42nd St. Moon Blog

Intrepid Annette sent me some paged from the original Golden Apple Playbill, and they are fascinating. Playbills today don't give you quite as much history of how a show made it to Broadway as these notes seem to.

There's way too much for one blog post, but let me give you the first few paragraphs of author John LaTouche's notes for now:

"The Golden Apple" has undergone all the rigors likely to beset any collaborative effort in the queasy atmosphere of the theatre. Jerome Moross wanted to compose, and I wanted to write, a musical in the manner of our "Ballet Ballads", developing the style of those pieces into a framework that could tell a unified story.

Naturally, our first problem was how to eat while putting such a long and complicated show together. Our first show had been handsomely commissioned by that dapper Maecenas of Shubert Alley, Mike Todd. (Regretfully relinquished by Mike, it had later arrived at the Music Box via ANTA's brave sponsorship.)

When "The Golden Apple" project was submitted to the Guggenheim Foundation, a fellowship from them enabled me to begin writing it.

"The Golden Apple" attracted me as a dramatic theme that was both timely and colorful. I set out to tell the stories of Ulysses and Penelope, Paris and Helen, as they would have happened in America. It was to be no adaptation of Homeric grandeurs, but a comic reflection of classical influence on the way we think nowadays. Therefore any myths we might use were to arise out of our native songs, dances, jokes and ideas.

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I'll share more of LaTouche's notes this week, because they provide insight into how the material came together and how the production of that material came together.

Stay tuned...