Robert Alan Bernstein, 67, is a retired television publicist who never gave up the dream of his youth: to write musical shows.
So recently his children, Douglas, Tracy and Jed Bernstein, took over the Roundabout Theater on Broadway, gathered together their father's friends from the theater and some of their own, and put on a show called "Bernstein on Broadway.""My father never had his musicals produced on Broadway, though sometimes he came tantalizingly close, so we felt this was an appropriate way to honor him," said Douglas Bernstein, himself a playwright and composer.
The occasion marked the 50th anniversary of his father's first song.
"We produced a two-hour celebration of 25 numbers he had written and enlisted the aid of well-known theater and television per-sonalities," the younger Bernstein said, listing Barbara Barrie, Tovah Feldshuh and Dick Hyman among them.
Tony Roberts, who played the wizard in a skit, "The Wizard and the Lizard," that Bernstein had written for his own children, said: "I think it is the most unusual event I was ever asked to be a part of. It was not a benefit, not something for the purpose of promotion, but almost like a service in a religious sense. It was an event by a family full of love, and you don't often get asked to be part of that unless it is your own family."