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| Don Murray, Ted Thurston, Mort Marshall. |
Smith, which Douglas Watt dismissed as a “dud,” was a musical
comedy with Pirandellian overtones about the eponymous young botanist (Don
Murray) from New Jersey whose sex interests are largely confined to his
research activities. This causes him to ignore the attentions of his shy,
plain, female lab assistant of half-a-decade (Virginia Sandifur).
Smith would rather
hire a new assistant who isn’t so solicitous. He suddenly discovers a
manuscript for a musical called Smith and,
before he knows what hit him, is living in the musical itself. Unable to do
anything about it, he pursues the clichéd plot line. This takes him to the
South Seas in search of a wonderful plant with the joint properties of inducing
weight reduction and sexual arousal. In his wake is a voluptuous sexpot—the fantasy
version of the drab young lab assistant he dismissed. Soon he and she are doing
what he and she could never get around to back in the antiseptic laboratory days.
Brendan Gill came
right out and called the show “a catastrophe,” and his thumbs-down feelings
were shared by most. Watt dubbed the book “sorry” and Clive Barnes crushed the music as “forgettable.” The show’s attempt at satirizing musical of the 50s
and 60s lacked life and wit, although a saving grace lay in several amusing
sight gags based on the theatrical conventions of the musical in which Smith
finds himself a prisoner. Star Don Murray, making his musical debut, was
modestly received, but his singing abilities were deemed insufficient for a
Broadway show.
Actually, the Eden
Theatre, where Smith was produced,
was not physically on Broadway but on Second Avenue and East Twelfth Street,
although its seating capacity allowed it to operate on a Broadway
contract. (When playing on an Off-Broadway contract, seats were roped off to
limit the number of spectators.) The venue, which still stands, has a long
history dating back to its use in the Yiddish theatre days and its subsequently
serving as the home of the Phoenix Theatre at the turn of the 1960s. In 1969 the original Oh! Calcutta! opened there. It
was also a movie theatre for many years.
The musical numbers
had titles like “Boy Meets Girl,” “There’s a Big Job Waiting for You,” “To the
Ends of the Earth, “Onh-Honh-Honh!,” “How Beautiful It Was,” “You’re in New
York Now,” and “Song of the Frog.”
