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MISSED HITS

Broadway producers talk about the ones that got away.

It was one of those warm, glorious summer weekends at the Eastern end of Long Island. When the telephone rang, Richard Barr, producer of such hits as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Sweeney Todd, was sitting on the deck of his summer house. The moment was idyllic, the sea calm, his drink deliciously cool.

He answered the phone. It was Al Selden, a longtime friend, who at that time was running the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Conn. After the usual amenities, Selden said, "Dick, there's a musical here I think you ought to look at. I believe it's got the makings." Barr said he'd think about it and called his partner, Clinton Wilder, who was also lounging in a Long Island summer home. They agreed it was too lovely to give up the weekend to make the long trip to Connecticut. Besides, they couldn't convince themselves that the deeds and derring-do of an eccentric gentleman of Iberia would prove an appealing American musical.

Selden produced the show with Hal James. It was, of course, called Man of La Mancha.

Some time went by and Barr again received a call from East Haddam asking him to come look at a musical called Drat. Chastened by his previous experience, he took his new partner, Charles Woodward, up to see it. They liked what they saw, took the option, and produced the musical Off Broadway. It closed in one night.

Barr, of course, is philosophical. He says, "No matter how long you are in the business, you never really know what will work and what won't."

Nor is he alone in this quandary. There is hardly a producer, alive or in the hereafter, who has not passed up, at one time or another, a script that later turned into a gold mine.

Take Never Too Late. According to those supposedly in the know, at least 25 New York managements rejected the play - everyone "from David Merrick on down," recalls author Summer Long. The comedy, about a middle-aged couple with two grown children, who one day discover the stork will visit them again, made the rounds for six years, and even received a production at the Bucks County Playhouse in Pennsylvania, with an unknown named Dick Van Dyke in the cast.

But not until agent Daniel Hollywood sent the script to producer Elliot Martin did the play appear to have a chance. Martin, who was packaging productions for summer theatre, "roared all the way through" as he read it and scheduled it for the Skowhegan Playhouse in Skowhegan. Maine. From there, it went to Westport, Conn., where the venerable George Abbott - whose office, incidentally, had been one of the original naysayers - took a look and agreed, after some rewriting, to direct. Paul Ford accepted the male lead, but Martha Scott turned down the role of his spouse. And when Maureen O'Sullivan signed for it, she did so on the assumption that she would be back with her husband and seven children a week after its Broadway opening. The play opened in November 1962 and ran 1007 performances.

Lest this tale seem the exception, note that the legendary Life With Father had a similar history. Producer Oscar Serlin had felt there was a good play to be fashioned from the New Yorker sketches Clarence Day, Jr. had written about his boyhood with his stockbroker-father in turn-of-the-century New York. But when he received the rights in 1955, he could find no one to share his enthusiasm. It seems, at the time, that people felt the love interest was too slight, too respectable and too middle-aged. So many investors turned down Serlin that in his desperation, by methods unrevealed, he managed to sneak a copy of the script into the suitcase of millionaire theatre backer, John Hay Whitney. Whitney sent the property to his advisor on theatrical investment, Robert Benchley, who dismissed it saying, "I could smell it as the postman came whistling down the lane. Don't put a dime in it." Whitney, on

by Phyllis Funke

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