Billion Dollar Baby
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Billion Dollar Baby was a Broadway musical set on Staten Island and in Atlantic City during the late 1920s. It follows the adventures of a ambitious young woman, Maribelle Jones, in her quest for wealth during the Prohibition era. Comden and Green, fresh from their success with On the Town, wrote the book and lyrics; Morton Gould provided the score. Indeed, the production team was something of an On the Town reunion: once again, George Abbott directed and Jerome Robbins choreographed. The show opened at the Alvin Theatre on December 21, 1945, and ran for 220 performances.
Billion Dollar Baby was not well-received, although Robbins' choreography--which included two dream ballets, a Charleston, and a gangster's funeral procession--was widely praised. (Decades later, Robbins incorporated the Charleston number into Jerome Robbins' Broadway.) The show starred Joan McCracken (Maribelle), Mitzi Green, William Tabbert, and David Burns; early in the run, McCracken was replaced by future Tony Award nominee Virginia Gorski (later Virginia Gibson). James Mitchell was Tabbert's dance double. Other dancers in the cast included Danny Daniels, Helen Gallagher, and Arthur Partington.
There is no original cast recording, although there is a CD of the 1995 concert version with Kristin Chenoweth, Debbie Gravitte, Marc Kudisch, Michael McCormick, and Richard B. Shull.
As it happens, the show is now most famous for an event that happened in rehearsals: Robbins, walking backwards as he ranted at the dancers, failed to realize how close he was to the orchestra pit--and fell in [1].
[edit] References
- [1] Although the story has been attached to a number of other Robbins musicals, both Greg Lawrence and Deborah Jowitt have traced it to Billion Dollar Baby; see Lawrence, Dance with Demons: The Life of Jerome Robbins (New York: Berkley, 2001), 101-2; Jowitt, Jerome Robbins: His Life, His Theater, His Dance (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004), 116.
