Productions2 on Broadway
| 1909 | Dalys Theatre Original. April 19, 1909 · predates this show | 8 performances |
| 1961 | Shubert Theatre Revival. November 18, 1961 · Gerald Freedman | 113 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 not confirmed
| Rights | — We have not been able to confirm the publisher. |
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 literature24 passages
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. book:broadway-musicals-the-101-greatest-shows-of-all-time-bloom-ken-1949-vlastnik-fra#p57
Anita Gillette in The Gay Life lost her gig due to chaotic out-of-town rewrites. book:broadway-musicals-the-101-greatest-shows-of-all-time-bloom-ken-1949-vlastnik-fra#p241
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… book:broadway-musicals-the-101-greatest-shows-of-all-time-bloom-ken-1949-vlastnik-fra#p326
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. book:more-opening-nights-on-broadway-a-critical-quotebook-of-compiled-by-steven-suski#p806
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… book:show-tunes-the-songs-shows-and-careers-of-broadway-s-suskin-steven-suskin-steven#p174
After the opening of The Gay Life, Lucinda Ballard encouraged Florence Klotz to stop assisting and begin designing herself - which she did. book:the-broadway-design-roster-designers-and-their-credits-owen-bobbi-bibliographies#p273
Passages naming this show, found by keyword across 178 books. Where this show turns up in the literature, not curated trivia about it.