Humpty Dumpty

• Closed prior to Broadway (1932)
  Pittsburgh, PA

Click on the title for info on the song.

Original score

• Tickled Pink
• Humpty Dumpty
• Laughing Our Way Through Love
• Way Ahead of the Game
• Turn Out the Lights
• She's Nuts About Me
• Smoothie
  • aka You're an Old Smoothie [no note]
• Eadie Was a Lady
• Night
  • aka Night, Hold Back the Dawn [no note]

Dress manufacturer Sammy Mosco's partner sinks $75,000 in a sure fire musical revue flop called Humpty Dumpty, a miserable pastiche featuring such historical characters as Alexander Hamilton, Nathan Hale, Miles Standish, Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, and Daniel Boone, written by flighty, effeminate playwright Gerald Townsend. The show's frantic producers, Martin and Michael Sully, coerce Mosco into investing another $10,000 to save the show and protect his disappeared partner's original rash investment. Mosco leaves his Riverside Drive home and arrives at the Embassy Theatre with his mother, Rebecca, younger brother, Louis, and sister, Consuelo, to appraise the dress rehearsal of Humpty Dumpty. The Mosco family's acerbic, withering commentary does nothing to encourage the producers nor cast. Mosco injects himself into the show as an unlikely General Duquesne in a Daniel Boone sketch. The Moscos' worst fears are confirmed after the opening night when the New York critics agree that "Humpty Dumpty ought to get three weeks, the producers three years!"

Writer B.G. DeSylva had originally wanted a turn-of-the-century-type ballad for Walter O'Keefe to perform. When O'Keefe decided against appearing in the show, DeSylva and composer Richard Whiting wrote "Eadie Was a Lady".