My Favorite Year

My Favorite Year is one of my favorite Broadway shows, and is hands-down my favorite Tim Curry project. I was fortunate enough to see the show six times...in four days. (I've also seen productions of the show in Pittsburgh and Chicago, but, of course, Tim wasn't in them.) This Playbill is from mid-November, when they were still making daily changes to the script. They would even make changes between shows on the same day! They were also changing songs. For instance, I saw them perform Pop, Fizz, Happy which was a song about drinking champagne, performed in a nightclub where Alan and Benjy are seriously partying...by the time the show ended its run, that song was long gone, and it does not appear on the original cast album. The Gospel According to King was, on the other hand, not in the production I saw, except as incidental music. The first day I saw the show, Alan sang a song called Clarence Duffy which was about how Clarence Duffy came to Hollywood and was transformed into film star Alan Swann. The next night, that song was gone, replaced by Exits, but the programs weren't changed until later...all of the programs I picked up listed Clarence Duffy.

The show opens with Benjy Stone welcoming the audience. "I'd like to tell you about 1954, which was my favorite year. Not my best year, not the year I had the most success, but my favorite year." In 1954, Benjy Stone was hired as the newest writer on the popular comedy/variety television show The King Kaiser Comedy Cavalcade. He then "shows" the audience what an exciting time it was to we working on a live television show by introducing the first big production number:

This song shows the mass chaos that exists five minutes before airtime. There are actors, dancers, writers, and producers running frantically all over the stage: passing out script changes, fixing broken zippers, getting final touches put on makeup; the writers are worrying the lines aren't funny, the dancers are worrying that they'll stumble or trip in front of 20 million viewers: 20 million reasons/we're guaranteed to bomb...let the costumes fit, God/please keep me on the staff/make the show a hit, God/most of all, God, let the people laugh!