Free You Fascinate Me So: The Life and Times of Cy Coleman by Andy Propst

even to the way in which the curtain was drawn. What he had not looked at was how his compendium of divertissements was totaling up in terms of time. When Almanac finally played its first performance at Boston’s Shubert Theatre on November 4, it was running three and a half hours, a length that critics made sure to note in their reviews and that prompted Boston Globe critic Cyrus Durgin to write, “As the city edition deadline approached, ‘Almanac’ was going strong, with some seven numbers still to come.” 12
    Despite the show’s length, the critics found much to praise, from Gingold’s and De Wolfe’s work in the central sections to Harry Belafonte’s numbers to the sequences that featured Mimmo, Bean, Bergen, and the team of Carpenter and Dunn. The main objections were to the songs themselves. The November 11 Variety review of the Boston engagement bluntly stated: “The music is relentlessly humdrum throughout.”
    Nevertheless, the show was a hit in the making. In his November 6 Boston Globe review Durgin said, “My hunch is the show will turn out well.” The Variety review echoed the assessment: “There’s enough good stuff in it to insure an extended Broadway run.”
    Anderson got down to the business of reshaping the show. “Tin Pan Alley” got moved from its prime location at the top of act 2 (“Ziegfeldiana,” with brides and twirling ballerinas, took its place) to a spot toward the end of the first act. A thread involving Tina Louise’s primary character, Miss Rhinestone of 1953, was removed.
    Along with cuts there were additions, notably a bit of theatrical satire, “Don Brown’s Body,” which imagined what a Mickey Spillane detective story might look like onstage if it were treated to the same sort of theatrics seen in the drama John Brown’s Body .
    During the Boston run, Anderson also attempted to satisfy the critics’ desire to hear more from singer-dancer Dunn. Urmston recalled, “They gave her a number—‘Going Up’; it was an elevator song. And they put it in in Boston, and it stopped the show cold. And so what was told to me was that Polly Bergen said that is the last time she’d be doing that. ‘I’m the singer in the show. She’s supposed to sing and dance with Carleton Carpenter.’” 13
    Anderson’s work paid dividends even before the show had started its journey back to New York. Boston Globe critic Durgin revisited the production and on November 24 wrote: “Anderson has cut, swept, trimmed, shortened, paced, re-arranged, brightened, tightened, and otherwise polished his revue. . . . All told, ‘Almanac’ now is close to the shape it must be in for its test on Broadway.”
    In New York the show settled into the Imperial Theatre on Forty-fifth Street and opened officially on December 10, 1953. The critical reaction from the New York press corps was essentially the same as that of the reviewers in Boston. They all felt that the production’s exceptional parts never quite added up to an entirely satisfying whole.
    Each critic had his own thoughts about what aspects of the production worked best. Most were quite enthusiastic about Jean Kerr’s last-minute contribution, “Don Brown’s Body,” and about Gingold’s and De Wolfe’s work in “Dinner for One.” Belafonte’s numbers were also uniformly praised; he earned a Tony for his work in the production.
    As for “Tin Pan Alley,” the song and number went unmentioned in all but one review. In his December 11 notice in the New York World-Telegram , William Hawkins wrote, “Like most new musicals, ‘Almanac’ seems overloaded. I would never miss ‘Tinpan [ sic ] Alley’ or ‘Hold ’Em Joe.’” (This last was Belafonte’s major calypso number.)
    But even in this review enthusiasm for the show outweighed any negative reaction. Hawkins went on to say that Gingold’s work in a sketch about a cellist and Medford’s imitation of Dame Judith Anderson in “Don Brown’s Body” were enough to compensate