Theater News

Labor of Love

Anne Croswell will be going to Japan to see an all-female version of her musical Ernest in Love.

Anne Croswell hasn’t been in the best of health during the past few months, but that won’t stop the septuagenarian from getting on a plane to Japan at the end of September to see the Takurazuka do her 1960 musical, Ernest in Love, the musical version of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

How could she not? The Takurazuka always does ornate productions, which will be a change from the modest stagings that the nine-person musical usually gets. In fact, the Takurazuka is adding a chorus of butlers and maids to be played by the ladies of the company. Yes, ladies will be butlers, too, for women are all that the Takurazuka ever puts on stage. So now, after all those productions of Wilde’s comedy in which Lady Bracknell has been played by a man, we’ll see women as Jack, Algernon, and Reverend Chasuble.

Croswell grew up in Virginia but she always had her eye on New York, for that’s where writers went in the early 1950s. She arrived and got a job writing jingles, but she was fired when she asked for a $5 raise. Croswell then went to J. Walter Thompson and wrote some more jingles as well as “I Believe in Stevenson”, which became Adlai Stevenson’s national campaign song in 1956. Soon after, when the new TV variety show Washington Square needed a lyricist, Croswell was hired. “Hugh Martin was the musical director, Danny Daniels was the choreographer. That’s where I really learned to write lyrics. It was my Tamiment,” she says, referring to the Pennsylvania playhouse where Neil Simon, Charles Strouse, and hundreds of others learned their craft.

One December, when the show needed a Christmas song, she wrote “Here’s Christmas.” Says Croswell, “I was called into the office of the producer, who said, ‘You have to take out the words ‘snow,’ ‘cold winter days,’ ‘fireside’s glow,’ and ‘sleighs.’ I said, ‘That’s the whole song. Why?’ He said, ‘We’re a network show and it doesn’t snow in California.’ So I said, ‘What about “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas?” ‘ And he said, ‘Ah, but there, they’re only dreaming.’ ” The argument escalated and Croswell was canned again. “I went home, poured myself a stiff drink, said ‘I’ll never work again,’ and turned on the TV,” she recalls.

“That’s where I saw Anna Russell as Lady Bracknell in the Matinee Theatre production of The Importance of Being Earnest,” Croswell continues, raising her eyebrows as if to say, “Can you imagine such a thing on daytime TV today?” What she does say is, “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t that make a neat musical?’ Understand, I didn’t know this play beforehand and had no idea that it was a world-wide classic. Had I known that it was a masterpiece, I wouldn’t have touched it. But there I was, saying, ‘This is something worth bringing to the American public.’ ”

Who would compose the music, though? “I thought of Leonard Bernstein before I realized he’d eat me alive,” she says. “Seventeen composers later, I found Lee Pockriss after a music publisher introduced us. Rather quickly, we wrote seven songs and the whole show as an hour-long special for television,” she relates, not mentioning that hour-long musicals were then rather common network fare. Who’s Ernest? debuted on The U.S. Steel Hour on October 9, 1957 to solid reviews and a large, appreciative audience.

“We felt, ‘If it did that well, why not put it on stage?’ ” says Croswell. “So we wrote seven additional songs and auditioned it for what seemed to be every producer and director in New York. They all said no. Our agent said, ‘Don’t give up, see one more guy — a protégé of David Merrick, a guy who stage manages for him but wants to direct. I don’t know if he’s done any directing, though.’ We auditioned at Lee’s apartment. At the end, there was a long silence, and I thought, ‘Well, there it goes.’ But this Harold Stone said, ‘I’ll do it!’ ”

The show opened at the now-defunct Gramercy Arts on 13th Street on May 4, 1960, the same day that its team read the not-so-glowing reviews for a musical that had opened the previous night: The Fantasticks. “We wound up getting better reviews,” says Croswell, “but I don’t have to tell you that they got the better run.” Soon after opening, the show wasn’t meeting expenses, so it moved to the less expensive Cherry Lane. To save money, Stone and co-producer Robert Kamlot (who eventually became one of Broadway’s best general managers) carried the sets over to Commerce Street. Two pianos replaced the orchestra that we hear on the Columbia cast album (now available on CD via DRG). Still, three months later, the show was gone.

Nevertheless, the team of Croswell and Pockriss got enough attention that producers Abel Farbman and Sylvia Harris courted them to write a musical they wanted to mount: Tovarich. Croswell and Pockriss agreed to provide a score for this work about a Russian duke and duchess who are forced to flee the newly-formed Soviet Union and are so impoverished that they must takes jobs as a butler and maid. He would end up being played by Jean Pierre Aumont and she by no less than Vivien Leigh, who won a Tony Award for her performance.

What does Croswell remember most about the production? “We had a puppy for Vivien to carry, but she didn’t want to because she felt the puppy would steal the show. So Herb Ross [the show’s choreographer] said, ‘Trust me, the audience won’t allow Vivien Leigh to be outdone by a puppy.’ He convinced her. The next night, the puppy stole the show — and he was out the next night.” She pauses. “I also remember that we got fired and we had to grovel to be get back in the show.” She pauses. “I’m always getting fired.” That may be true, but if she hadn’t been sacked in 1956, she wouldn’t soon be getting on a plane to go and see Ernest in Love.

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[To contact Peter Filichia directly, e-mail him at pfilichia@theatermania.com]