Pal Joey is a musical with a book by John O'Hara and music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart based on a character and situations O'Hara created in a series of short stories published in The New Yorker. It includes two songs that have become standards: "I Could Write a Book" and "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered".
The original 1940 Broadway production was directed by George Abbott and starred Gene Kelly. There have been several reviv...
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Pal Joey is a musical with a book by John O'Hara and music and lyrics by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart based on a character and situations O'Hara created in a series of short stories published in The New Yorker. It includes two songs that have become standards: "I Could Write a Book" and "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered".
The original 1940 Broadway production was directed by George Abbott and starred Gene Kelly. There have been several revivals since, including a 2008–09 Broadway run, and a 1957 film adaptation stars Frank Sinatra, Rita Hayworth and Kim Novak.
The author John O'Hara offered the stories of "Pal Joey" to Rodgers and Hart to turn into a musical. O'Hara was not present during the out-of-town tryouts, and the director George Abbott took over the rewriting. When the show opened in New York the critics were divided, with Richard Watts (New York Herald Tribune) calling it "brilliant." It became the longest running Rodgers-Hart show to that time. Ethan Mordden wrote that...
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