Theatre Register
File:Dearest Enemy with Helen Ford and Charles Purcell NYPL 1814210.jpg

Dearest Enemy

Shows · Dearest Enemy

Dearest Enemy is a musical with a book by Herbert Fields, lyrics by Lorenz Hart, and music by Richard Rodgers. This was the first of eight book musicals written by the songwriting team of Rodgers and Hart and writer Herbert Fields, and the first of more than two dozen Rodgers and Hart Broadway musicals.

Opened
1925
Performances
286
Type
Musical
Era
Early
Music: Richard RodgersLyrics: Lorenz HartBook: Herbert Fields

Productions1 on Broadway

1925 Knickerbocker Theatre Original. September 18, 1925 · John Murray Anderson, Charles Sinclair, Harry Ford 286 performances

Every Broadway staging held in broadway-data, sourced to IBDB. West End runs are not yet held.

Licensing 1 entry

US Concord Theatricals R&H Theatricals available

Read from the licensor's own pages and catalogues. Rights move, and an empty row means we have not confirmed a publisher, not that the show cannot be licensed.

In the literature30 passages

For other musicals about the American Revolution, see Dearest Enemy, page 48. book:broadway-musicals-show-by-show-seventh-edition-stanley-green-cary-ginell#p220

Dearest Enemy (9/18/ 25; 286 performances), actually written before The Garrick Gaieties, starred Helen Ford, Charles Purcell, Flavia Arcaro, and Andrew Lawlor Jr. Writing in the New York Evening World, E. W. Osborn said that the book was “wise and truly witty and genuinely romantic.” book:broadway-its-history-people-and-places-an-encyclopedia-bloom-ken-1949-2nd-ed-new#p187

During the production of that historic revue, he met Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and together they wrote seven Broadway musicals, including their first, Dearest Enemy, and A Connecticut Yankee. book:broadway-musicals-the-101-greatest-shows-of-all-time-bloom-ken-1949-vlastnik-fra#p21

Dearest Enemy (1925), his first book musical with Hart, gave his team the welcome “chance to demonstrate what we could do with a score that had at least some relevance to the mood, characters and situations found in a story.” book:enchanted-evenings-the-broadway-musical-from-show-boat-block-geoffrey-oxford-new#p122

Rodgers is the first to admit that a number of his musicals created with Hart do not even aspire to, much less achieve, the goals he first enunciated in the late 1920s with Dearest Enemy and Peggy-Ann. book:enchanted-evenings-the-broadway-musical-from-show-boat-block-geoffrey-oxford-new#p259

Dearest Enemy, the first successful book musical with a score by Rodgers and Hart, opens at the Knickerbocker Theater. book:historical-dictionary-of-the-broadway-musical-volume-22-william-a-everett-paul-r#p19

Passages naming this show, found by keyword across 178 books. Where this show turns up in the literature, not curated trivia about it.

Something wrong here? Correct a field or report the problem. Every change is recorded in public under the contributor licence.