This Day in Theater History (‘Wonderful Town’ Opens After Not-So-Wonderful Creation)

Feb. 25, 1953—Most Broadway playgoers who saw the sunny musical comedy Wonderful Town, which premiered on this date at the Winter Garden Theatre, had no idea that in actuality, the lives of its two main characters—young, single sisters out to conquer New York—had been blighted by tragedy, nor that the production they were watching had been marked by more than the usual amount of ego-tripping, backstabbing, betrayal and hysteria present in any collaborative creative production.

But don’t take my word for it—just listen to director George Abbott, a veteran of six decades of theater wars, who noted: “There was more hysterical debate, more acrimony, more tension and more screaming connected with this play than with any other show I was ever involved with."

The setting of the musical, New York in the Depression, does not sound like much fun, but Ruth McKenney spun her adventures in the big city into comic gold in the form of My Sister Eileen, a collection of sketches from The New Yorker, in 1938. At that point, success beckoned for both Ruth and the title character. Two years after the book’s appearance, Eileen had left the East Coast for Hollywood as an executive assistant to Walt Disney, and Ruth was awaiting an event that would boost her sales even further: a Broadway comedy based on the last two chapters of her book, involving life in the Greenwich Village apartment she shared with her madcap beautiful sister.

Not much seemed to go right for Ruth afterwards:

*Four days before the opening, Eileen’s husband, novelist Nathanael West (Day of the Locusts), a terrible driver, ran a stop sign. The resulting collision killed both him and Eileen. The comedy premiered as scheduled on Broadway, but Ruth understandably was in no mood to attend.

*Ruth and her husband, Richard Bransten (professional name: George Minton), both Communists, were driven out of the party--though they still had to endure the blacklisting of the McCarthy Era.

*On Ruth’s 44^th birthday in 1955, Richard committed suicide.

*Ruth died in 1972 at age 60, with 10 books to her credit but none as successful as My Sister Eileen. 

(For a fine description of the life of Ruth, see Scott Johnson's Powerline blog post here.)

The 1940 comedy, by Jerome Chodorov and Joseph Fields (brother of famed lyricist Dorothy Fields), became a big hit, then was adapted into a film two years later starring Rosalind Russell. In 1950, Chodorov and Fields approached Abbott about adapting the work into a musical, with Russell again in the role of the sharp-witted older sister of a bombshell. Despite initial misgivings, Abbott’s initial resistance was worn down, much to his later regret.

The two men called on to create the score, composer Leroy Anderson and lyricist Arnold Horwitt, worked slowly, and what they had in hand didn’t please Russell or Abbott. With the start of rehearsals looming, Betty Comden and Adolph Green—a team known for working fast, and under tough taskmasters, at that (they had survived Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain)—were called in. Comden and Green overcame the rather half-hearted resistance of their friend, Leonard Bernstein, to handle the music while they worked on the lyrics.

True to form, Comden and Green, with help from Bernstein, whipped several numbers together in only a month. Chodorov and Fields were furious: What had happened to their warm, rather sentimental material? (The sharply satiric songs that were Comden and Green’s stock in trade may have also reminded them a bit too much of the most highly praised bits from the 1940 show, widely rumored to have been concocted by director-playwright George S. Kaufman.) It didn’t help that Jerome Robbins, the man that Abbott called on to fix lingering problems with the show, ended up informing on Chodorov as a Communist.

Matters came to a head in the show’s out-of-town New Haven performances prior to its Broadway opening. Ingenue Edie Adams, suspecting that she would be scapegoated for the production’s failures, told the production team that it was impossible to deal with contradictory notes about her performance from so many different people. Chodorov and Fields darkly warned that without moving the show back to their original concept, it faced disaster. Russell, not trained as a singer, stressed out by the rising tension all around her, lost her voice right after the New Haven opening.

In the end, when the show got to the Winter Garden Theatre, the frothy atmosphere onstage—typified by the funny song “Ohio” and the infectious “Conga”—won over critics and audiences. The tensions between the show’s old and new creative teams were never really smoothed over, but Wonderful Town won five Tonys (including Best Musical and, for Russell, Best Actress in a Musical), on its way to 559 performances.

A half-century after its premiere, a revival of Wonderful Town was staged. Like the original critics and audiences, I, too, was bowled over by the show’s spirit of fun and wit—testimony to the work of Comden and Green. Yet even in this case, for a show with such a problematic history, there couldn’t help but be some troubles. Donna Murphy, taking over Russell’s lead role, proved a dazzling all-purpose talent—not just acting (Russell’s forte), but also singing and dancing up a storm. But she had to take so many absences during the show’s nearly 500-performance run that, it is said, her chances for another Tony Award were badly damaged.

 

This Day in Entertainment History (Judy Holliday and Fellow “Revuers” in Show-Biz Start)

August 28, 1939—Attendees at the Westport County Playhouse saw The Revuers, a satirical musical act that had been together less than a year, but were already performing with a wit and skill that would play out over the next several decades.

Two of the five-member group would become songwriter partners in Hollywood and on Broadway: Adolph Green and Betty Comden. Another was an 18-year-old who perfected a dumb-blonde act that was exactly the opposite of her frighteningly talented and intelligent real-life persona: Judith Tavin, better known to vintage-film aficionados like myself as Judy Holliday.

The group—whose members also included Alvin Hammer and John Frank—got its start in December of the prior year at the Village Vanguard. Its owner, Max Gordon, had no liquor license but thought the youngsters’ satirical skits, dances and songs (with words and music by Comden and Green, since they couldn’t afford to pay for anyone else’s) would give his place the bohemian ambiance that had existed in Greenwich Village only a few decades before.

For the next five years, the Revuers went on a whirligig of engagements—uptown theaters, nightclubs, and radio—where they performed their collaboratively created material. They even managed an extended run at Radio City Music Hall. Sometimes they were even joined by recent Harvard alum Leonard Bernstein, a friend of Green’s from summer camp a few years before, who got into the spirit of the enterprise by playing the piano for the hell of it.

The group was infused with a sense of camaraderie. Even the most serious obstacle in the face of their progress—Frank’s heavy drinking—was resolved as amicably as could be expected, with Frank leaving the group but still retaining a financial interest.

That mutual loyalty stood the group in good stead in their brief Hollywood stint, and in the sometimes-troubled years beyond. Agents tried to sign Holliday separately from the rest of the group, but she refused, until a compromise was worked out: the Revuers as a whole would be cast in one picture, but only Holliday would be granted a standard multi-year contract.

The group’s single scene in its single film—Greenwich Village—ended up on the cutting-room floor. The contracts for Hammer, Comden and Green were not renewed—pretty amazing lack of foresight, when you consider the incredible contributions the latter two made to the movie musical within the next 16 years (e.g., The Barkleys of Broadway, On the Town, Singin' in the Rain, The Band Wagon, It's Always Fair Weather, and Bells are Ringing).

Holliday wasn’t used in much better fashion, making only three films before she, too, had to decamp back east. Her breakthrough came on Broadway, when she replaced Jean Arthur—afflicted with an attack of the nerves—before the opening of Garson Kanin’s Born Yesterday.

Stefany Anne Goldberg has a fascinating take on Holliday and her Born Yesterday character Billie Dawn as the epitome of “the dumb broad,” as opposed to the “dumb blonde” epitomized by Marilyn Monroe. I think that comparing the two women yields these interesting similarities:

* Both experienced difficult childhoods (the mental illness of Monroe’s mother meant that Marilyn was sent to an orphans’ home, while Holliday’s parents split);

* Both were afflicted at points with depression (Monroe’s, obviously, far more disabling than Holliday’s);

* Both had film careers that lasted for roughly the same period, 1949-1960;

* Both died young, in the 1960s.

And yet, Marilyn has become an American icon, celebrated in song (Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind”), while Holliday—possessed of looks, talent, and intelligence (an I.Q. of 172!!!!)—does not have anywhere near the same mass recognition. What a shame.

Back to the Revuers. I mentioned that the group had some troubled years. One of these came in the midst of one of the high points of Holliday’s career, her Tony-winning Broadway triumph in Bells Are Ringing. (The character—an employee at a telephone answering service—was one that she could identify with, since she’d worked as a switchboard operator for Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater before she took up with The Revuers.)

Holliday’s love affair with co-star Sydney Chaplin provided a year’s worth of backstage drama. Early on, she championed Charlie Chaplin’s son—a charmer who, unfortunately, did not have much of a singing voice—when everyone else (starting, but by no means ending, with Comden and Green) insisted he would not do.

Later, when their affair ended and she made clear she not only she wanted no part of him but also no part of anyone who continued to socialize with him, her two longtime songwriting friends found their relationship with Holliday sorely tested. After all they’d been through, Comden and Green had come to like Chaplin, and wouldn’t hear of disinviting him to parties.

Holliday bristled at Green about her feelings of betrayal, but continued with the show's run—as well as the movie, the last one she would make. She died after a horrific struggle with breast cancer, at age 43.

Once you’re done looking at some of the best of Holliday on film (I’d recommend the hilarious card scene with Broderick Crawford in Born Yesterday or her emotionally lacerating discovery that her son has just died, in the incredibly underrated The Marrying Kind), go back a little further in time, and listen to these audio clips of her with the other Revuers, and see how she got started. After you've stopped laughing, wipe away a tear for what we've all lost.