Production
The Broadway production, directed by DaCosta and choreographed by Brian Macdonald, opened on October 23, 1968 at the ANTA Playhouse, where it ran for 82 performances and 6 previews. The cast included real-life spouses Shirley Jones and Jack Cassidy, who was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical, and Robert Kaye as Col. John Farraday. Among the orphans were newcomers Irene Cara, Giancarlo Esposito, and Stephanie Mills.
Critics found the basic situation of Jones and the children threatened by political unrest to be too similar to The Sound of Music, albeit told in an unrelentingly darker manner, and efforts to equate the New York Draft Riots with contemporary protests against the Vietnam War heavy-handed and counter-productive. "It is worth noting that two of the first night critics came up with the same line, calling Maggie Flynn the best Broadway musical since Her First Roman — thereby honoring a desperately lousy mishmash that opened three days earlier."
An original cast recording was released by RCA Victor and re-released on CD by DRG in 2009.
Read more about this topic: Maggie Flynn
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“The growing of food and the growing of children are both vital to the family’s survival.... Who would dare make the judgment that holding your youngest baby on your lap is less important than weeding a few more yards in the maize field? Yet this is the judgment our society makes constantly. Production of autos, canned soup, advertising copy is important. Housework—cleaning, feeding, and caring—is unimportant.”
—Debbie Taylor (20th century)
“The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)