All-American

All American is a musical with a book by Mel Brooks, lyrics by Lee Adams, and music by Charles Strouse. Based on the Robert Lewis Taylor novel Professor Fodorski, it is set on the campus of the fictional Southern Baptist Institute of Technology, where the worlds of science and sports collide when the principles of engineering are applied to football strategies and football strategies are used to teach the principles of engineering. Hungarian immi... more

All American is a musical with a book by Mel Brooks, lyrics by Lee Adams, and music by Charles Strouse. Based on the Robert Lewis Taylor novel Professor Fodorski, it is set on the campus of the fictional Southern Baptist Institute of Technology, where the worlds of science and sports collide when the principles of engineering are applied to football strategies and football strategies are used to teach the principles of engineering. Hungarian immigrant Fodorski's techniques prove to be successful, resulting in a winning team, and he finds himself the target of a Madison Avenue ad man who wants to exploit his new-found fame. Adams and Strouse, flush with the success of Bye Bye Birdie, and Brooks, still a relatively unknown television comedy writer, concocted an old-fashioned musical reminiscent of such lighthearted fare as Good News, albeit one with a gay subtext enhanced by director Joshua Logan, who filled the stage with his trademark beefcake scenes filled with flexing muscular men... less