At the Drop of a Hat

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Opening night program
At the Drop of a Hat

Music	Donald Swann
Lyrics	Michael Flanders
Book	Michael Flanders Donald Swann
Productions	1956 London fringe 1959 Off-Broadway

At the Drop of a Hat is a musical revue by Flanders and Swann, described by them as "An After-Dinner Farrago". In the show, they both sang, accompanied by Swann on the piano. The songs were linked by contemporary social commentary, mostly by Flanders.

The show opened at the New Lindsey Theatre, a fringe theatre outside the London West End theatre district, on December 31, 1956. It was successful and transferred to the Fortune Theatre in the West End on January 24, 1957, where it ran for 808 performances. On October 8, 1959 the show opened in New York City at the Golden Theater, running there for 215 performances.

Although they had performed together in the summer of 1940 in a revue they both directed and staged, this was Flanders and Swann's first show performing in the format for which they would become successful, and from 1959 to 1967 they toured with it off and on, performing it a total of 1,700 times over 11 years around the world.^[1] The two continued to perform together for three decades.

1 Description of the show
2 Songs
3 References
4 External links

[edit] Description of the show

The two-man show was performed with Flanders in a wheelchair (he was a polio victim) and Swann seated at a piano on an otherwise empty stage. The show consisted of a collection of mainly humorous songs, written by them, connected by topical comments. A second revue called "At the Drop of Another Hat" was produced in 1963.

Each performance ended with the Hippopotamus Song, in which the audience was encouraged to join-in, followed, in Britain, by a musical rendition of the Lord Chamberlain's requirements.