ABSTRACT
Camelot. Costalot. Cutalot. That was director Moss Hart’s call to arms during the out-of-town tryouts for Lerner and Loewe’s first show of the 1960s, a gorgeous, lumbering fantasy based on T. H. White’s The Once and Future King. The preopening assaults on its bulk were quite literally battles—and ones that claimed victims. Moss Hart suffered a heart attack from which he never fully recovered; Frederick Loewe had to take time off for rest and recuperation on doctor’s orders; and Alan Jay Lerner, who assumed Hart’s duties in additon to his own as lyricist-librettist, eventually was bundled off to the hospital with a bleeding ulcer.
