How to succeed on Broadway today is quite simple: sign up Robert Alan Morse as your leading man. A sort of non-repulsive Mickey Rooney, Morse is pint-sized, so boyish he’s still convincing skeptical bartenders nine years later that he is, too, over 21—and the possessor of a comic flair that should make Danny Kaye, among others, sit up and take notice. He plays the sly, slithery, perfidious, double-crossing, ambitious, conceited, back-biting, fawning J. Pierpont Finch (you spell it f-i-n-c-h, he insists), hero of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. And he plays it so engagingly that the audience’s only hope is that Wickedness will Prevail, musical comedy rules notwithstanding, and J. Pierpont Finch scale the crest of his particular Mt. Everest, in this case the World Wide Wickets Company.
The play, an amiable spoof on big business by Abe Burrows (book) and Frank Loesser (music and lyrics) — the Guys and Dolls twosome—is the surprise hit of the 1961 fall season despite the fact that there isn’t a singable tune in the lot—the kind an audience leaves the theater humming —or a dirty line. (A secretary’s “pad is to write in not to spend the night in” is about as racy as the show gets.) Moreover, choreographer Hugh Lambert turned his back on those frenetic, galvanic dances—a Broadway ritual these days—which leave the audience in doubt whether they’re watching a chorus line or an Olympic
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