Pipe Dream is the seventh musical by the team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. It premiered on Broadway on November 30, 1955. The work is based on John Steinbeck’s short novel Sweet Thursday. The musical met with poor reviews and rapidly closed.
About Pipe Dream (musical) in brief
Pipe Dream is the seventh musical by the team of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. It premiered on Broadway on November 30, 1955. The work is based on John Steinbeck’s short novel Sweet Thursday. The musical met with poor reviews and rapidly closed once it exhausted its advance sale. Pipe Dream was not an outright flop but was a financial disaster for Rodgers and Hammerstein. No movie version of the show was made; the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization once hoped for a film version featuring the Muppets with Fauna played by Miss Piggy. The show was a hit and helped establish Cy Feuer and Ernie Martin on Broadway. They went on to produce Guys and Dolls and Where’s Charley? The musical 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. Doc’s friends Mack and Hazel decide Doc’s discontent is due to loneliness, and try to get him together with Suzy, a prostitute. 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. In The Bear Flag Café, Fauna teaches the girls how to set a table properly, hopeful they will marry wealthy men. In the musical Suzy is a prostitute; her profession is only alluded to in the stage work. Originally, Feuer, Martin and Steinbeck intended the work to be composed by Frank Loesser, but he was busy with a project which eventually became The Happy Fella. From the beginning, Hammerstein was uncomfortable with the setting with the family shows, but found himself attracted to the characters of Pipe Dream. During early drafts of the novel, Rodgers was also concerned about having a female lead and setting part of the musical in a bordello. The pair’s Carousel and South Pacific were not only in success, but in Hammerstein’s work before his collaboration with Rodgers, such as The Desert Song and Rose-Marie. They also worked on The Great Comet of 1812 and Carousel of 1813, among other musicals. They were the first musicals to be produced by Rodgers and Hammerstein, and the first to be written by Rodgers, not Hammerstein, in the early 1950s. It was a success and helped secure additional investment for the pair’s production company, Rodgers & Hammersstein Organization, which helped secure more investment.
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This page is based on the article Pipe Dream (musical) published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
