film department, but ultimately, they passed. When I saw the Broadway play was coming out, I was happy they were doing it — he had a very interesting life, and it’s a compelling story — but there’s always part of me that feels like, ‘Man, I wish I could have done the film that I wanted to do.’”
When he’s not singing, Most is still acting — his latest film, the 1920s gangster drama “Harsens Island Revenge,” is in theaters now — and connecting with “Happy Days” fans at TV conventions. Though his time on the long-running show ended decades ago, he says, talking with viewers can take him right back to the soundstage.
“There are times when it seems like another lifetime, but there are other times when something comes back — a memory, or somebody’s talking to me about a specific episode that they loved — and I can be back in that moment,” he said. “When I do personal appearances — Anson and I do them together sometimes, and sometimes we do them with Henry Winkler, as well — it’s surprising how many people come up and tell us how much that show meant to them during a time when they were going through a rough period, whether it was illness, relationships, family — the show is what they would look forward to. They could just laugh and get away from it.”
Greg Glasgow is a Colorado freelance writer.