This Day in Musical History (Adaptation of O’Casey’s ‘Juno’ Opens, Then Flops)

Mar. 9, 1959—Juno might not have been a “can’t miss” musical, but it came loaded with expectations because of its constellation of talents when it opened at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theater.

Its music and lyrics were by the creator of a legendary Depression musical, with a book by a playwright who would eventually write Fiddler on the Roof; a male lead with Hollywood credentials for comedy; an innovative choreographer who changed how dance worked in musicals; an Oscar-winning actor equally at home with directing for the stage; a beloved actress returning to Broadway; and an Irish playwright whose tragicomedy formed the foundation of the show.

But Juno the musical, like its titular heroine, was plagued by misfortune—more specifically, critics who couldn’t hide their disappointment with the result of this all-star team. It closed after 16 performances, and, despite defenders who have attempted revivals, it remains seldom performed.

The musical was based on a 1924 landmark of the Irish Literary Renaissance, Juno and the Paycock, generally regarded as the best entry in Sean O’Casey’s “Dublin Trilogy” set in the period surrounding the Irish War of Independence and Civil War. (See my blog post from a decade ago that reviewed a production at New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre.)

The first adaptation of the play was for the screen rather than the musical stage, in a 1929 movie by Alfred Hitchcock—what biographer Peter Ackroyd called the director’s “first thoroughly conceived and consistent talkie.”

Uncharacteristically, that film included few of Hitchcock’s visual flourishes, but at least it stayed largely faithful to the source. It turned out to be more successful than Hitchcock’s last couple of releases, as he transitioned from silents to talkies.

But Hitchcock, possessed of a vigorous if often twisted sense of humor, may have felt little need to tinker with O’Casey’s dialogue.

In contrast, it was O’Casey’s socialism, not his comic sense, that appealed to songwriter Marc Blitzstein, who had achieved notoriety two decades before with his agitprop musical The Cradle Will Rock.

More recently, his translation of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera had turned that tale of Weimar corruption into what was then the longest-running musical in Off Broadway history—and giving him as much clout with investors as he would ever receive.

Book writer Joseph Stein, though no longer a Marxist, retained enough progressive sympathies as an Adlai Stevenson Democrat to work well with the more leftist Blitzstein.

All of that may have helped secure early on O’Casey’s approval of their project (called, at this initial stage, Daarlin’ Man). 

The playwright never left his home in England to view rehearsals or performances of this musical, and he could be caustic toward anyone who looked askance at his work (as the Abbey Theatre, which rejected some of his more expressionist plays after the “Dublin Trilogy,” could attest). 

But a discussion with Blitzstein and tapes of the songs contemplated for the show led O'Casey to green-light the project.

One fact, had it been considered more thoroughly, might have forestalled this blessing: though Stein and Blitzstein may have shared O’Casey’s leftist sympathies, they did not exhibit the sharp sense of humor that had leavened Juno and the Paycock. 

The tone of the musical, according to future Juno star Victoria Clark, more closely resembled another Weill piece of musical theater, the tragic Street Scene.

Two out-of-town tryouts, in Washington and Boston, proved increasingly troubled. In the spring and early summer of 1958, Blitzstein barely survived an appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, in which he admitted to Communist Party membership till 1949 but refused to name names.

Just when the production appeared to be coming together, Tony Richardson, a rising British theater talent who soon became famous for the film version of Look Back in Anger and the Oscar-winning Best Picture Tom Jones, backed out as director because of scheduling conflicts. His replacement, Vincent J. Donehue, had limited experience to that point with musicals.

Neither did movie and theater star Melvyn Douglas, called in to take over the role of “Captain” Boyle when the choice of the creative team, James Cagney, would only participate if the property were adapted for the screen.

Although the actress who played Boyle’s long-suffering wife and family mainstay, Shirley Booth, had somewhat more experience than Donehue and Douglas with musicals, she was nervous about executing Irish stepdances and playing a “heroic” figure that demanded “an Irish Judith Anderson.”

The production's only Irish actor, Jack MacGowran (suggested by O’Casey), after being provoked repeatedly by Donehue, unleashed a profanity-laced rehearsal diatribe indicating that nobody in the show knew anything about O’Casey or what they were trying to do.

This represented “a fusillade of abuse for director, company and producing organization such as I have rarely heard in many decades of performance work,” Douglas recalled, stunning all concerned because, the leading man conceded, “there was a great deal of truth to what he said.”

Though Blitzstein tried to stay even-tempered, even he was prone to snapping, as when he unloaded on choreographer Agnes de Mille (whose work in this instance, some would later say, was among the best of her career).

Reviews of the January 1959 performances in Washington, while observing that O’Casey’s play presented unique challenges in adapting, still pointed out the musical’s deficiencies in tone and tightness.

A month later, Boston critics—aware of word of mouth already spreading, as well as interviews in which Booth and especially Douglas confessed to their insecurities about the demands required by their roles— noted the same problems.

That proved the undoing of Donehue, who was sacked the morning after the Boston opening.

The history of Broadway includes occasional shows that are rescued from near-certain disaster. But it’s more often the case that the problems apparent before an opening are not fixed in time.

And so, despite the replacement of Donehue with Jose Ferrer, who brought considerable stage credibility and film renown (including an Oscar for Cyrano de Bergerac), and new, better songs from Blitzstein (“It’s Not Irish” and “For Love”), the creative team behind Juno could not improve matters enough in the month before opening on Broadway.

Years later, theater professionals and fans alike would wonder how a show with so much talent behind the scenes and onstage (not just Booth and Douglas, but also, in early stages of their careers, Jean Stapleton and Sada Thompson), could have misfired.

One of the less charitable detractors was Broadway composer Richard Rodgers. In the taxi ride home from the show, he and his wife ridiculed the show's “prosaic lyrics and unmelodiousness,” remembered their daughter Mary Rodgers in her posthumous memoir Shy. 

“Maybe the driver could sing ‘We Have Reached Our Destination’ to similar effect,’” Richard said acidly.

If Broadway musical history is filled with disasters, it also includes shows that, years after their underwhelming openings, find far longer lives, either through audiences who could better appreciate what its creators were attempting (Pal Joey, Chicago) or a combination of more appropriate stagecraft and casting (the current Stephen Sondheim revival, Merrily We Roll Along, starring Daniel Radcliffe).

Blitzstein had an example closer at hand: his Threepenny Opera translation that thrust the Weill-Brecht work into the elite circle of most-performed musicals. Undoubtedly inspired by that example, Juno revivals have been mounted over the years at New York’s Vineyard Theater and City Center, and Chicago’s TimeLine Theatre.

The outcome has been the same: a good try (especially in these productions’ unbending refusal to provide a happy ending), but still a failure. It’s not likely that this verdict will change soon--unless, perhaps, it's staged as an opera rather than a musical (as has been the case over the past four decades with Street Scene and Sondheim's Sweeney Todd--and how Blitzstein's Regina was fashioned from its 1949 creation)

The best way to understand why that situation is so sad is to listen to YouTube performances of some of the musical’s songs, including Rebecca Luker’s rendition of “I Wish It So” or the Celia Keenan-Bolger-Clarke Thorell duet of “My True Heart.”

Flashback, December 1936: Ford’s Irish Project, ‘Plough and the Stars,’ Misfires

Eighty years ago this week, RKO released the passion project of one of Hollywood’s most highly regarded directors, starring one of its best young actresses. But The Plough and the Stars, once highly anticipated, pleased none of the principals involved: the studio, director John Ford, star Barbara Stanwyck, and the Irish playwright whose work was adapted, Sean O’Casey. It raised legitimate questions over how faithfully the film industry would treat complex, provocative subject matter.

Probably Ford’s most famous utterance, at a legendary 1950 Screen Directors Guild showdown over the blacklist (“I am John Ford and I make Westerns”), could just as truly have been rephrased as “I am John Ford and I am Irish-American.” Ireland was second only to the West as a favorite subject.

In the mid-1930s, his most recent Irish project had given him a virtually unrivaled reputation as an artist. The Informer, adapted from the Liam O’Flaherty novel, not only brought him a Best Director Oscar but, for a few decades, a distinction that has since gone to the likes of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo: critical acclamation as the greatest film of all time.

In other words, he was now close to the hottest director in Hollywood. Within the strict bounds of the studio system of the time, his RKO bosses wanted to make him happy.

From the first, everyone should have known that problems would need to be surmounted in translating the material from stage to screen. The Plough and the Stars, like the other parts of the “Dublin Trilogy” by Sean O’Casey, The Shadow of a Gunman and Juno and the Paycock, is a tragicomedy about boastful, cowardly or delusional men and their long-suffering women, set in the tenements of Ireland’s largest city amid the nation’s war of independence and civil war.

The Irish themselves were divided over the meaning of the play, as indicated by a riot during its initial 1926 run at the Abbey Theatre (an event described in this prior post of mine). Certain scenes—including an off-screen orator using phrases from a leader of the Easter Rising, Padraig Pearse, the Irish tricolor brought into a bar, and a prostitute soliciting business—had aroused the ire of the patriotically correct. If the Irish, the people with the most direct knowledge of the events depicted, couldn’t agree about it, how could one ever expect the band of callous outsiders in Hollywood to make sense of it?

John Ford would have none of that.   

What could go wrong? As it turned out, way too much:

*Pleasing the Puritans. One source of the Dublin rioters’ anger was O’Casey’s prostitute character Rosie Redmond. Such fallen women, they complained, were not emblematic of Irish womanhood. No matter how much O’Casey complained about these critics and the censorship they advocated, however, they did not succeed in significantly diluting Rosie’s depiction on stage; only Hollywood managed to do so. It might be argued that this did not affect the political stance of the movie. But it did soften the Marxist O’Casey’s picture of the desperate lengths to which Dublin’s tenement dwellers would go in order to live to tomorrow. Nor was the cantankerous playwright happy about satisfying British censors who requested the removal of any references to God.

*Miscasting of leads. Ford got his wish to hire four members of the Abbey Theatre (including Barry Fitzgerald, who would go on to an Oscar-winning career of his own as a character actor). In return, however, RKO insisted that he hire American stars for the leads in order to assure some box-office revenues. The result was two markedly different acting styles: the stage-based, naturalistic emoting of the Abbey players, vs. the broader manner, honed for the big screen, of Barbara Stanwyck and Preston Foster as, respectively, Nora and Jack Clitheroe. Stanwyck looked particularly out of place, despite the fact that, consummate pro that she was, she threw herself into the role, including trying to get her Irish accent just right. But, according to her biographer Victoria Wilson: “One night, in the projection room, one of the producers decided that somebody had to be understood. The Abbey players couldn’t change their dialect. Barbara was chosen, but the early sequences in which she used a heavy brogue were never reshot.”

*Disagreement over politics. Playwright, director and studio held sharply different views on the justice and effectiveness of the Easter Rising, leaving the point of view of the finished film a muddled mess. O’Casey, at one point a member of the Irish Citizens Army, eventually parted ways with the republican movement for putting nationalist goals above socialist ones. Surviving family members of Irish executed during the rising believed he was ridiculing the patriot cause. On the other hand, the opportunity to plead that cause was part of what drew Ford to the project. His nocturnal scene of Irish soldiers listening to their commander lent the troops an ineradicable dignity. “Events and actions which are only reported in the play (the meeting, the occupation of the GPO) all now appear on the screen,” observe Kevin Rockett, Luke Gibbons and John Hill in their 1987 study, Cinema and Ireland. “Inevitably, these additions undermine the importance of the domestic sphere as the central site for action and with it the virtues that are to be found there.” But Ford’s views clashed with Sam Briskin, RKO’s recently hired production chief, who couldn’t understand what the Irish wanted in the fight. To Ford’s reply—“What did George Washington want? They wanted liberty”—Briskin responded in a way that could only have made Ford bristle: “They’ve got liberty.” In the end, Hollywood’s requirement for a happy ending made a hash of O’Casey’s point about the futility of Pearse’s “blood sacrifice” for nationalism when ordinary human needs for food, shelter and dignity went unmet.

*An ornery director. “Terse, pithy, to the point,” actress Mary Astor once characterized Ford’s directing style. “Very Irish, a dark personality, a sensitivity which he did everything to conceal.” Astor understood him well, and Katharine Hepburn, whom he had directed earlier in 1936 in Mary of Scotland, did more than that: she loved him. Stanwyck did neither. Her early remark about her role—that it was so insubstantial that she could “walk through” it—led Ford to continually taunt her later on with, “Come on, Barbara, and walk through.” After filming was completed, Ford departed for his boat and refused to come back to supervise any additions. That opened the door to Briskin, never comfortable with such a political picture, to changing Jack and Nora Clitheroe from a married couple to lovers, necessitating additional scenes shot without Ford’s approval.

According to Scott Eyman’s biography of Ford, Print the Legend, the movie cost nearly a half-million dollars but only grossed three-quarters of that. That failure made the studio reluctant to take on future potentially prestigious projects, even low-budget ones, if they couldn’t promise a predictable revenue stream. (One of those was another O’Casey masterpiece that had caught Ford’s eye, Juno and the Paycock.) RKO’s post-production alterations led Ford both to depart for Twentieth Century Fox, where he would have a somewhat freer hand, and to become a driving force at the Screen Directors Guild (later the Directors Guild of America) as a counterweight against studio interference.

Ford was in no way done with Irish subject matter, however. In 1940, he wove several Eugene O’Neill one-act plays into The Long Voyage Home. Throughout his Westerns of the 1940s, Irish characters frequently appear as soldiers who perform lonely and dangerous duty on the American frontier. And, in the same year he suffered through one of his most frustrating projects because of his passion for an explicitly Celtic subject, he optioned another short story that, when he finally filmed it 15 years later, netted him his fourth and final Best Director Oscar: The Quiet Man.

Amazingly, for all his negative experience with The Plough and the Stars, he wasn’t done with O’Casey, either. Shortly before the latter’s death in 1964, the playwright agreed to allow filming proceed on the portion of his autobiography dealing with his early life. Unfortunately, Ford could not bring his vision to pass in this case, either. When he fell ill, Young Cassidy fell into the hands of cinematographer Jack Cardiff. Ford, in declining health, made only one other movie thereafter.

Theater Review: O'Casey’s ‘Juno and the Paycock,’ at the Irish Repertory Theatre

“When anyone asks me about the Irish character, I say look at the trees: maimed, stark and misshapen, but ferociously tenacious,” Edna O’Brien has written. This observation by the Irish woman of letters stems largely from her experience in post-independence County Clare in the rural west, but it applies just as strongly, perhaps even more so, in Dublin a few decades before, as the land was wracked first by rebellion, then by civil war.

The plight of women in the city’s poorest, strife-torn tenements found an unusually sympathetic chronicler in Sean O’Casey, a man who cut so constantly against the grain of his society as a Protestant Socialist in increasingly Catholic nationalist Ireland that critic-novelist Thomas Flanagan called him "the quintessential Irishman who is always 'agin' whatever movement he is a part of." 

The playwright’s mix of comedy and tragedy, along with his proletarian and antiwar sympathies, are what usually get emphasized in productions of Juno and the Paycock. But many audience members will find many proto-feminist notes sounded in the production from New York’s Irish Repertory Theatre that will close on Sunday.

Juno and the Paycock is one third of a trilogy of O’Casey’s dramedies, originally staged in 1924 by the Abbey Theatre. In the play, losses occur as much in the home as on the war-torn streets of the time, as, in fratricidal warfare, the Irish soldiers who had once battled Britain for independence now turned on each other in a civil war resulting from a treaty that gave greater self-government but not a complete break from Britain. 

I discussed previously the other two plays in this group: The Shadow of a Gunman and The Plough and the Stars.  Generally considered the finest of the three, Juno and the Paycock also formed the basis for the Marc Blitzstein opera Juno.

The Irish Repertory does not have the technical resources of the Roundabout Theatre Co., which staged it in a fall 2000 production that I attended, starring Derbhla Molloy and Jim Norton in the eponymous roles. 

But that does not work to the disadvantage of the play; in fact, it heightens the audience’s sense of the physical and emotional claustrophobia afflicting the tenement residents of the play.

“Juno,” the nickname of middle-aged wife and mother June Boyle, conjures up an ancient goddess, in marked contrast to her actual position as a beleaguered Dublin housewife trying desperately to keep her family intact. 

The major source of her problems is her husband, “Captain” Jack Boyle (played wonderfully by the Irish Repertory’s co-founder, Ciaran O’Reilly), who is not merely improvident but downright parasitical in dealing with his wife. 

Daughter Mary (played by Mary Mallen) has, as a result of her reading, taken up the cause of labor, which only ends up getting her fired from her job. 

Most worrisome of all might be son Johnny, a onetime quartermaster in the Irish Republican Army, who has been left with nothing for his service but an amputated arm, a limp and screams while asleep.

Into the Boyles’ darkened, dingy lives come improbable rays of sunshine. A schoolteacher, a new beau of Mary’s, not only offers her the possibility of a like-minded spirit but the entire family the chance to escape their poverty via a will of a relative of Jack’s that he has drawn. 

But by the final curtain, Juno will have to summon even greater reserves of courage and dignity, as triple catastrophe descends on the Boyles.

“The whole world is in a terrible state o’ chassis!” Jack moans—but he, like virtually all the men in the play, is at a loss over what to do about it. Whenever he hears of the chance of a job, he suddenly develops an incapacitating malady. 

Even the best male in the play, a well-meaning former boyfriend of Mary’s, cannot surmount traditional contemporary notions of feminine virtue.

Under the expert direction of Charlotte Moore, the cast strikes the right notes in balancing the tragedy that is never far from these tenement-trapped characters and the humor that relieves it. 

The great majority of the cast matches up quite well, physically, as described by the playwright himself, particularly John Keating as Jack’s fair-weather drinking buddy “Joxer” Daly, embodying to the life the character’s “spare…loosely built” frame and “cunning twinkle.”

But the powerful centerpiece of this production is J. Smith-Cameron as Juno. The actress might be most familiar to the general public for her role as Melinda Mickens in the cable series True Blood, but she’s also an accomplished stage veteran with two Obie Awards to her credit. 

Here, she must modulate from reproof to rejoicing to resignation as Juno, bringing equal authority to moments of sorrow as much as to one of the devastating one-liners she launches at her no-good spouse (“You’d do far more work with a knife an’ fork than you’ll ever do with a shovel!”). 

This show was the veteran actress's debut with the Irish Repertory, and I fervently hope that she will appear again, and soon.

Those of Irish descent, all too familiar with their country’s centuries of woe, will identify the most with the characters here. 

But O’Casey’s themes are universal, particularly in his piercing cry against nationalist violence. 

“Good God, haven’t I done enough for Ireland?” young, maimed Johnny cries out when paid a visit by a sinister “Irregular Mobilizer” in the Irish Republican Army.  

“Boyle,” the man tells him sternly, “no man can do enough for Ireland!” 

Substitute “Russia,” “China,” “Cuba,” “Iran,” and almost any other country marked by revolutionary chaos in the 90 years since this play’s premiere, and virtually any citizen of that country would shudder in recognition.

The wonder is not a nation came into being in the Emerald Isle after so much suffering, but that, unlike the other countries I named, it continued as a stable (albeit economically stagnant) republic ever since then.

This Day in Theater History (O’Casey’s ‘Gunman’ Debuts at Ireland’s Abbey Theatre)

April 12, 1923—The Shadow of a Gunman, the first play of Sean O’Casey’s staged by Ireland’s Abbey Theatre after three prior unsuccessful tries by the playwright, opened on a Thursday night to so-so business. But by the end of its four-performance run that weekend, the first of his “Dublin Trilogy” of plays on nationalism and class in revolutionary Ireland had won wide acclaim, saved the renowned theater from hard times, and set its creator on the course of the most successful stage of his career.

Years later, in the fourth volume of his memoir, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, O’Casey recalled his chagrin when he received the Abbey's check in the mail for this run: less than four pounds. “Dimly he began to realize that the Abbey Theatre would never provide a living," he wrote of himself in the third person. "It was a blow, a bitter disappointment.”

In another sense, however, he should not have been shocked. That ambitious Irish theatrical institution had not even reached 20 years old at the time of his premiere, and there was a real question if it would endure. 

John Millington Synge, whose The Playboy of the Western World had provided it with its first cause celebre in the form of a riot during its initial run, had died 14 years before; William Butler Yeats, another co-founder, remained with the theater, but his attention was increasingly taken up with his poetry; and the convulsions surrounding Ireland’s War of Independence had left most of Dublin with little interest or opportunity to patronize the institution.

In fact, it might be said that the one force keeping it going throughout this time was Lady Augusta Gregory, one of its artistic directors and a longtime patron of artists. It was in the latter role that, at her family estate of Coole, she nurtured the talent of O’Casey, a socially awkward, guilt-ridden product of the streets of Dublin.

The director of The Shadow of a Gunman was Lennox Robinson, himself a prolific playwright. By the end of the decade, he would be involved with the rejection of a later O’Casey play, The Silver Tassie. Moreover, though Yeats would, in a couple of years, stoutly defend O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars, it may have had as more to do with guarding artistic expression than in believing in the play’s quality.

If Yeats was Synge’s biggest partisan among Abbey management in its early years, then Lady Gregory was O’Casey’s at this point. He was self-educated and had never had any theater training.  Everything he knew came from watching performances, including at the Abbey. The rest of the meat of his tenement-set plays from this period came from the raw view of life he had gained as a laborer, including nine years as a railway. 

Lady Gregory got O'Casey to concentrate on his greatest strength--characterization--in this play and the two that followed, Juno and the Paycock and The Plough and the Stars. They were the biggest hits the Abbey had till that point.

O’Casey and Gregory truly made an odd couple, this young Marxist and elderly aristocrat, but they became real soul mates. After the hugely successful premiere of Juno and the Paycock, she even told Yeats, “This is one of the evenings at the Abbey that makes me glad to have been born.”

Yeats may have had one influence on the play. One story goes that he urged O’Casey to change his original title, On the Run, because another play by that name existed. 

Subsequently, the playwright dreamt he saw a “gunman in a mirror.” However, O’Casey’s memoir is silent on this point, so it’s hard to tell how much to make of this.

Part of the reason for the success of The Shadow of a Gunman was simply that it spoke so urgently to its time. The play was set only three years before, in the midst of the war for independence from Great Britain, but the settlement of hostilities between the rebels and the Empire had not ended the violence.

In fact, this treaty, while granting self-rule for the island, had only succeeded in igniting a civil war among the rebels, over provisions requiring an oath of allegiance to the crown and the drawing of a boundary for Ulster that eventually left that broken off from the rest of the republic while still under British rule.

The result: at the time of the premiere, as the Irish Civil War raged outside in the streets, a program note for O’Casey’s play assured the audience that any gunfire heard was part of the plot.

O’Casey’s “Dublin trilogy” has endured as a definitive commentary on the resort of the 20^th century to settle issues of nationalist identity through revolutionary violence. 

The playwright was critical of male blustering that left women and the poor disproportionately suffering from the consequences of revolution. If there are any heroic figures in the trilogy, it is not the men who strut and drink their way across the stage, but the wives and mothers who struggle to keep their lives together.

The template for these women was his own mother, who managed to keep her family together after the death of her husband when Sean was only six years old--and who watched over him through painful eye disease. The playwright lived with her until her death, when he was 40, and his inability up to that point to make a decent living that would provide for her burdened him with a guilt that fed his artistic rage.

The Shadow of a Gunman was performed many times over the years by the Abbey, most recently as part of the theater’s 1990 tour. A PBS performance from 1972 starred the Irish actor Jack MacGowran as well as the Americans Frank Converse and Richard Dreyfuss. Twenty years later, two other famous Irish-born actors, Kenneth Branagh and Stephen Rea, starred in a version that was broadcast as part of the BBC2 Performance series.

Ironically, though much of O'Casey's later work would be expressionist in style, the success of his "Dublin Trilogy" influenced the Abbey's definitive turn in the coming years toward social realism.

Frank McCourt, who wrote with a similar seriocomic bent on the miseries of his childhood and his long-suffering mother in the Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir Angela's Ashes, summed up the playwright's character about as well as anyone else I have ever come across:

"He's the first Irish writer I ever read who wrote about rags, dirt, hunger, babies, dying. The other writers go on about farms and fairies and the mist that do be on the bog and it's a relief to discover one with bad eyes and a suffering mother."