Nothing's Quite the Same as The Pajama Game
Few would argue with the statement that George Abbott, Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, and Harold Prince are four of the greatest talents in American musical theatre history. The Pajama Game boasted the services of all four of them, which is all the more remarkable considering that the show was a relatively straightforward, conventional musical comedy. But The Pajama Game was also one of the better musicals of the '50s, the show that established the Broadway careers of Prince, Fosse, and songwriters Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, and the show that gave Robbins his first Broadway directorial credit.
With the commencement this week of previews of the new Broadway production of The Pajama Game, I thought I'd look back over the history of the show. It began in 1953, when Robert E. Griffith, who had been veteran director-producer-writer Abbott's assistant and stage manager for two decades, read a review of the newly-published novel 7½ Cents by Richard Bissell, a book based on the author's experiences as superintendent in his father's pajama factory in Iowa.
At the time of the book's publication, Griffith and Prince were stage managers of Abbott's latest hit, Wonderful Town. Interested in becoming a producer, Griffith brought the novel to Abbott, who agreed to direct the adaptation but not to write it. After winning the rights to the novel, the fledgling producers approached George Axelrod The Seven Year Itch, F. Hugh Herbert The Moon Is Blue, and Abe Burrows Guys and Dolls about doing the libretto. But all of them deemed the novel's subject matter --a labor dispute in a midwestern pajama factory-- unlikely musical comedy material. So Abbott ultimately decided to collaborate on the book with Bissell.
The husband of Wonderful Town star Rosalind Russell, Frederick Brisson, became co-producer. To write the score, the producers approached Frank Loesser, who recommended his proteges Adler and Ross. The team had written a 1953 pop hit, "Rags to Riches," and had contributed numbers to the recent Broadway revue John Murray Anderson's Almanac. What was to become a Pajama Game standout, "Steam Heat," was written for Almanac but rejected. With both men fashioning music and lyrics, Adler and Ross got the job, and they wrote the Pajama Game score in five weeks.
Robbins, who had already choreographed a number of of Abbott-directed musicals, turned down the job but recommended Fosse to Abbott. An alternate version: Fosse was recommended by his wife, Joan McCracken, Abbott's star dancer in Billion Dollar Baby and Me and Juliet. But Robbins did agree to back up newcomer Fosse's work in exchange for co-direction credit. While an advance press release announced that Robbins would "supervise the dances, assisted by Bob Fosse," Robbins ultimately received no program credit for choreography.
Van Johnson and Gordon MacRae were mentioned for the leading role, and it was, for a time, given to Ralph Meeker, dramatic star of William Inge's Broadway hit Picnic. But Meeker wasn't a strong enough singer, so the role went to John Raitt. Raitt, who had became a star playing Billy Bigelow in Carousel 1945, had subsequently headed three successive musical flops: Magdalena, Three Wishes for Jamie, and Carnival in Flanders. His luck would change with The Pajama Game. Julie Wilson was offered the female lead, but turned it down to remain in London, where she had made a hit in Kiss Me, Kate and Bet Your Life; the part went to glamorous, salty Janis Paige. Veteran song-and-dance clown Eddie Foy, Jr. got the comedy lead of Hines, and Carol Haney, who had danced with Fosse in the Kiss Me, Kate film, was hired to play Foy's girlfriend, Gladys, and to lead the dances.
Because the show had no major box-office stars and no well-known creators except Abbott, the required financing was not easy to raise. Backers' auditions were performed in the living room of Wonderful Town ingenue Edie Adams. Eventually, 134 investors supplied the $169,000 the show cost. The Pajama Game was planned for fall '54, but because Abbott was committed to a revival of On Your Toes, The Pajama Game had to be moved up to May, in those days a less-than-auspicious time to open a new Broadway musical.
During rehearsals, Paige's role was enlarged, and a featured character was eliminated, along with the actress playing the role, Charlotte Rae. A song called "Dear Miss Williams" was abandoned in favor of a more promising number, "Hey There." And Robbins began to take a more active part in the musical staging: As Abbott wrote in his autobiography, "When rehearsals started, Fosse did excellent work on many of the numbers, but later he needed help and Robbins was called in."
The Pajama Game won immediate acclaim during its New Haven and Boston tryout runs. Replacing The King and I at the St. James Theatre, The Pajama Game arrived on Broadway with an advance sale of only $40,000. Griffith and Prince hired themselves as stage managers for the show, although they were not listed in the Broadway Playbill.
By 1954, Broadway had seen the innovations of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical plays and their influence on numerous other productions. Abbott still believed in conventional musical comedy, however, so The Pajama Game, while taking advantage of the musical-theatre progress of recent years, touched lightly on serious probems, remaining at all times a carefree lark. Adler and Ross's first complete Broadway score was a gem, containing several songs "Hey There," "Hernando's Hideaway," "Steam Heat" that achieved pop-hit status. Fosse's "Steam Heat" and "Once-a-Year-Day" were showstoppers.
The reviews that greeted the May 13, 1954 Broadway opening were unanimously favorable, hailing all aspects of the production, with special kudos going to the score, Fosse, and Haney. In The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson summed it up by writing, "the last new musical of the season is the best." The show returned ten percent of its investment five days after the opening, and paid back entirely within four months. During the first week of the run, a second-act song for Paige and Raitt called "The World Around Us" was replaced by a reprise of "Hey There" for Paige. "The World Around Us" is being restored in the new Broadway revival.
Chorus dancer Shirley MacLaine famously substituted for an injured Carol Haney shortly after the opening and was snapped up for a Hollywood contract, never to return to Broadway book musicals. Opening too late for the '54 awards season, The Pajama Game went on to win the Best Musical Tony in '55, with additional prizes going to Haney and Fosse.
The Pajama Game was the beginning of long and much-admired careers for Prince and Griffith as producers, Fosse as choreographer, and Robbins as director. Exactly one year later, Brisson, Griffith, and Prince produced Damn Yankees, another smash with an Adler-Ross score, choreography by Fosse, and direction and co-authorship by Abbott. Stephen Douglass, who had substituted for Raitt in The Pajama Game, got the male lead in Damn Yankees, and Pajama Game chorus member Rae Allen moved up to a featured part in the new show. But Damn Yankees would turn out to be the last Adler-Ross show: Ross died of a lung ailment in November, 1955 at the age of 29. Bissell went on to write another novel, Say, Darling, suggested by his experiences on Broadway with The Pajama Game. Bissell then co-adapted that novel into a successful Broadway comedy with songs.
The Pajama Game went on to run 1,063 Broadway performances. Paige was replaced by Pat Marshall, Julie Wilson at last, and Fran Warren, and Raitt was succeeded by George Wallace, who would take the male lead in the 1957 Brisson-Fosse-Griffith-Prince-Abbott musical New Girl in Town. Helen Gallagher and Neile Adams took over for Carol Haney. A national company starring Fran Warren replaced by Betty O'Neill, Larry Douglas, Buster West, and Pat Stanley, toured with great success. The show opened in 1955 at London's cavernous Coliseum, where it had a good run of 588 performances and made a star of Elizabeth Seal Irma La Douce in Haney's role.
The Pajama Game made way for Li'l Abner with Charlotte Rae at the St. James in November, 1956. But at a time when shows could do such things, The Pajama Game moved to the Shubert Theatre to play out its last two weeks. Just six months later, it was revived at New York's City Center, with Douglas and Stanley from the tour along with Stanley Prager, Thelma Pelish, and others from the original cast. Paul Hartman and Jane Kean were Hines and Babe.
I'll be discussing the excellent film version of The Pajama Game in an upcoming column on Pajama Game discs. So for now I'll skip ahead to 1973, when The Pajama Game returned to Broadway in a revival notable for a racially integrated cast. Abbott was again the director, and Fosse's assistant on the original, Zoya Leporska, reproduced the choreography. The interracial romance between leads Hal Linden and Barbara McNair was referred to only once, in a newly-added dialogue exchange. McNair: "It wouldn't work. There's a little thing called racial prejudice." Linden: "You mean you won't go out with us Polacks?"
In place of the second-act "Hey There" reprise, McNair was given a new song, "Watch Your Heart." Retitled "If You Win, You Lose," the song has been heard in recent productions of the show and will be heard in the new Broadway production. Reviews for the revival were mostly favorable, but Clive Barnes in The New York Times was negative, and the production, which also starred Cab Calloway, lasted only sixty-five performances at the Lunt-Fontanne.
In 1989, The Pajama Game returned to New York, this time as the fourth entry in New York City Opera's series of spring musicals at the New York State Theatre. Judy Kaye, Richard Muenz, Avery Saltzman, and Lenora Nemetz had the leads, and the reception was mixed. Then Encores! staged the show in 2002, with Brent Barrett, Karen Ziemba, Mark Linn-Baker, and Deidre Goodwin. The critics were more enthusiastic about the performance than they were about the work itself, and that may have had something to do with the fact that the current revival, originally announced as a commercial Broadway production, wound up a not-for-profit Roundabout staging.
