In 1959, CBS cancelled The Phil Silvers Show, which was the hit sitcom otherwise known as both You'll Never Get Rich and Sgt. Bilko. The series was still enormously popular but it was also very expensive to produce. (Some episodes had a speaking cast of twenty.) A genius at the network decided it was cost-efficient to stop the series and sell the reruns to NBC, which stripped them in a late afternoon weekday time slot and cleaned up.
This put Mr. Silvers at liberty and he decided to return to Broadway, which was big news as he was then a very big star. Producers threw scripts and proposals his way, and he briefly toyed with starring in a new musical that had just been written by Burt Shevelove, Larry Gelbart and some newcomer named Stephen Sondheim called A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. Then he changed his mind and opted for a new musical by Garson Kanin, Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Jule Styne entitled Do Re Mi. Directed by Kanin, it opened at the St. James Theater the day after Christmas of 1960. Also in the cast were Nancy Walker, Nancy Dussault, David Burns and Al Lewis, who is better known to us now as "Grandpa" Al Lewis of The Munsters. The show went on hiatus for a month the following summer but still ran 400 performances. One song from it — "Make Someone Happy" — became a hit apart from the show, especially the record of it recorded by Perry Como.
I never saw that production but based on what I saw Monday night — I'll tell you what it was in a moment — I think I can draw a few conclusions, the main one being that Do Re Mi isn't a very good show. The plot is pretty hokey. A small-time operator named Hubie Cram (the Silvers role) comes up with a get-rich scheme. Once upon a time, he worked as a kind of messenger boy for "The Mob," back when it was trafficking in slot machines. The idea is that with jukeboxes catching on big, he'll get his old employers out of retirement, they'll go legitimate and sell jukes the way they once sold slots, only without lawbreaking. Despite the urging of his wife (Nancy Walker), Hubie does this and things go right for a time and then go wrong — first, when his star recording artist falls in love with the head of a rival jukebox company and then when his associates revert to their old strongarm tactics. It all wraps up with the senate conducting hearings and Hubie doing a big, musical mea culpa.
That this thing lasted 400 performances is obviously because Phil Silvers was willing to do 400 performances. He and Nancy Walker could probably have stood on a stage, belched for two hours and still sold tickets. It's rather telling that the show had very little life after that. It was not, like most other hit Broadway musicals, produced hundreds of times in theaters all over the country. Everyone knew there wasn't much point in doing it if you didn't have someone the caliber of Mr. Silvers to carry the proceedings, and people that good are not easy to find. The only known attempt to revive the show came in 1999 when the City Center "Encores" series did five performances with an all-star cast headed by Nathan Lane.
Yet another revival was what I saw last evening and it was so well done that it pointed up the weaknesses in the material. The Musical Theater Guild of Southern California revives old musicals for two or three performances and does a very fine job of them, even without a budget or much rehearsal. Hubie was played by Michael Kostroff, who recently concluded a national tour of The Producers, and boy, was he good. So was Eydie Alyson as his wife. So was the entire company, which included a gentleman named S. Marc Jordan who was in the original production with Mr. Silvers and who played the same roles last night. At the end, I turned to my companion and said, "Is it my imagination or was this a very good production of a pretty weak play?" If you have a theater group and you're looking for a musical to stage that everyone isn't sick of, don't bother with Do Re Mi; not unless you can corral someone as good as Phil Silvers or Nathan Lane or Michael Kostroff to play the lead. Even then, audience members will sit there, laugh and applaud and say, "Boy, I wish I could see this cast in a better show."