Top Banana
Shows · Top Banana
Top Banana is a musical with music and lyrics by Johnny Mercer and book by Hy Kraft which premiered on Broadway in 1951. The show was written as a star vehicle for comedian Phil Silvers, who played the host of a television variety show program.
- Opened
- 1951
- Performances
- 350
- Type
- Musical
- Era
- Golden Age
Productions1 on Broadway
| 1951 | Winter Garden Theatre Original. November 1, 1951 · Jack Donohue | 350 performances |
Every Broadway staging held in broadway-data, sourced to IBDB. West End runs are not yet held.
Licensing 2 entries
| US | Concord Theatricals Tams-Witmark | available |
| UK | Concord Theatricals Tams-Witmark | available |
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.
12 passages naming Top Banana, found by keyword across 178 books. It's where this show turns up in the literature, not curated trivia about it.
Silvers won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical for Top Banana , and two decades later won the award again when he played the role of Pseudolus in the 1972 revival of Stephen Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. book:complete-book-of-1950s-broadway-musicals-the-dan-dietz#p214
Phil Silvers scored at the Winter Garden in a noisy musical, Top Banana (1951), about television, with Silvers impersonating a TV comic said to be inspired by Milton Berle. book:at-this-theatre-100-years-of-broadway-shows-stories-and-botto-louis-viagas-rober#p65
Playing the monumental ego Jerry Biffle in Top Banana, he exemplified every tyrannical attribute of a TV variety show mega-star (read Milton Berle), driving the show to a frenzied pitch with his breathless double-talk. book:broadway-musicals-the-101-greatest-shows-of-all-time-bloom-ken-1949-vlastnik-fra#p92
TOP BANANA was a burlesque musical featuring Phil Silvers, a handful of clowns, and a dog named Ted “Sport”? Morgan (who sang an inspired duet with Silvers). The show, which did not quite make it, was coproduced by Paula Stone (of the Stepping Stones—see RIPPLES [Kern: February 11, 1930]). book:show-tunes-1905-1985-the-songs-shows-and-careers-of-steven-suskin-1st-ed-new-yor#p574
TOP BANANA was produced by Paula Stone (see RIPPLES [Kern: February 11, 1930]) and her husband, Mike Sloane. book:show-tunes-the-songs-shows-and-careers-of-broadway-s-suskin-steven-suskin-steven#p421
Silvers won the Tony Award for Best Leading Actor in a Musical for Top Banana, and two decades later he was featured as script writer Sally Rogers for top banana Alan Brady (Carl Reiner) in the long-running CBS series The Dick Van Dyke Show. book:the-complete-book-of-1950s-broadway-musicals-dan-dietz-hardcover-2014-rowman-lit#p215
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