We’re back with the conclusion of our look at Ira Levin’s Dr. Cook’s Garden, which opened September 25, 1967. Here are some excerpts from the reviews, many of which appeared the next day.
Open for less than a week but there’s still a Hirschfeld.
“Dr. Cook’s Garden is planted with stiffs” headlined John Chapman in the Daily News, continuing ““the author seems to have aimed for suspense and goose pimples but the audience found these in short supply.”
The New York Times went so far as to say “worse than anything I saw last season.”
“Dr. Cook’s Garden needs a shot in the arm…a medical melodrama in need of first aid,” wrote Glover in the AP review, which was nationally syndicated, as was Jack Gaver’s UPI review which opined “the first act is one of the dullest, most banal ever written.”
Medical and gardening imagery abounds in the unanimous pans the show received.
The most in-depth criticism of the writing I could find was from Charles Champlin in the Los Angeles Times: “the most interesting thing about the play, is the way it keeps threatening to become comparatively new-fangled—a testy black comedy with a clever basic idea and a sardonic approach to a large, provocative scene…what might have been uproarious as black comedy…is merely mostly tedious as melodrama. The cheery homecoming scene which begins the play must be ghastly to enact time after time, and the early exposition is heavy-handed and interminable.”
Playbill cover.
Closing was announced the day after the reviews, for that Saturday, September 30. Dr. Cook’s Garden played just six previews and eight performances. In just under seven weeks, between August 14-September 30, the show had rehearsed, previewed, opened, and closed.
And yet, Dr. Cook’s Garden was only one part of Broadway’s rough fall that year: between September 25 and October 19, five of the twelve shows that had opened in those weeks quickly closed.
Keir Dullea and Burl Ives
THE AFTERMATH
After the critical drubbing, producer Saint Subber said, “I loved [the play]. I had to, to produce it. Do I love it now? No. It’s like a joke you heard and laughed at and wanted to tell someone else. You do and it’s a bomb. This is no reflection on Mr. Levin or on the cast, who could do beautifully in anything else. I believe the blame should be placed only on the producer. I chose the play, the director, the script. I controlled all the conditions.”
Subber continued, “Doing a show is much less trouble than closing it. There is the return of all the rentals of the furniture and so forth, the refunds, the closing of the books. And you know as you’re doing it that you’re not doing anything that is productive.”
Subber had to dig into his own pocket to cover the loss on Dr. Cook’s Garden, which was in excess of the $100K investment total. Significantly, Subber did not receive any of the money from the screen deal with Paramount. Since the show did not run 21 performances, under the terms of Subber’s deal with the author, all that money went to Levin.
The set cost $16,800, plus $900 more to be hauled off and burned, as it could not be sold. The costumes, which cost $3,500, netted $35 in their sale to a thrift shop. The show’s weekly payroll was (15 people) was $8,800 a week.
Subber would have better luck later that year with There’s a Girl in My Soup.
Der Bingle/Academy Award winning actor Bing Crosby in his final dramatic role as Dr. Cook in the TV movie of Dr. Cook’s Garden.
Dr. Cook’s Garden did become a 1971 tv movie (watch it here) starring Bing Crosby in the title role. It was his final acting project and he was cast against type. Blythe Danner and Frank Converse are in the cast as well. The film opens up the play to many outdoor settings and telescopes the play’s events into a 70 minute running time. The tv movie received good reviews, far better than the play did.
The play is occasionally still performed on small stages in America, every once in a while…and the issues the play brings up still haven’t been settled in our society.
Our next show was a hit everywhere… but Broadway: the sex comedy The Little Hut by Andre Roussin.