Hollywood Pinafore: History and Key Facts

Hollywood Pinafore, or The Lad Who Loved a Salary is a musical comedy in two acts by George S. Kaufman, with music by Arthur Sullivan, based on Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore. The adaptation transplants the maritime satire of the original Pinafore to a satire of the glamorous world of 1940s Hollywood film making, but Sullivan's score is retained with minor adaptations.

The work premiered on May 8, 1945, at Ford's Grand Opera House in Baltimore for tryouts. It opened on Broadway at the Alvin Theatre on May 31, 1945, and closed on July 14, 1945, after 52 performances. It was directed by Kaufman and starred Annamary Dickey as Brenda Blossom, Shirley Booth as Louhedda Hopsons, Victor Moore as Joseph W. Porter, George Rasely as Mike Corcoran, William Gaxton as Dick, and Mary Wickes as Miss Hebe. The costumes were designed by Mary Percy Schenck.

According to Howard Teichmann's 1972 biography George S. Kaufman: An Intimate Portrait, Kaufman had the inspiration for Hollywood Pinafore during a poker game with his friend Charles Lederer. While Lederer was arranging his cards, he idly sang a few bars of "When I Was a Lad" from Pinafore while ad-libbing a new lyric: "Oh, he nodded his head / and he never said 'no' / and now he's the head of the studio." Kaufman insisted on paying Lederer a token fee for the idea of transplanting Pinafore's setting to a Hollywood studio.

Although Kaufman's lyrics are witty, the book is static for a musical. However, it has been revived a number of times in recent years, including a 1998 "Lost Musicals" staged concert production at the Barbican Centre in London.

Source and attribution

Text excerpted from Hollywood Pinafore by Wikipedia contributors, available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0. The extract is abridged and formatting has been adjusted; the adapted text on this page is shared under the same licence. Revision history.