Billion Dollar Baby
Shows · Billion Dollar Baby
Billion Dollar Baby is a musical with the book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and the score by Morton Gould. Comden and Green were fresh from their success with On the Town, and the production team was something of an On the Town reunion: once again, George Abbott directed and Jerome Robbins choreographed.
- Opened
- 1945
- Performances
- 220
- Type
- Musical
- Era
- Golden Age
Productions1 on Broadway
| 1945 | Alvin Theatre Original. December 21, 1945 · George Abbott | 220 performances |
Every Broadway staging held in broadway-data, sourced to IBDB. West End runs are not yet held.
Recordings 1 album held
Licensing not confirmed
| Rights | Not confirmed We have not been able to confirm the publisher. |
Read from the licensor's own pages and catalogues. Rights move, and an empty row means we have not confirmed a publisher, not that the show cannot be licensed.
26 passages naming Billion Dollar Baby, found by keyword across 178 books. It's where this show turns up in the literature, not curated trivia about it.
Joan McCracken had starred in the title role of Billion Dollar Baby (1945). book:complete-book-of-1950s-broadway-musicals-the-dan-dietz#p22
Billion Dollar Baby [1945] was also a failure, running for 220 performances. book:complete-book-of-1950s-broadway-musicals-the-dan-dietz#p30
Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Morton Gould combined talents on Billion Dollar Baby, an interesting musical about the Roaring Twenties. Mitzi Green, Joan McCracken, Helen Gallagher, Danny Daniels, William Tabbert, and David Burns gave vivid performances, and the show amused postwar audiences for 220 performances. book:at-this-theatre-100-years-of-broadway-shows-stories-and-botto-louis-viagas-rober#p290
Unfortunately, their next outing was not as successful. Billion Dollar Baby (12/21/45; 220 performances), for which they teamed up with composer Morton Gould, was a failure; Irving Hoffman headed his review “Inflation.” book:broadway-its-history-people-and-places-an-encyclopedia-bloom-ken-1949-2nd-ed-new#p133
He costarred with brilliant vocalists Bette Davis (in Two’s Company) and Tallulah Bankhead (in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1956), but luckily, the Follies closed in New Haven, freeing Burns to go directly into Billion Dollar Baby. book:broadway-musicals-the-101-greatest-shows-of-all-time-bloom-ken-1949-vlastnik-fra#p131
Even in mediocre shows like Billion Dollar Baby (1945), Look Ma, I’m Dancin’ (1948), and Miss Liberty (1949), Robbins created dances that were unlike anything Broadway had ever seen, using ultra- specific, stylized character movement to historic effect. book:broadway-musicals-the-101-greatest-shows-of-all-time-bloom-ken-1949-vlastnik-fra#p172
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