How to Go On Succeeding

Long runs in musicals can be like long runs in stockings. Things get shabby. Dancing becomes listless. There is something a little threadbare about the beat, the book, the cast, the chorus. Even the tickets seem faded.

Actors start playing the match trick--lighting a match and holding it until it burns their fingers, thus distracting the audience's attention from another actor. The geometries of their love affairs become hopelessly complicated, and morale is chewed up by cliques, gossip, and fierce little jealousies. Meanwhile, the washed and eager faces out front are sitting on upholstery that may be wearing out, but is still worth about $9.60 a square foot. After hearing of this great musical for months and months, they have finally taken out a second mortgage and bought tickets, and what do they see?

Sometimes they see a surprisingly crisp show. Some 14 months and 483 performances old, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying today fairly glistens with evidence that it is, in point of fact, trying very hard. It is not only the best but also the best-preserved musical now running. And what's more, it is a better show now than it was when it opened.

Forgotten Flaw. In the early performances, something went wrong at the end. After recording with satirical relish the expanding fortune of a vicious, backbiting, devious, ruthless little sweet-smiling crud, the show ended with a number called Brotherhood of Man, delivered in a manner that seemed to say: "All right, fellas, all right, we've just been kidding around for two hours; we really love each other, we all believe in Help the Other Fellow and Turn the Other Cheek; now let's all say we're buddies and go home." Star Bobby Morse lacked mordancy in delivering that final song, but he has since acquired it. The number now has a bristling irony. Where once it seemed to reach for mother, it now kicks her down the stairs, a wonderfully mean-spirited climax to a wicked, funny show.

No Tricks. How does a show stay so alive? A big reason is in having its stars--Morse and Rudy Vallee--still on hand. In the female roles, Virginia Martin has gone off to Little Me and Bonnie Scott to have twins, but the new girls--Joy Claussen and Michele Lee--are adequately brassy and ingenuous. But if this is luck, Writer-Director Abe Burrows gives it a hand. He has a chart in his pocket that tells him the exact hour and minute that any given number or scene begins. Deciding to check on, say, the / Believe in You sequence, he pops into the theater at 10:39, and if anything is slipshod. Burrows will be crashing around backstage making a disturbance at 11:15, perhaps calling for a morning rehearsal. Similar sneak visits are frequently made by Choreographer Bob Fosse, Producers Cy Feuer and Ernie Martin. Says Pressagent Merle Debuskey: "It's like Big Brother.''

It's like big box office too. And onstage, not one of the successful succeeders has yet tried the match trick.

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