50 Years Ago on Broadway

Among the great stars appearing on Broadway during the 1955-56 season were Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne (The Great Sebastians), Shirley Booth (Desk Set), Edward G. Robinson (The Middle of the Night), Bert Lahr (Waiting for Godot), Michael Redgrave (Tiger at the Gates), Arthur Kennedy and Richard Kiley (Time Limit), Sammy Davis Jr. (Mr. Wonderful), Van Heflin and Eileen Heckart (A View from the Bridge), Walter Matthau and Jayne Mansfield (Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?).

There were only two Best Musical contenders for the 1955-56 Tony Award: the winner, Damn Yankees (which had opened too late for consideration the previous season and about which I wrote in last year’s retrospective); and Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Pipe Dream, not one of the team’s successes. Had the Tony deadline been in May as it is now, and not March 1, the category would have included the Lerner & Loewe classic My Fair Lady, which opened in March 1956, and Frank Loesser’s glorious The Most Happy Fella, which bowed in May.

Loesser wrote the book, music, and lyrics for the show, an adaptation of Sidney Howard’s 1925 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama They Knew What They Wanted. In the process, he added several major characters. The operatic musical starred Robert Weede and Jo Sullivan, who later became Mrs. Loesser. For this article, Jo Sullivan Loesser spoke about the show and how she was cast in the role of Rosabella, for which she received a Tony Award nomination.

“I was in Threepenny Opera, the big revival at the Theatre de Lys with Lotte Lenya, Bea Arthur, Scott Merrill, and everybody,” Sullivan recalls. “Frank and Lynn Loesser — he was married to her at the time — came down to see the show. They were looking for a soprano. In those days, all the sopranos were young, blonde little girls: Barbara Cook, Florence Henderson, myself. I auditioned quite a few times and, finally, I got the part. We had to learn the entire score before the start of rehearsals., because you couldn’t do it in so short a time — especially Tony [Weede]. My God, he sang all night long!”

During the run, Weede performed only six times a week; Richard Torigi played the matinees. “I stayed the entire year-and-a-half in New York,” says Mrs. Loesser. “Then, after a few months, Arthur Rubin [Giuseppe] and I joined the show in California. We were well aware that Happy Fella was a landmark. It was a very special, different piece.” According to his widow, Loesser originally wrote the musical’s opening song, “Ooh, My Feet” — sung by Susan Johnson as Cleo — for the Lt. Brannigan character in Guys and Dolls, but the number was cut from that show.

New York City Opera will present The Most Happy Fella later this season. “I want to speak to the director and see what his plans are,” Sullivan remarks. “I’m hoping that they will restore some of the songs that were taken out. They took out quite a few, especially for the character Marie [Tony Esposito’s sister]. I think Happy Fella is such a wonderful piece.”

Also working on Broadway during the 1955-56 season were several other talents who are still with us. Julie Harris received the season’s Best Actress Tony — her second of a record five — for her performance as Saint Joan in The Lark, which co-starred Boris Karloff. Robert Morse made his Broadway debut as Barnaby Tucker in The Matchmaker. Marian Seldes, currently winning raves in Terrence McNally’s Dedication, or the Stuff of Dreams, had a supporting role in The Chalk Garden, which starred Siobhan McKenna and Gladys Cooper.

Ira Levin’s No Time for Sergeants had scored a success as a TV play in March 1955; the piece came to Broadway seven months later and made a star of Andy Griffith, cast as a hillbilly draftee. Patricia Neal starred in A Roomful of Roses, which became the 1956 movie Teenage Rebel with Ginger Rogers in Neal’s role. Joanne Woodward had the female lead in the short-lived The Lovers, later filmed as The War Lord (1965).

Alan Alda, who has just completed a Tony-nominated turn in Glengarry Glen Ross, understudied Don Murray in The Hot Corner, which tallied only five performances in January 1956. The show starred and was directed by Sam Levene, who had co-starred with Alan’s father Robert Alda in Guys and Dolls. Carol Channing, who’ll be doing her stuff at Feinstein’s October 11-22, played a silver-screen siren in The Vamp, a November 1955 musical that lasted 60 performances at the Winter Garden. Maggie Smith and Jane Connell were in New Faces of 1956; adorned in oranges, Dame Maggie descended a staircase in a Ziegfeld spoof, while Connell’s big number was the hilarious “April in Fairbanks.”

Chita Rivera, who’ll return to Broadway in December in Chita Rivera: The Dancer’s Life, played Rita Romano in Mr. Wonderful, which made a star of Sammy Davis, Jr. In her new show (book by Terrence McNally), Rivera reportedly speaks of her romance with Davis. Elaine Stritch, whose new one-woman show At Home at the Carlyle runs September 10-October 29, could be seen back then as Grace in William Inge’s Bus Stop — a nominee for Best Play, having opened on March 2, 1955. (The award went to The Diary of Anne Frank.)

Catch a Star, a revue featuring Pat Carroll and David Burns, opened at the Plymouth on September 6, 1955 and ran 23 performances. It marked the Broadway debut of TV writer Neil Simon; he and brother Danny provided the sketches, which spoofed, among other topics, Marlon Brando’s acting and Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty (called “Arty“). Later in the season, the Simon siblings contributed a sketch to New Faces of 1956. After that, Neil Simon did not return to Broadway until 1961, when his comedy Come Blow Your Horn premiered. The 2005-06 season will see revivals of Simon’s second and third plays, Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple, in reverse order.

George Abbott, Helen Hayes, and Mary Martin starred in a revival of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth. Also in the large cast were Martin’s daughter, Heller Halliday, and a superb actress making her Broadway debut: Frances Sternhagen. A Hatful of Rain starred Shelley Winters as a pregnant housewife and Ben Gazzara as her drug-addicted husband. In the role of Gazzara’s caring brother, Anthony Franciosa gained attention from critics and off-stage attention from the leading lady, later becoming Winters’ third spouse. Succeeding the two leads for the last month of the show’s year-long run were an oddly paired Vivian Blaine (Guys and Dolls‘ original Miss Adelaide) and newcomer Steve McQueen in his only Broadway appearance.

London’s D’Oyly Carte Opera Company brought a season of Gilbert and Sullivan to the Shubert, while British comedienne Joyce Grenfell headlined a revue (for which she also wrote book and lyrics) at the Bijou. Maurice Chevalier dispensed Gallic charm at the Lyceum while Marcel Marceau mined mime at the Phoenix, then at the Ethel Barrymore, and later at City Center. Other offerings at City Center, which received a special Tony Award that season, included A Streetcar Named Desire with Tallulah Bankhead as Blanche (a part that supposedly has been written for her); Orson Welles as King Lear; The King and I, co-starring Jan Clayton (the first Julie Jordan in Carousel) and film star Zachary Scott; and Kiss Me, Kate, with Bobby Short in a small role and Kitty Carlisle (Hart) as the female lead. (Mrs. Hart will commemorate her 95th birthday with an engagement at Feinstein’s later this month, September 20-24.)

Margaret Sullavan starred in Janus, a farce in which she was succeeded by Claudette Colbert and, later, Imogene Coca. The play proved to be the gifted actress’s last Broadway play; losing her hearing and suffering from chronic depression, Sullavan committed suicide at age 48 on New Year’s Day 1960. Ruth Gordon played Dolly Gallagher Levi in Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker, a successful reworking of his 1938 failure, The Merchant of Yonkers.

Paul Muni won the Tony as Best Actor in a Play for Inherit the Wind, while Best Actor and Actress in a Musical were Ray Walston and Gwen Verdon for Damn Yankees. Tonys for featured performances were won by Lotte Lenya (The Threepenny Opera), Una Merkel (The Ponder Heart), Russ Brown (Damn Yankees), and Ed Begley (Inherit the Wind). The first telecast of the Tony Awards ceremony occurred on Easter Sunday, April 1, 1956 — a local broadcast seen in New York on the Dumont network. Co-hosts for the event were Helen Hayes, then President of the American Theater Wing, and comic Jack Carter.

Two of several shows that closed out of town were a new edition of The Ziegfeld Follies and The Amazing Adele. In the former, Tallulah Bankhead headed a large cast that included Joan Diener, David Burns, Carol Haney, Larry Kert, Beatrice Arthur (who also understudied Bankhead), and Julie Newmar. The title role in the latter, a musical with a book by Anita Loos, was played by Tammy Grimes. Among the cast members were Peggy Cass, Cris Alexander, Johnny Desmond, Dagmar, Joey Faye, and Grover Dale.

Grimes had understudied Kim Stanley in Bus Stop and subbed for the star during Stanley’s two-week vacation, thereby making her Broadway debut. Anita Loos saw Grimes and wrote Adele for her, but the show closed during its Boston tryout. That was “much to my relief,” Grimes once told me in an interview. “I realized that I wasn’t ready to have that kind of responsibility.” During the 1955-56 season, Grimes appeared Off-Broadway in The Littlest Revue with Joel Grey and Bea Arthur, and went on tour with Julie Harris in The Lark. (Last month, The Lark played at Ontario’s Stratford Festival with Grimes’s daughter, Amanda Plummer, starring as Saint Joan.)

Here’s hoping that the 2005-2006 Broadway season will turn out to be a great one.