on March 28 to explore Rodgers and Hart's 2nd best-known show (after Pal Joey), THE BOYS FROM SYRACUSE. The show is based on Shakespeare's COMEDY OF ERRORS (perhaps my favorite of his comedies) and features such great American Songbook standards as "This Can't be Love," "Falling in Love with Love," and "Sing for Your Supper." The cast is MUCH larger than the shows we've done to date, with many singing and non-singing character roles. So please help spread the word and sign up here NOW! As the story goes, Rodgers and Hart were on a train to Atlantic City, where their show I MARRIED AN ANGEL, was in rehearsal, when Rodgers proposed to Hart that they do something based on Shakespeare - a pretty original idea for 1938. Hart reportedly loved the notion. He especially loved the idea of creating an opportunity for his younger brother, the comedian Teddy Hart. Teddy had a problem: he looked a lot like another better known comic, Jimmy Savo; but the resemblance could be put to good use in an adaptation of The Comedy Of Errors, in which the low-comedy roles of the twin Dromios steal the show.
Rodgers and Hart brought in George Abbott, who had been working with them on and off since JUMBO in 1935. For BOYS, Abbott would produce, direct, and adapt the play. "The book that he came up with was exactly what we wanted, " Rodgers recalled in the New York Herald Tribune at the time of the 1963 revival, "bright, fast moving, but, in its own wacky way, very much in the bawdy Shakespearean tradition." On November 23, 1938, The Boys from Syracuse became, amazingly, the sixth Rodgers and Hart show to reach Broadway in three years, but despite a pleasing cast that included Eddie Albert, Muriel Angelus and Burl Ives, the reviews were mixed, and the show ran for only 235 performances - not unusual for a "hit" of the day, but still something of a disappointment.
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