PineStraw magazine asked me to write about the world of theatre and how it’s coping with the pandemic. I titled it Indefinite Intermission decided to segment the article along the major lines of my peripatetic life and career — one section is about theatre in New York, and one is about Judson Theatre Company and the Sandhills. Read it here:
https://issuu.com/pinestrawmag/docs/january_pinestraw_2021/74
What an honor to be the first guest of Joe Brown (Executive Director, Bradshaw Performing Arts Center) on the new BPAC podcast Behind the Curtain! Watch it here:
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.
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
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.
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.
Well, friends, it’s been a minute since I wrote an entry in our Shows for Someday series, but here we are again! Thanks for reading. Today, we’ll be looking at Ira Levin’s Dr. Cook’s Garden, which is subtitled “A Melodrama” on the published script.
Ira Levin occupies his own singular niche as a writer. Many writers are lucky if they have one monumental, genre-changing bestseller, but Levin arguably had three: Rosemary’s Baby (the grandaddy of the demon-possession story), The Stepford Wives (whose title has become a common American phrase), and The Boys from Brazil. His first huge bestseller was A Kiss for Dying in 1953, his last Son of Rosemary in 1997. That’s a good run!
People pay less attention to his impressive accomplishments as a playwright: a massive hit right out of the gate with his theatrical adaptation of No Time For Sergeants, which was a television play, then a Broadway show, then a film. It launched the career of Andy Griffith and first paired him with Don Knotts. His other theatre hits include Critic’s Choice (on Broadway with Henry Fonda, on film with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball) and 1978’s Deathtrap, a blockbuster play that still holds the record as the longest-running mystery-comedy on Broadway. Deathtrap and Sergeants in particular were worldwide successes that played everywhere in their day, from Broadway to community theatre. And even less successful Levin titles like Veronica’s Room are still occasionally done.
He had flops on Broadway too, but even one like the 1965 musical Drat! The Cat!, yielded a cultural contribution, the standard “He Touched Me”, for which Levin wrote the lyrics.
What, then, of the subject of this Shows for Someday entry: Levin’s 1967 thriller Dr. Cook’s Garden?
In the fall of 1967, luck hadn’t been with Levin’s recent Broadway outings. His big hit No Time For Sergeants had closed a full decade prior. He’d had a moderate hit (with a long stock and amateur afterlife) in Critic’s Choice, which ran for 5 months in 1962. But since Sergeants’ 1957 closing, Levin had flopped on Broadway with Interlock, a four-performance bomb in 1958 that starred Rosemary Harris, Celeste Holm, and Maximilian Schell; the large-cast 1962 play General Seeger, which ran for one preview and two performances, and starred George C. Scott, who also directed; and the aforementioned Drat! The Cat! in 1965, directed by Joe Layton and starring Elliot Gould and Lesley Ann Warren, which ran for eleven previews and eight performances. As for his career in fiction writing, Rosemary’s Baby had been released in March 1967 and would go on to sell 4,000,000 copies. The film version was already in pre-production when Dr. Cook’s Garden made its much-anticipated Broadway bow.
In the fall of 1966 in the town of Greenfield Center, VT, much-loved Dr. Cook is a pillar of his community. It’s the kind of idyllic place where karma seems to catch up with wicked people. Ben Tennyson, a young physician who grew up with Cook as his family doctor, returns to the town to visit. Ben is delighted to see his mentor again, until a medical ethics issue arises: it seems the town attains its perfection in an unexpected and deadly way. And in the play’s climax, the two doctors, one young and one old, face off in a very suspenseful, dramatic scene.
In the next post we’ll talk about the backstage shenanigans, which were nearly as dramatic as those in the play!
