This is the second show in a series of blog posts 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 current regional and stock theatre rotation that met with varying degrees of success on Broadway and beyond. In short, I’m using this space to shine a little light on shows that are worth another look. The second show we’re focusing on is…
Original windowcard - note the snipe on the credits.
GOODBYE CHARLIE, a 1959 comedy fantasy written and directed by George Axelrod.
I’ll be covering this one with four posts.
1) Background and Pre-Production
2) Out-of-Town Tryout
3) Broadway
4) Film, Afterlife, & Final Thoughts
BACKGROUND AND PRE PRODUCTION
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: The world-at-large remembers George Axelrod’s films more than they remember his name. He adapted Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Manchurian Candidate, Bus Stop, and his biggest hit play, The Seven Year Itch for the screen. He also wrote original screenplays for the cult classic Lord Love a Duck, How to Murder Your Wife, Phffft!, Paris When It Sizzles, and The Secret Life of an American Wife.
Axelrod was one of Broadway’s brightest comedy writers. He wrote three plays that were well known in their time: the aforementioned The Seven Year Itch, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, and Goodbye Charlie. His other Broadway credits include Neil Simon’s The Star-Spangled Girl (director), Once More with Feeling (director), Gore Vidal’s Visit to a Small Planet (producer), and the musical Small Wonder (bookwriter). For television, Axelrod estimated he wrote over 400 scripts, mostly for the Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis Colgate Comedy Hour. Axelrod also wrote novels: a comic novel, Beggar’s Choice ; a crime story, the recently reprinted Blackmailer; and Where am I—Now That I Need Me?
Back of presale flyer.
PRE-PRODUCTION:
Axelrod was riding high in showbiz in 1959. The Seven Year Itch had ended its phenomenally successful Broadway run (1952-55), had been successfully translated to the screen, toured, and was making the rounds in stock and amateur companies. His follow-up play (which he also directed), Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? had also done well, running a little over a year on Broadway and becoming a successful film (albeit one that bore little resemblance to Axelrod’s play). Expectations were high in June 1959 when Goodbye Charlie was announced, as a return to the stage after a seventeen-year absence for Lauren Bacall in the title role—she had appeared on Broadway prior to her film stardom. Top-tier producer Leland Hayward would produce; Axelrod would direct. Sydney Chaplin would be Miss Bacall’s leading man. Cara Williams, nominated in 1958 for the Academy Award and Golden Globe for her role in The Defiant Ones, would play the supporting role of Rusty.
Out-of-town flyer for the Baltimore stop.
SYNOPSIS:
Goodbye Charlie was pretty frank stuff for a mainstream 1959 Broadway show. It opens at the Malibu beach house memorial service of Charlie Sorel, a womanizing writer shot by a jealous husband who discovered him in flagrante delicto with his wife. After the service, Charlie’s soul returns to earth in the body of a woman (also called Charlie) to visit his best friend, George Tracy. We learn that George is executor of Charlie’s estate; that Charlie had slept with George’s wife, and more.
As George helps Charlie navigate the intricacies of being female in 1959, the big question is: will Charlie and George’s bromance turn to romance, now that Charlie is a woman? In need of money, Charlie decides to write a diary, posing as his own widow, to blackmail the married Hollywood society ladies he knew during his previous life. Completing the triangle is Rusty, the married woman Charlie was with when he was shot, who admits to George that she felt what they had was more than a fling…she was truly in love with Charlie.
Returning to earth with the brain of Charlie-the-man inside a woman’s body is a new chapter for Charlie in life and love, and karmic retribution for all the women he romanced and forgot. It’s a bubbly comedy of supernatural second chances.
OUT OF TOWN:
The show’s first rehearsal was September 23 in New York, and it made five out-of-town stops over an eight week tryout:
Pittsburgh (1 week, Nixon Theatre, October 19-24)
Detroit (2 weeks, Shubert-Lafayette Theatre, October 26-November 7)
Cleveland (2 weeks, Hanna Theatre, November 9-21)
Baltimore (1 week, Ford’s Theatre, November 23-28)
Philadelphia (2 weeks, Walnut Theatre, November 30-December 12)
with a Broadway opening four days later, December 16, 1959
The out-of-town seems to have been a bit rocky. Read more about it in our next post as we head for Pittsburgh with Goodbye Charlie.