A Study Guide for Frank Loesser, Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert's "How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying"

How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying

Frank Loesser,

Abe Burrows,

Jack Weinstock,

Willie Gilbert

1961

Introduction

How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying is a musical that opened on October 14, 1961, at the 46th Street Theatre in New York City, where it ran for over three years. After 1,417 performances, the show closed in March 1965. The music and lyrics were written by Frank Loesser. The book of the musical play was written by Abe Burrows in collaboration with Jack Weinstock and Willie Gilbert. Burrows also directed the show. The origins of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying lie in a satirical book of that title by Shepherd Mead, himself a business executive. Weinstock and Gilbert adapted the book for the theater, but their play sans music was not produced.

The musical How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Book. It was revived on Broadway in 1995, in a highly successful production starring Matthew Broderick at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. In 2011, a fiftieth-anniversary revival was produced, starring Daniel Radcliffe, at the Al Hirschfeld Theatre. The show is also often produced by amateur and student drama groups. Although aspects of the story now seem rooted in the 1950s and early 1960s and therefore outdated, the songs remain entertaining, and the satire about cor-porate life still has the ability to amuse a twentyfirst-century audience.

The book of the play, published in 1965, has long been out of print and is difficult to obtain. The vocal score, however, is available, published by Frank Music Corp., as are audio CDs of the major productions. The song lyrics are available at the Internet Archive, http://web.archive.org/web/20070807011417/http://libretto.musicals.ru/text.php?textid=165&language=1.

Author Biography

Composer and lyricist Frank Henry Loesser was born in New York City on June 29, 1910, the son of Henry and Julia Ehrlich Loesser. Although his family was a musical one, his father being a teacher of classical piano, Loesser never had any formal musical training but as a teenager taught himself to play the harmonica and the piano. He attended City College of New York in 1926 but dropped out after a