One of the brightest spots in the summer theatrical season will be the City College Theatre Group’s new production of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying (1961). Performances will be July 10-27 in the Garvin Theatre on the West Campus of Santa Barbara City College, 900 block of Cliff Drive.
With a book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert, music and lyrics by Frank Loesser, stage direction by R. Michael Gros, musical direction by David Potter, and choreography by Tracy R. Kofford and Chloe Grace Roberts, How to Succeed features in its cast:
Hannah Brudney, Paul Canter, Chris Carmona, Victor Carrasco, Lennon Chahivec-Schneider, Christian Duarte, Amanda M. Elliot, Austin Escamilla, Alexander Fell, Grace Gibbs, Josie Gillingham, Katie Hahka, Ken Johnson, Marisol Miller-Wave, Kathleen McLychok, Ryan Ostendorf, Sarah Raines, Landon Ranck, Hannah Lee Robinson, Daniel Sabraw, Rich Sander, Irving Soto, Zachary A. Thompson, Ciara Tolliver, and Annabell Walker.
Patricia L. Frank has designed the sets and lighting, Pamela Shaw the costumes, and Dom Camardell the sound.
The show chronicles the rise to power of J. Pierrepont Finch, a young window cleaner in New York City, who has bought a book called How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and reads it on his lunch breaks. Taking the book’s morally challenged advice as a literal blueprint for a meteoric rise in the business world, he secures a job in the mail room of the World Wide Wicket Company.
Armed with only a towering ambition and a total lack of scruples, he begins his climb to the top.
The original Broadway production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying starred Robert Morse and Rudy Vallee, ran for 1,417 performances, while winning seven Tony Awards, the New York Drama Critics Circle award, and the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
It made a major stage star out of Bobby Morse, and caused the flickering career of Rudy Vallee to flare up brightly, for the last time (think Don Ameche, in Cocoon). More to the point, the show broke new ground in terms of subject matter — not the big corporation as a setting for ruthless intrigue, but the business office as a venue, especially on television, for an ad hoc family, what Michael J. Arlen would later call “the work family.”
(Previously, this sort of bonding took place only in military or police units.) Thus it was a prototype of Lou Grant, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and, of course, The Office, in which the office, not the home, is conceived as the main core of life’s relationships.
In the meantime, the the close-knit, affectionate nuclear family of Father Knows Best and Ozzie and Harriet dissolved into a dysfunctional swarm of cynical wiseacres.
Most of the songs from Broadway musicals that become mainstream hits are only minimally connected to their original context: “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific, “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” from My Fair Lady, “Maria” from West Side Story, that sort of song.
Frank Loesser was a great songwriter, and the songs in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying are attractive, witty songs that serve the action very well — the show would be very dull without them — but taken from the show and made to sing for their supper by themselves, they are fish out of water.
How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying previews at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, July 10-11, with shows at 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sundays.
(The 2 p.m. Sunday, July 14, performance will be live-captioned for the hearing-impaired. All performances have the assisted-listening system available, and the Garvin Theatre is wheelchair accessible.)
Tickets for the previews are $18 general, $15 seniors, $10 students; for Thursday evening and Sunday matinees, $24 general, $19 seniors, $14 students; and for Friday and Saturday evenings, $26 general, $21 seniors and $17 students.
Parking is free and near the theater. For information or reservations, call the Garvin box office, 805-965-5935 or buy tickets online at www.theatregroupsbcc.com.
— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.