This is the first in a series of posts here about “Shows For Someday”—plays and musicals that have lived in my heart a long time, but I’ve never gotten to do in any capacity. Interesting scripts outside the usual regional and stock theatre rotation that met with varying degrees of success on Broadway and beyond.
Many of these shows are by prestigious authors whose work isn’t as known as it may once have been. Some would be difficult to produce because of script requirements or cast size; some might need touching up to bring them more in line with modern expectations and sensibilities; some may not have as much appeal for an open-run mass audience because people just aren’t doing shows like that anymore. Anyway, I think these shows are worth another look, and who knows what may come from using this space to shine a little light them. So, our first show is…
Original out-of-town flyer, art by Charles Addams.
REMAINS TO BE SEEN
a 1951 mystery comedy written by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse. There’s so much to share with you that I’ll be breaking up the story into four posts: 1) Background and Pre-Production; 2) Out of Town; 3) Broadway; 4) Film, Afterlife, & Final Thoughts
PART I: BACKGROUND and PRE-PRODUCTION
ABOUT THE AUTHORS: Little remembered with most of their corpus rarely-produced today, Lindsay and Crouse were playwrights, producers, and performers of near-terrifying eminence during their lifetimes. As critically acclaimed award winners who also enjoyed record setting commercial success, their plays included State of the Union (Pulitzer Prize) and Life With Father (still Broadway’s longest-running non-musical play). They wrote four musicals for Ethel Merman: Anything Goes, Red Hot and Blue, Happy Hunting, and Call Me Madam (which was running when Remains To Be Seen opened…and closed). Their most-produced works are The Sound of Music (producers and librettists) and Arsenic and Old Lace (producers and ghostwriters).
Howard Lindsay also performed and directed regularly, including the role of Father in Life With Father on Broadway. Lindsay and Crouse were prolific and successful producers of their work and that of others, including plays like The Hasty Heart and Detective Story.
PRE-PRODUCTION: The play was originally announced with the title Opus 9 , a humorous nod to the fact that it was L&C’s ninth collaboration. The title was changed when they found people expected that title to be a play with more serious ambitions. They also considered titling it The Hepcat and the Canary, but couldn’t get the blessing of Mrs. John S. Willard, the widow of the author of the famous thriller The Cat and the Canary, so they changed it to the wonderfully evocative Remains To Be Seen.
Lindsay and Crouse had started work on the play before they wrote Call Me Madam, but did the bulk of the writing starting the November after Madam opened, finishing the first draft Saturday, March 2, 1951. Legendary producer Leland Hayward had announced both Jackie Cooper (in the starring role of Waldo Walton) and the October 3 opening date by mid-April of that year. The role of Jody was turned down by Judy Holliday, and after considering actual band singers like Peggy Lee and Rosemary Clooney, Janis Paige, who had just finished a contract as a star at Warner Brothers, auditioned in New York and was offered the job on the spot.
SYNOPSIS: There are two stories in Remains To Be Seen: a comic romance between Jody Revere, a jiggly jazz band singer, and Waldo Walton, a virginal apartment house manager/would-be drummer; and a whodunit involving the twice-killed corpse of Travis Revercombe, a hypocritical millionaire guardian of public morals who privately enjoys his pornography and his lady paramours.
As both a spoof and loving homage to its genre, surrounding the story we find instantly recognizable supporting characters common to vintage thrillers: bungling policemen as well as tough cops out of a B movie, a mad doctor, a fanatical scorned mistress, an enigmatic Japanese houseman, a staid lawyer who tries to “get with it” and twists on the old conventions like a medical examiner more interested in the fights on TV than the body he is duty-bound to examine, and undertakers from two different firms competing to land the job of a potentially expensive funeral.
Suspenseful story conventions are in there too: sliding walls and screams on a darkened stage. The chills start right at the top where the room is black except for a TV screen, and we sense a murky figure creeping across the stage.
None of the characters who knew Mr. Revercombe liked him much, and as we try to solve the mystery of who stabbed him after he died, the story takes in murder, suicide, and shooting alongside side-splitting laughs.
As they had done with Arsenic and Old Lace, Lindsay and Crouse mined the humorous side of homicide for Remains To Be Seen, working to create that rara avis of the theatre, a comedy whodunit.
More in Part 2 as we go out-of-town with Remains To Be Seen.