ABSTRACT
The plot of O’Hara’s libretto is mostly original, and anticipates, in many ways, the narrative synthesis done a decade later when shows such as South Pacific and Guys and Dolls cherry-picked all sorts of characters, incidents, and milieus from a collection of short stories as their source material. By mid-September 1940, Rodgers and Hart were half-finished with their score; rehearsals began in November with Gene Kelly, fresh from his acting success as an ingenuous hoofer in William Saroyan’s play The Time of Your Life, as Joey, and Vivienne Segal, who had starred in Rodgers and Hart’s I Married an Angel (1938), as Vera Simpson. In the late 1940s, Columbia record producer Goddard Lieberson was organizing a series of recordings of Broadway scores that didn’t make it into the studio the first time around.
