Productions1 on Broadway
| 1951 | Winter Garden Theatre Original. November 1, 1951 · Jack Donohue | 350 performances |
Every Broadway staging held in broadway-data, sourced to IBDB. West End runs are not yet held.
Licensing 2 entries
| US | Concord Theatricals Tams-Witmark | available |
| UK | Concord Theatricals Tams-Witmark | 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 literature12 passages
Silvers won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical for Top Banana , and two decades later won the award again when he played the role of Pseudolus in the 1972 revival of Stephen Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. book:complete-book-of-1950s-broadway-musicals-the-dan-dietz#p214
Phil Silvers scored at the Winter Garden in a noisy musical, Top Banana (1951), about television, with Silvers impersonating a TV comic said to be inspired by Milton Berle. book:at-this-theatre-100-years-of-broadway-shows-stories-and-botto-louis-viagas-rober#p65
Playing the monumental ego Jerry Biffle in Top Banana, he exemplified every tyrannical attribute of a TV variety show mega-star (read Milton Berle), driving the show to a frenzied pitch with his breathless double-talk. book:broadway-musicals-the-101-greatest-shows-of-all-time-bloom-ken-1949-vlastnik-fra#p92
TOP BANANA was a burlesque musical featuring Phil Silvers, a handful of clowns, and a dog named Ted “Sport”? Morgan (who sang an inspired duet with Silvers). The show, which did not quite make it, was coproduced by Paula Stone (of the Stepping Stones—see RIPPLES [Kern: February 11, 1930]). book:show-tunes-1905-1985-the-songs-shows-and-careers-of-steven-suskin-1st-ed-new-yor#p574
TOP BANANA was produced by Paula Stone (see RIPPLES [Kern: February 11, 1930]) and her husband, Mike Sloane. book:show-tunes-the-songs-shows-and-careers-of-broadway-s-suskin-steven-suskin-steven#p421
Silvers won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical for Top Banana, and two decades later he was featured as script writer Sally Rogers for top banana Alan Brady (Carl Reiner) in the long-running CBS series The Dick Van Dyke Show. book:the-complete-book-of-1950s-broadway-musicals-dan-dietz-hardcover-2014-rowman-lit#p215
Passages naming this show, found by keyword across 178 books. Where this show turns up in the literature, not curated trivia about it.