The run closed February 24, 1962
- Opened
- November 18, 1961
- Closed
- February 24, 1962
- Performances
- 113
- Previews
- —
- Theatre
- Shubert Theatre
Of the 603 productions we hold that opened in the 1960s and record a performance count, this is the 173rd longest. That is a rank within what we hold, not within everything that was staged.
Other stagings of The Gay Life 1 more that season
| 1909 | Dalys Theatre Original | 8 perf. |
Who was in it45 named
Loring Smith
Kip Andrews
Loyce Baker
Karoly Barta
Joan Bishop
Bonnie Brandon
June Card
Carolyn Clark
Sterling Clark
Thatcher Clarke
Leonard Elliott
Luce Ennis
Marion Fels
Carol Flemming
Leslie Franzos
Russell Goodwin
Jeanne Grant
Bettye Jenkins
Patrick King
Ray Kirchner
Louis Kosman
Ted Lambrinos
Lu Leonard
Carl Nicholas
Hal Norman
Carole O Hara
Doris Ortiz
Michael Quinn
Nancy Radcliffe
Tony Russo
Joanne Spiller
Gerald Teijelo
Eleonore Treiber
Aura Vainio
Jenny Workman
Ben Gillespie
Vernon Wendorf
8 of these 45 names have a person record behind them and link to one. The other 37 are set from the identifier in the cast list, which is a slug of the name — so hyphens and full stops are lost and a few come out wrong. We hold nothing else about them. Nobody here is matched to a character: the cast list records who was in the company and not what they played.
Characters9 roles recorded
Walter Chiari Anatol
Barbara Cook Liesl Brandel
Jules Munshin Max
Loring Smith Herr Brandel
Elizabeth Allen Magda
Jeanne Bal Helene
Yvonne Constant Frau Brandel
Leonard Elliott Franz
Lu Leonard Frau Brandel
Only 512 of 13,459 productions carry role names, and these came out of a wiki table — the names arrived with the table's own cell markup on them and have been stripped back. They are not linked to person records because the identifiers in that table do not resolve to ours.
Creative team
- Director
- Gerald Freedman
- Choreographer
- Herbert Ross, Herbert
A producer is one string on this record, however many people or companies it names. Directors and choreographers are held both as text and as identifiers; where an identifier exists the name links to a page.
Around this production
The Gay Life is a musical with a book by Fay and Michael Kanin, lyrics by Howard Dietz, and music by Arthur Schwartz. Based on a cycle of seven short plays by Arthur Schnitzler, published in 1893 and first staged in 1910, The Gay Life focuses on womanizing playboy Anatol von Huber. The score is a mixture of traditional Broadway show tunes and operetta.
You can’t cut her out. She’s got the best costume in the show!
Lucinda Ballard. Show and Tell the New Book of Broadway Anecdotes Ken Bloom Bloom Ken Oxford Univ, p. 333- Equally comfortable as a soprano ingenue or a belty soubrette, she was cast as a supporting lead in The Gay Life, only to have her character (who jumped off a bridge in the opening scene) written out of the show in Detroit. Broadway Musicals the 101 Greatest Shows of All Time Bloom Ken 1949 Vlastnik Fra, p. 57
- Anita Gillette in The Gay Life lost her gig due to chaotic out-of-town rewrites. Broadway Musicals the 101 Greatest Shows of All Time Bloom Ken 1949 Vlastnik Fra, p. 241
- Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz's The Gay Life contains “Magic Moment,” a beautiful ballad, especially as sung sincerely by Barbara Cook, who also brightened the Sammy Fain/E. Y. Harburg mishmash Flahooley (please ignore the Moises Vivanco numbers for Yma Sumac). Orchestrator Don Walker completed Sigmund Romberg’s las… Broadway Musicals the 101 Greatest Shows of All Time Bloom Ken 1949 Vlastnik Fra, p. 326
- Even Gerald Freedman, whose other musicals—The Gay Life (1961), A Time for Singing (1966), The Grand Tour (1979)—suffered from a weak directorial hand, did a marvelously atmospheric job on this backwoods fairy tale. More Opening Nights On Broadway A Critical Quotebook of Compiled By Steven Suski, p. 806
- Dietz retired his vice presidency at MGM in 1957 and reunited with Schwartz for three final Broadway projects (the first of which went unproduced). THE GAY LIFE was saddled with a lifeless book and a lifeless star (Chiari), which defeated its attributes: a fine, sweepingly Viennese score by Schwartz, a sacher-torte phy… Show Tunes the Songs Shows and Careers of Broadway S Suskin Steven Suskin Steven, p. 174
Passages naming this production, found by keyword across 178 books. Where it turns up in the literature, not curated notes about it.
What this page does not know
- No photograph of this staging. 48 of 13,459 productions hold one.
- No recording is held for The Gay Life at all.
- Reviews, box office, running order, understudies and designers: none of it is held for any production.