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Jerry Bock /Sheldon Harnick /Cast– "The Body Beautiful" MONO- LTD LP - Blue Pear Image 1 of 4

The Body Beautiful

Shows · The Body Beautiful

An Ivy League graduate reluctantly enters the world of professional boxing to pay off debts, managed by a small-time promoter who sees dollar signs in his educated fighter. As the boxer rises through the ranks, he falls for a beautiful woman while struggling to reconcile his intellectual aspirations with the brutal realities of the ring.

Opened
1958
Performances
60
Type
Musical
Era
Golden Age
Music: Jerry BockLyrics: Sheldon HarnickBook: Joseph Stein, Will Glickman

Productions2 on Broadway

1935 Plymouth Theatre Original. October 31, 1935 · predates this show 4 performances
1958 Broadway Revival. January 23, 1958 · George Schaefer 60 performances

Every Broadway staging held in broadway-data, sourced to IBDB. 1 of these predate the show itself and are almost certainly a different work of the same name. Shown, marked, not merged. West End runs are not yet held.

Licensing 2 entries

US Concord Theatricals Concord Theatricals available
UK Concord Theatricals Concord 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 literature39 passages

A new musical, The Body Beautiful with a score by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, went nowhere, and closed to make room for Les Ballets de Paris, the Beryozka Russian Dance Company, and the Old Vic, imported by Sol Hurok, doing Henry V, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet. book:at-this-theatre-100-years-of-broadway-shows-stories-and-botto-louis-viagas-rober#p210

The two songwriters collaborated for the first time on a book musical, The Body Beautiful, which premiered on January 23, 1958. Unfortunately, the show ran only 60 performances, but the score was well received and appreciated by Bock and Harnick’s contemporaries. book:broadway-its-history-people-and-places-an-encyclopedia-bloom-ken-1949-2nd-ed-new#p94

Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s first collaboration was The Body Beautiful (do you go around humming tunes from that one?). book:broadway-musicals-the-101-greatest-shows-of-all-time-bloom-ken-1949-vlastnik-fra#p45

This was followed by a big out-of-town flop, the 1951 Nancy Walker-starrer Month of Sundays, which caused Shevelove to set down his rhyming dictionary for good. Selden rebounded in 1955, writing music and lyrics and producing an even bigger out-of-town flop, The Amazing Adele (scripted by Anita Loos, with Adele played… book:more-opening-nights-on-broadway-a-critical-quotebook-of-compiled-by-steven-suski#p966

He first collaborated with lyricist Sheldon Harnick on The Body Beautiful (1958), which was followed by four Harold Prince-produced musicals: Fiorello! (1959), Tenderloin (1960), She Loves Me (1963), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964). book:more-opening-nights-on-broadway-a-critical-quotebook-of-compiled-by-steven-suski#p1089

Other early works include The Body Beautiful (1958). book:more-opening-nights-on-broadway-a-critical-quotebook-of-compiled-by-steven-suski#p1106

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

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