DVDs: What Lola Wants

Focusing on the unlikely subject of a labor dispute at a midwest pajama factory, The Pajama Game took Broadway by storm in 1954. It was the first show co-produced by Hal Prince, the first with choreography by Bob Fosse, and the first book musical for the songwriting team of Richard Adler and Jerry Ross.

The Pajama Game remained on Broadway for 1,063 performances. Almost exactly a year after the opening, the show's team, including Prince, Fosse, Adler, Ross, and co-author/director George Abbott, reunited for another show, Damn Yankees. Like The Pajama Game, it was based on a comic novel, this one a fantasy called The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, written by Douglass Wallop. It offered a contemporary take on the Faust legend in which a middle-aged baseball fan named Joe Boyd sells his soul to the devil to become Joe Hardy, a young, invincible ball player guiding the Washington Senators to victory over the Yankees.

Rarely does lightning strike twice in the same place on Broadway, but Damn Yankees proved to be just as big a hit as The Pajama Game, lasting 1,019 performances. Baseball had never before been the basis for a successful show, but Damn Yankees managed to get away with seemingly intractable subject matter, just as The Pajama Game had done. Yankees also made a full-fledged Broadway star of Gwen Verdon, who would win the second of her four Tonys for playing Lola, the devil's assistant who is called in to distract the hero from the lure of home and wife. Verdon was actually third choice for the role of Lola, paged after Mitzi Gaynor and Zizi Jeanmaire had turned it down.

In addition to Verdon, Tony Awards went to Ray Walston as the devilish Mr. Applegate and Russ Brown as the Senators' manager. The show took the Best Musical Tony, and Tonys were also won by the authors and Fosse. "Heart" and "Whatever Lola Wants" became major hit-parade entries. But Damn Yankees would be not only the second but also the final Adler-Ross smash: Jerry Ross died of a lung ailment on November 11, 1955 at the age of twenty-nine. Without his partner, Adler went on to such flops as Kwamina, A Mother's Kisses, and Music Is.

Just as The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees had functioned as twin shows on Broadway, their Warner Bros. film versions were also a matched pair. Respectively released in 1957 and 1958, the movies of The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees were produced and co-directed by Abbott and Stanley Donen. Both kept Fosse as choreographer, and both had screenplays by Abbott. Both films retained an extraordinary number of performers from the Broadway productions, but in each case, one star name --Doris Day for The Pajama Game, Tab Hunter for Damn Yankees-- was substituted for one of the stage leads in order to provide some box-office insurance.

Among those rehired for the Damn Yankees film were Verdon, Walston, Robert Shafer Song of Norway as middle-aged Joe Boyd, Shannon Bolin as Joe's wife, plus Rae Allen, Nathaniel Frey, Jimmie Komack, Albert Linville, and Jean Stapleton. For the comic mambo duet "Who's Got the Pain?," an unbilled Fosse joins future wife Verdon on screen, and the number ranks as a lovely record of the pair dancing together.

To add to the film's resemblance to the stage show, the Broadway set and costume designers, William and Jean Eckart, repeated those chores on the film. For the baseball sequences, Los Angeles's Wrigley Field was made to resemble Washington's Griffith Stadium.

Most of the Broadway score was retained, but three numbers were dropped. One, the comic "The Game" for the ballplayers, was probably considered too risqué the lyric for "A Little Brains, a Little Talent" was slightly laundered for the film, or perhaps it was felt that "The Game" would slow down the second half.

The other two omissions are more damaging. Unlike The Pajama Game, Yankees featured two strongly emotional musical numbers, "A Man Doesn't Know" and "Near to You," for Joe Hardy and his wife. These possess a near-operatic grandeur, and perhaps it was feared that they might clash with the lighthearted nature of the film. More likely, though, they were dropped because Tab Hunter wasn't much of a singer. Hunter took the place of Broadway's Stephen Douglass, a strong baritone. In any case, a new song, "There's Something About an Empty Chair," a solo for the wife, replaced "A Man Doesn't Know." Much inferior to the rest of the score, "Empty Chair" is particularly inadequate when it's reprised at the finale, which had been much more appropriately accompanied in the theatre by the soaring "A Man Doesn't Know."

But that may be quibbling. Like The Pajama Game, the film of Damn Yankees ranks as a terrific record of a '50s Broadway musical, capturing much of the energy and fun without entirely sacrificing an occasional filmic element, such as the use of split-screen in "Six Months Out of Every Year" and "Those Were the Good Old Days."

True, the film is quite stagey. Verdon later said of it, "I don't think it looks like a movie. I think it looks like a stage show, which is not good." She's probably correct, but that's not necessarily a bad thing for musical-theatre fans, who are likely to appreciate the fact that the film supplies much of the flavor of the stage original.

And for those same fans, the Yankees movie may be even more valuable than The Pajama Game simply because it offers the only full-length preservation of Verdon, one of Broadway's greatest musical stars, in one of her stage roles. Verdon, who gets an earlier entrance in the film than in the theatrical version, was a highly persuasive actress, and her screen Lola is sexy, droll, and touching. Probably because the word "yankees" would have a different connotation abroad, the film's title was changed to What Lola Wants in the U.K.

The Pajama Game has been available on DVD for a number of years, but Damn Yankees is, at last, available for the first time in that format. There are no significant DVD bonuses, but the widescreen transfer looks fine, with notably rich colors.

Damn Yankees got a TV remake in 1967 starring Lee Remick, Phil Silvers, Jerry Lanning, Jim Backus, Linda Lavin, Fran Allison, Ray Middleton, and Bob Dishy. The production has its moments, and happily restores those two soaring romantic numbers. But the General Electric Theatre production is sabotaged by cartoon cut-out sets and psychedelic graphics deployed throughout the musical numbers.

In 1994, Damn Yankees got an overrated Broadway revival that played 510 performances but didn't make money. Director Jack O'Brien rewrote the book substantially, and during the run, Jerry Lewis followed Victor Garber as Applegate. Bebe Neuwirth and later Charlotte d'Amboise played Lola, and newcomer Jarrod Emick won a Tony as the hero.

Currently in development for Chicago film producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron is a remake of Damn Yankees. No director has been announced, but the screenplay will be the work of Peter Tolan and Mike Martineau, with Billy Crystal serving as a co-producer.