Thanks for continuing to read our Shows for Someday series. This is the second part of the third show we’re focusing on, Ira Levin’s 1967 melodrama, Dr. Cook’s Garden.
Playwright…and director Ira Levin
THE BACKSTORY
FEBRUARY: Broadway producer Saint Subber (Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, Kiss Me Kate) read the first two acts of Ira Levin’s new play, Dr. Cook’s Garden, in February 1967. Subber met with Levin and Levin’s lawyer, making a deal that he didn’t sign till he’d read the third act.
MAY: May brought the arrival of the finished script, which Subber offered to George C. Scott to direct (Scott had directed a previous Levin show, General Seeger).
JUNE: By the end of June, it was clear that Dr. Cook’s Garden would happen in the fall; it became the first play of the 1967-68 season.
JULY: Subber cast Academy Award winner Burl Ives, in his first Broadway play since playing Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The Ives announcement was made July 13. Keir Dullea’s signing was announced a few days later, sharing Ives’ above the title billing.
AUGUST: In August, Paramount Pictures bought the screen rights to Dr. Cook’s Garden for $75,000.00, and they invested an additional $25,000.00 in the Broadway production. Rehearsals began August 14, with four weeks of rehearsal and two weeks of previews starting September 11, prior to a September 25 opening night at the Belasco Theatre on W 44th Street, east of Broadway.
Modern producers may marvel at how quickly it all came together…seven months from the time the producer read the script to opening night.
Dr. Cook’s Garden was budgeted at $100,000.00. Subber pulled together a group of no more than 25 investors, all within New York State. This let him make the show a private offering and bypass the 2 to 3 month wait for the SEC to clear general investors.
REHEARSALS
Director George C. Scott talks to stars Burl Ives and Keir Dullea.
By all accounts, including that of William Goldman in his landmark book The Season, rehearsals were very rough.
Rehearsals had begun while Scott still had issues with the play itself: “There’s no scene in here where Cook has doubts about his killing, his gardening of the community. Without it, we have a play about a suspicious young man who points the finger and a villain who rationalizes 21 years of killing… I want Pasteur gone wrong. Someone told me Ives saw it as a morality play; I think he’s reading in a depth that doesn’t exist. I think Ira won’t deepen the play because he’s worried that it’ll confuse what he’s written. But how deep should we go?”
Ives claimed illness in the week prior to opening. The first preview, on September 11, was canceled. Four days later, director Scott withdrew from rehearsals after several arguments with Ives that began in earnest the week before he left. Ultimately, Scott felt Ives just wasn’t much of an actor, confiding to William Goldman, “I just couldn’t get through to him—I wanted to fire him but I didn’t have the power…so I got rid of myself.” Levin ended up directing the play himself, having never directed before, and he had never met Ives prior to his being cast.
Playbill title page
Previews went badly too—the audience was laughing in the wrong places. According to Levin, Ives exercised the right in his contract to an extra week of rehearsals by canceling the previews. With that plus his illness, Ives ended up missing several of the preview performances, and it may have been he wasn’t fully recovered on opening night. When the play opened on Monday night September 25, Ives hadn’t done the play since the Wednesday before.
Burl Ives and Keir Dullea
Reviews came out September 26th. We’ll look at them in the next post.
Ives and Dullea, at Dr. Cook’s desk.