Inception
Following World War II, Cy Feuer and Ernie Martin decided to start producing musicals together. Feuer was the former head of the music department at low-budget Republic Pictures; Martin was a television executive. Having secured the rights to the farce Charley's Aunt, they produced it as the musical comedy Where's Charley?, with a score by Frank Loesser. Among the backers of Where's Charley? were Rodgers and Hammerstein, which helped secure additional investment. The show was a hit and helped establish Feuer and Martin on Broadway—they would go on to produce Guys and Dolls.
In the aftermath of Guys and Dolls's success, Feuer and Martin were interested in adapting John Steinbeck's 1945 novel Cannery Row into a musical. They felt that some of the characters, such as marine biologist Doc, would work well in a musical, but that many of the other characters would not. Steinbeck suggested that he write a sequel to Cannery Row that would feature the characters attractive to Feuer and Martin. Based on suggestions for the story line by Feuer and Martin, Steinbeck began to write Sweet Thursday.
Cannery Row is set in Monterey, California before World War II. In Sweet Thursday, Doc returns from the war to find Cannery Row almost deserted and many of his colorful friends gone. Even his close friend Dora, who ran the Bear Flag Restaurant, a whorehouse, has died, and her sister Fauna has taken her place as madam. A former social worker, Fauna teaches the girls how to set a table properly, hopeful they will marry wealthy men. Doc's friends Mack (Mac in Pipe Dream) and Hazel (both men) are still around. They decide Doc's discontent is due to loneliness, and try to get him together with Suzy, a prostitute who has just arrived in Monterey. The two have a brief romance; disgusted by her life as a hooker, Suzy leaves the bawdy house and moves into an abandoned boiler. She decides she cannot stay with Doc, but tells her friends that if Doc fell ill, she would care for him. The accommodating Hazel promptly breaks Doc's arm as he sleeps, bringing the two lovers back together. At the end, Doc and Suzy go off to La Jolla to collect marine specimens together.
Originally, Feuer, Martin and Steinbeck intended the work to be composed by Loesser, but he was busy with a project which eventually became The Most Happy Fella. With Loesser's refusal, Feuer and Martin approached Rodgers and Hammerstein with their project, then titled The Bear Flag Café. From the beginning, the prudish Hammerstein was uncomfortable with the setting, telling Feuer "We do family shows." However, Hammerstein found himself attracted to the characters. Doc and Suzy were culturally mismatched but drawn to each other, with Doc rather moody and Suzy somewhat intense. Similar pairings had led to success, not only in the pair's Carousel and South Pacific, but in Hammerstein's work before his collaboration with Rodgers, such as The Desert Song and Rose-Marie. During early 1953, Steinbeck sent Hammerstein early drafts of the novel. Rodgers was also concerned about the idea of having a prostitute be the female lead, but he eventually gave in. The two agreed to write and produce the adaptation.
As they worked with Steinbeck, Rodgers and Hammerstein, though renowned for such hits as Oklahoma!, Carousel, and South Pacific, suffered a relative failure with the 1953 musical Me and Juliet, a tale of romance among the cast and stagehands backstage at a musical. Before agreeing to do the Sweet Thursday project, the duo had considered other projects for their next work together, such as an adaptation of the film Saratoga Trunk. A proposal made by attorney David Merrick to adapt a series of works by Marcel Pagnol to which Merrick held the stage rights fell through when the duo were not willing to have Merrick be an associate producer; Merrick took the project elsewhere, and it was developed into the hit Fanny. In later years, Hammerstein stated, "Why the hell did we give up Fanny? What on earth were we trying to prove? My God, that's a great story and look at some of the junk we've done!"
Read more about this topic: Pipe Dream (musical)
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