Word: tryouts
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...football talents of 25-year-old John Unitas (pronounced unite us) went begging for years. The son of a Pittsburgh coal dealer, he was turned down at Notre Dame and Indiana, the only major colleges that gave him tryouts ("I only weighed 145 then," he explains). Unitas settled for the University of Louisville. The Pittsburgh Steelers gave him a brief tryout, sent him home. Disappointed, he got a job with a pile-driving crew, played football on the side (salary: $6 a game) for a Pittsburgh semipro sandlot team. Baltimore picked him up there in 1956 with a telephone call...
During Flower Drum's Boston tryout, when Nightclub Comic Larry Storch did not work out in the role of Sammy Fong, he was quickly replaced by a more experienced stage veteran, Larry Blyden. A sentimental song was cut, and Blyden's part was beefed up; Hammerstein spent two days writing the lyrics of a new song, and Rodgers retired to the Shubert Theater ladies' room (which during rehearsals was equipped with a piano) and wrote the music in less than six hours. (His record: South Pacific's Bali Ha'i, which he wrote in five...
...Trailing clouds of tryout praise, Archibald MacLeish's J.B. found Manhattan critics in a virtually unanimous yea-saying mood. Said Atkinson: "One of the memorable works of the century as verse, as drama and as spiritual inquiry . . . The performance is magnificent." Comparing it to Our Town and On Borrowed Time for theatrical effectiveness, John Chapman of the News added: "A magnificent production of a truly splendid play." "Not only beautiful stage poetry," wrote the Post's Richard Watts, "but also a fine drama that is as emotionally moving as it is sensitively thoughtful...
...Rodgers and Hammerstein will be able to pay the fuel bill this winter, with Flower Drum Song, sold out for all 4½ weeks of its Boston tryout. Advance sale in New York a month before the Broadway opening: a reported $1,000,000 plus...
Broadway is an unhealthy place, in the opinion of Producer Manning Gurian, because of the fallout from all those theatrical A-bombs. Knowing the pain of Broadway radiation burns (in 1948 he brought Tennessee Williams' Summer and Smoke into Manhattan after a triumphant three-week road tryout only to see Summer go up in smoke), he has devised a classically simple defense: get out of town. His invaluable asset: a wife named Julie Harris...