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their romance deepened and the wedding date was advanced as a result of seeing Oklahoma!, and in London, everywhere Princess Elizabeth and her favorite escort Philip went, the band struck up their tune: “People Will Say We’re in Love.” When Armina Marshall Langner of the Theatre Guild, which produced the musical, lost her Tibetan terrier Chang, she gave newspaper interviews mentioning a reward of two tickets to anyone finding him - and the dog was returned pronto. One upper Eastside matron who had been given a ticket by an ailing friend came back from the theatre to find her apartment had been burglarized; “I still wouldn’t have missed the show," she said gallantly. Film producer Samuel Goldwyn, master of malapropisms, arrived from the Coast to catch a performance, declaring, "I know every word of every song in the show from the moment Curly sings, 'Oh, how I hate to get up in the morning!'"

Behind this "overnight" success lay the familiar stretch of troubled history. 

In the 1920-31 season the Theatre Guild had produced a cow-country drama by Lynn Riggs called Green Grow the Lilacs. For a decade the Guild's Theresa Helburn had harbored the hunch that this play could convert into an excellent musical. Early in 1942 Lawrence Langner, founder of the Theatre Guild, persuaded Richard Rodgers to compose the music. But Lorenz Hart, Rodgers' perennial collaborator, was in failing health and unable to take up his pen. Miss Helburn suggested a partnership with Oscar Hammerstein, a lyricist whom Rodgers greatly admired, and the book was completed by summer.

All through the autumn auditions were held for singers and actors. Then came the little matter of financing. After a disastrous season the Guild - then in its 25th year- had only $30,000 in the bank. Clearly outside backing was needed. But at the time the war was going badly and money was hard to raise even from the

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Guild's erstwhile "angels."

So began, as one of the many precedents set Oklahoma!, auditions for backers. At a series of teas and cocktail parties - many of them held in Steinway Hall - Mr. Rodgers and Mr. Hammerstein and Alfred Drake and Joan Roberts (the original Curly and Laurey) would run through the songs and explain the action to prospective angels. But nobody much reached for a checkbook. 

Celeste Holm - Ado Annie in the original, the girl who "cain't say no" - has grim memories of that money hunt. Ten days before the New Haven opening Theresa Helburn, Lawrence Langner and Armina Marshall ushered into the rehearsal studio some 30 ladies and gentlemen who were dressed to the nines. Declining to identify them, Miss Helburn whispered to the cast sweetly, "Just think of them as friends."

"The rehearsal piano began," as Miss Holm recalls the evening, "and so did an uncontrolled nightmare. As I was about to make an entrance, a whole ballet came on. Cues were missed, actors tripped over laths and forgot their lyrics, and no one out front laughed. Not one in the bunch had a dime's worth of confidence in us.... I watched the civilians leave. The phony smiles were still there frozen on. We made them laugh sporadically on subsequent nights but not one backer ever emerged from those groups."

Oklahoma! was capitalized at $150,000 but it took only $83,313 to get it to Broadway. Columbia Pictures was enjoined to enter into a 50% participation of $75,000. Broadway producer Jed Harris advised it not to touch the property with the proverbial 10-foot pole; under nudging, Columbia finally coughed up a timid $15,000. But when M-G-M - which owned the rights to Green Grow the Lilacs - was asked to invest, it wired back loftily, "We are not interested at the moment in Western musicals."

Continued on page 30

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