Alexander H. Cohen - Career As Producer

Career As Producer

With an inheritance, he initially became an investor in a number of flops, producing his first Broadway show with Ghost for Sale in 1941, which closed after six performances. He followed this quickly with his next production, the thriller Angel Street, which ran for three years (and was made into the movie Gaslight). Soon, he revealed himself to have a decidedly eclectic approach to popular entertainment with a busy schedule of productions. They ran the gamut from comedies (Little Murders) to revues At the Drop of a Hat, Beyond the Fringe, to dramas (84 Charing Cross Road, Anna Christie) to musicals (Dear World, A Day in Hollywood / A Night in the Ukraine) to the classics (King Lear, Hamlet). He also produced stage concerts for Marlene Dietrich, Maurice Chevalier, and Yves Montand, and an evening of comic sketches with Mike Nichols and Elaine May.

Cohen was responsible for the international stardom of Marcel Marceau, bringing him to New York to support Maurice Chevalier in An Evening with Maurice Chevalier. He had originally intended the production to be a one-man show but Chevalier did not want to work that hard, and requested that Marceau (then unknown outside Europe) perform his mime pieces to give Chevalier opportunities to rest between musical numbers.

His informal series of revues collectively titled "Nine O'Clock Musicals" included At the Drop of a Hat and At the Drop of Another Hat (both featuring Michael Flanders and Donald Swann, Words and Music (Hollywood lyricist Sammy Cahn performing his own songs with a few back-up singers) and the semi-musical Good Evening with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. They were low-budget, required little material support, and were hugely successful.

Despite his success with revues, the highly prolific Cohen never produced a financially successful book musical (a musical with a script and plot) on Broadway, although he did produce the successful London productions of 1776 and Applause. A challenge he was never able to satisfy was to mount a Broadway revival of Hellzapoppin'. A 1967 out-of-town tryout starring Soupy Sales closed in Montreal, and ten years later another effort starring Jerry Lewis and Lynn Redgrave closed in Boston. The rights are still held by the Cohen estate. The nearest Cohen came to a successful book musical on Broadway was A Day in Hollywood/A Night in the Ukraine, adapted from a much less elaborate London production. This double feature consisted of two short entertainments with the same cast: the first half being a plotless compendium of songs and anecdotes about old-time Hollywood, the second half being Anton Chekhov's play The Bear radically reworked as a musical comedy for the Marx Brothers (impersonated by modern actors), retaining a vague semblance of Chekhov's plot.