Sixteen
years ago, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Eugene O’Neill’s only
comedy, Ah! Wilderness, had, a half century before, been turned into a
musical: Take Me Along. The company that mounted the revival, New York’s
Irish Repertory Theatre, was also responsible for unearthing another
musical that had faded out of popular consciousness over the years: Earnest
in Love.
In the
mid-to-late 1950s, it was possible to envision musicals taken from almost any
source, mounted in almost any medium. Lerner and Loewe had struck it rich on
Broadway by turning George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion into My Fair Lady,
and Rodgers and Hart had crafted a musical especially for TV with Cinderella.
It was
only a matter of time before someone had the bright idea of adapting another
play by a witty Anglo-American playwright into a TV hour of song, Who’s
Earnest?, that was shown on The United States Steel Hour in 1957.
Someone then had the idea of expanding the show and taking it to the stage,
which it did three years later.
The show’s creators, while accomplished songwriters, didn’t have the exalted pedigree of other musical creators of the time.
Anne Croswell, responsible for the book and lyrics, had been a copywriter for the J. Walter Thompson and Leo Burnett advertising agencies, a television production assistant, and creator of the 1956 Democratic campaign song "Believe in Stevenson" for penning Who’s Earnest? and Huck Finn for The United States Steel Hour.
Composer
Lee Pockriss, a frequent collaborator with Croswell, had received a
Grammy nomination for the Perry Como hit, "Catch a Falling Star.”
Critics
applauded the show for its droll lyrics and for retaining Wilde’s whimsical
plot and dialogue, but few people left the theater humming the songs.
Ernest
in Love was quickly
overshadowed by another Off-Broadway musical that premiered the day before its
debut, The Fantasticks, which in its original run went on for another 42
years. Even after moving to the Cherry Lane Theatre, Ernest totaled 111
performances.
Luckily, an
original-cast recording was released a month and half later. That has helped to
ensure that the musical would not go completely unnoticed since then, with
productions by professional, college, and community theaters. But there’s
always been a sense of it being dusted off, even unearthed, whenever someone
gets around to it.
Croswell
and Pockriss, then in their thirties, lived into the new millennium, but never
had a major success on the Broadway stage. Their closest shot, Tovarich,
a 1963 star vehicle for Vivien Leigh, could not sustain its run past six months
once the talented but troubled actress suffered a nervous breakdown at a
matinee.
Though
Croswell continued to write shows produced in smaller venues like Connecticut’s
Goodspeed Opera House for another few decades, she was not seen again on the Great
White Way once her 1968 musical, I’m Solomon, closed after seven
performances—a legendary flop that, playwright and screenwriter William Goldman
estimated, lost between $700,000 and $800,000.
As for
Pockriss, he went on to have his share of hits (e.g., Shelley Fabares’ “Johnny
Angel”), much-heard children’s songs in the 1980s for Sesame Street, and
a 1970 musical adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby that
never made it to production. But another novelty song of his continues to
reverberate in my mind: “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini.”
Whenever
the latter tune pops up on oldies stations, it’s always too soon for my taste. Someone
who felt similarly was director Billy Wilder, who featured it in his 1961 Cold
War satire One, Two, Three as the music that the East German police used
to torture a suspected spy.
Just think:
Within a year, falling from Oscar Wilde to “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow
Polkadot Bikini.” It’s even worse than going from writing Frasier or The
Gilmore Girls to Married With Children. It may have provided
royalties for the rest of Pockriss’ life, but all the same…
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