Throwing a Stage Party and a Cinematic Revel

Abstract

As Bells Are Ringing became a bona fide Broadway success, Betty Comden and Adolph Green fielded a wide array of projects. Notably, they started work on the book for the musical that would eventually become Gypsy, but a film deal pulled them away from that theater project. The movie they were hired to write was a screen version of the play Auntie Mame, which starred Rosalind Russell. After they completed work on this, and almost exactly twenty years after they had started working together on stage as part of the Revuers, they found themselves once again performing. The show, a compendium of their material for the theater and the movies, started as a one-off in Greenwich Village and ended up transferring to Broadway, earning them raves.