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  • O’Neill on the Musical Theater Stage
  • Jackson R. Bryer (bio)

For some familiar—and two perhaps less familiar—indications of Eugene O’Neill’s re-emergence into prominence in the middle of the twentieth century, I want to take you back to the 1950s. On November 27, 1953, O’Neill died in a Boston hotel, uttering his famous last words, “Born in a hotel room—and God damn it, died in a hotel room.” His work had not been seen in New York since 1946 when The Iceman Cometh played on Broadway. While it is probably an exaggeration to say he was forgotten, he certainly was not on the top of anyone’s list of playwrights whose work might insure box office success. Then, in May 1956, Theodore Mann, Leigh Connell, and José Quintero produced their famously successful revival of Iceman at New York’s Circle in the Square, directed by Quintero and starring Jason Robards as Hickey It became an off-Broadway hit—it has been said to have started the off-Broadway movement—and brought O’Neill back before the theater public. That revival in turn was the major factor in convincing O’Neill’s widow, Carlotta Monterey O’Neill, to give Mann and Quintero permission to present the American premiere of Long Days Journey Into Night in November 1956, ten months after its world premiere at Sweden’s Royal Dramatic Theatre. Long Days Journey, of course, won O’Neill his fourth Pulitzer Prize; he was now most certainly front and center in the American theater.

The 1950s was also the heyday of the American musical. Two of the signature musicals of the decade, produced in successive years, were The Pajama Game (1954) and Damn Yankees (1955); both were the work of a young songwriting team, Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, and were directed by the legendary George Abbott and coproduced by his young protégé Harold Prince. Damn Yankees also introduced a talented young choreographer, Bob Fosse, and a charismatic actress/singer/dancer, Gwen Verdon, playing Lola, [End Page 168] the Devil’s soft-hearted assistant. Both shows were hits, each running for over 1,000 performances; so Abbott, Prince, Fosse, and Verdon were eager to capitalize on their success by presenting another blockbuster.

They made a choice that seemed unlikely but one which, given O’Neill’s re-emergence in 1956, now seems not that startling: O’Neill’s 1921 play, “Anna Christie.” It gave Verdon the opportunity to play another “fallen” woman with a soft side—a type she was to reprise successfully in the later musicals Sweet Charity (1966) and Chicago (1975). Because Jerry Ross had suddenly died soon after Damn Yankees opened, Abbott and Prince turned to one of the more successful pop songwriters of the period, though new to musical theater, Bob Merrill. New Girl in Town opened in May 1957; starring Verdon and veteran movie actress Thelma Ritter as Marthy, it ran for 431 performances (just about twice as long as “Anna Christie”). Verdon and Ritter tied for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical, the first such deadlock in Tony history; the show was also nominated for Tonys in three other categories, including Best Musical, and Fosse for Choreography.

As so often seems to be the case in the highly collaborative art of musical theater, one part of the creative team dominated the production of New Girl in Town. In this case, it was Fosse and Verdon, who determined the contours of the show—although Ritter, probably because of her status as a film star, ended up receiving a great deal more attention than her character had in O’Neill’s original, where she disappears after the first act. While New Girl in Town retained O’Neill’s basic triangle of Anna, Chris, and Mat, the three principals were upstaged by a series of energetic chorus numbers that enabled Fosse to display his choreographic talents. The most notorious of Fosse’s dance interjections involved a solo for Verdon (whom he would marry in 1960) in a dream ballet (Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! [1943] and Carousel [1945] had established the precedent for such sequences), set...

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