Bright Lights of 1944 was a 1943 Broadway musical revue with music composed by Jerry Livingston and lyrics by Mack David.
It opened at the Forrest Theatre where it played for a total of four performances. The cast featured James Barton, Buddy Clark, and the vaudeville team Smith and Dale.
Act one is set in Sardi's, a New York City Theater District restaurant, where two producers are planning a show. Renee Carroll, an actual hat check girl at Sardi's, played herself in the musical. Smith and Dale played waiters. The second half of the revue is the show the producers were planning in act one, and included the Smith and Dale sketch "Doctor Kronkite".
Music was provided by John Kirby and his orchestra.
Bright Lights of 1944, which cost $72,000 to produce, brought $5,200 in receipts. Writing for The New York Times, Lewis Nichols called the first half of the show "quite bad, being both dull and tedious."
Famous quotes containing the words bright and/or lights:
“For the bright side of the painting I had a limited sympathy. My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“There in the narrow,
mote-filled finger of light, is a blonde
so blonde, so blinding, she is a blizzard, a huge
spook, and lights up like the sun the audience
in its galoshes. She bulges like a deuce coupe.
When we see her we say good-bye to Kansas.”
—Lynn Emanuel (b. 1949)