Word: dears
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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NEEDLESS TO SAY, everybody works to the point of exhaustion. Often, in the most desperate of cases, a producer will bring in additional writers to "doctor" or, hopefully, save the show. Alexander Cohen, Dear World's producer, used his wife, Hildy Parks, and another librettist, Joe Masteroff (who wrote Cabaret) to fix up his production. Neither of these show doctors will receive program credit for their work, but they will get a flat sum of money, and, if their rewriting is substantial, perhaps a percentage royalty...
...producer and director will also make cast changes. Some actors will lose their jobs because their roles no longer exist in the new version; others will be fired and replaced. By its fourth Boston week, Dear World had lost about a half-dozen of its original performers...
...mess, all right, but does it do any good? Dear World's new first act, even though substantially different from the original, got just as bad, if not worse, audience reaction. The critics had criticized the musical's shortchanging of the serious aspects of the play from which it had been adapted, Jean Giraudoux's Mad-woman of Chaillot. Apparently the authors took this prevalent criticism so seriously that they decided to drown the first act with eerie, sur-realistic doom. The audience was bored and dumbfounded, particularly considering the fact that the unchanged second act had a light, humorous...
...Dear World seemed to be past the point of no return. The doubtful new act cost in the neighborhood of $200,000 to put in (on top of the original outlay of $600,000), and the second act had not yet been touched. The show was scheduled to open in New York on Dec. 26, or about two weeks after the Boston closing...
Realizing that his show -- now the most expensive in Broadway history--would be a sure flop unless more radical changes could be made, producer Cohen decided to postpone the opening indefinitely, with all performances in New York designated as "previews" until he considered Dear World ready for an opening before critics. While critics accept this practice of previews as an addition to the road tryout period, they could not abide by Cohen's plan to play the unfinished show into the distant future before paying audiences. Several of the first-nighters threatened to show up at the show unannounced...