How to (and Not to) Take it from There

It took $400,000 to mount Baker Street and better than half that sum to bring Flora the Red Menace to Broadway. What the price tag was for The Decline and Fall of the Entire World as Seen Through the Eyes of Cole Porter, I don’t know, but not much. It offers: as orchestra, one piano, one drum; four stage props, five battered red kitchen stools; scenery, a movie screen backdrop; cast, five talented song and dance men and women—in a small off-Greenwich Village hall that seats a couple of hundred people at most, cabaret style, around small and crowded tables. Which proves? That (Hallelujah!) there is no formula as yet, no IBM-itized equation that will guaranteedly produce x-parts of laughter, or y-of enjoyment per z-dollars. Not on the stage, at any rate.

Take Baker Street. Just think what the producer had going for him. To start with, the familiar, eccentric Sherlock Holmes. If you flash a silhouette on the wall of a tall, slim figure with a deerstalker cap, a cloak, pipe, magnifying glass, everyone knows that’s Sherlock Holmes—no further description needed. Mix in with that other familiar figures: rotund, sentimental Dr. Watson, a handful of Baker Street Irregulars, evil Dr. Moriarty, beautiful Miss Irene Adler, well-meaning Inspector Lastrade, anxious Mrs. Hudson, a backdrop leavening of London in Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee year—and what more could one ask? Well . . . talent, imagination, humor, dramatic intensity, a book, a score, good lyrics—elements all too seldom brought together, it is true, to produce musical comedy marvels like Kiss Me Kate, West Side Story, My Fair Lady. But it’s rare also that none of them is apparent in a Broadway production. Baker Street has one moment of glory, an incidental ten-second interlude—the magical piece of stagecraft that has Bil Baird’s Marionette Grenadier Guards parading across Trafalgar Square with the Queen’s gleaming silver coach. Aside from that, nothing much.

PL

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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It took $400,000 to mount Baker Street and better than half that sum to bring Flora the Red Menace to Broadway. What the price tag was for The Decline and Fall of the Entire World as Seen Through the Eyes of Cole Porter, I don’t know, but not much. It offers: as orchestra, one piano, one drum; four stage props, five battered red kitchen stools; scenery, a movie screen backdrop; cast, five talented song and dance men and women—in a small off-Greenwich Village hall that seats a couple of hundred people at most, cabaret style, around small and crowded tables. Which proves? That (Hallelujah!) there is no formula as yet, no IBM-itized equation that will guaranteedly produce x-parts of laughter, or y-of enjoyment per z-dollars. Not on the stage, at any rate.

Take Baker Street. Just think what the producer had going for him. To start with, the familiar, eccentric Sherlock Holmes. If you flash a silhouette on the wall of a tall, slim figure with a deerstalker cap, a cloak, pipe, magnifying glass, everyone knows that’s Sherlock Holmes—no further description needed. Mix in with that other familiar figures: rotund, sentimental Dr. Watson, a handful of Baker Street Irregulars, evil Dr. Moriarty, beautiful Miss Irene Adler, well-meaning Inspector Lastrade, anxious Mrs. Hudson, a backdrop leavening of London in Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee year—and what more could one ask? Well . . . talent, imagination, humor, dramatic intensity, a book, a score, good lyrics—elements all too seldom brought together, it is true, to produce musical comedy marvels like Kiss Me Kate, West Side Story, My Fair Lady. But it’s rare also that none of them is apparent in a Broadway production. Baker Street has one moment of glory, an incidental ten-second interlude—the magical piece of stagecraft that has Bil Baird’s Marionette Grenadier Guards parading across Trafalgar Square with the Queen’s gleaming silver coach. Aside from that, nothing much.