In his book Finishing the Hat, Stephen Sondheim writes that this production had a second week of performances. As far as we can tell, that is incorrect. All press coverage of the production at the time — advance press releases, articles, and reviews — gives the date of the opening as May 20, 1974, and the closing as May 25, 1974. We have found no evidence of a last-minute extension for a second week.

In addition, Sondheim himself said the following during the question-and-answer portion of a 1987 lecture in London (which was published in BIASED, Spring/Summer 1988, with his comments on The Frogs excerpted on Page 20 of the Fall 1998 issue of The Sondheim Review): "I had only four weeks to write it, it was a short piece. But we never had a chance to have a dress rehearsal. The dress rehearsal was performed in front of the critics. We had eight performances, and it took four of those to settle in. We did some rewriting afterwards."


The exact script performed in this production seems to have never been performed again. Sondheim's setting of Shakespeare's "Fear No More" from Cymbeline was not in this production. (It was probably not yet written.)

The dialogue was often different from that in the script published in 1975 by The Dramatic Publishing Company (and republished in 1985 by Dodd, Mead & Company, in a book that also contained the script for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum). That first published script seems to document the revised version first performed in the 1975 Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival production.


There is an audio recording of this production. In all probability, there is no video. A video circulates that has sometimes been identified as being a document of this production, but that video is of the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble production.


There was no list of musical numbers in the printed program, but at least at some performances, there was an insert with a list of numbers. We have followed the titles and format of that list in our list. The insert did not list the characters or performers who sang the numbers. For that information, we have used the list of musical numbers in the script published by Dodd, Mead, in which it was paired with the script for A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.


From the program insert:

The TIME is The Present.

The PLACE is Ancient Greece.

The ACTION is Continuous.

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