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Three Men on a Farce. It follows that their new show, opening in November, will be another leap in a new direction: this time, over 300 years backward. On a train going to Atlantic City they hit on the idea of putting Shakespeare to music, decided to swipe his Comedy of Errors, the farce about the two sets of twin brothers and their women who couldn't tell them apart, which Shakespeare himself swiped from the Menaechmi of Plautus (who in turn swiped it from parties unknown).
They are leaving the plot as they found it —"If it's good enough for Shakespeare, it's good enough for us"; but they have changed the title to The Boys from Syracuse. George Abbott, who has written the book, has pitched out every line of Shakespeare's dialogue, because he likes his own better.
The raw, rowdy tale, as filled with Abbott wisecracks as an amusement park with lights, gives Rodgers plenty of chance for pedal in his tunes, Hart plenty of change for pepper in his rhymes. The score runs the whole anachronistic gamut from waltzes to hotcha; the lyrics vary from the smart patter of a prison song, listing the advantages of jail:
You're privileged to miss a row
Of tragedies by Sophocles
And diatribes by Cicero
to the sly patter of a He and She song:
He told her this, on the very day he met her;
She said the wish is the father to the sport;
He built a house, in the nursery he set her ;
She helped the stork make an annual
report; to the forthright bang of:
I want to go back to Syracuse:
Wives don't get divorces there,
The men are strong as horses there.
Cast for the roles of the Dromio twins are Comedians Jimmy Savo (Almanac Parade) and Hart's brother Teddy (Three Men on a Horse, Room Service), two shrimps who look uncommonly alike. (Savo, 5 ft. 4 in., at present weighs 180 pounds, and all through October must diet as well as rehearse.) The Boys from Syracuse will be the first Rodgers & Hart show in which Teddy Hart has appeared. Said Brother Larry: "He had to be a star, and this is the first star part that ever fit him." The Boys from Syracuse will be the second Rodgers & Hart show in which Rodgers & Hart have an investment; the other was I'd Rather Be Right.
The Boys from Syracuse is the 25th show that Rodgers & Hart have worked on together. Since they first met in 1919, when Hart was 23 and just out of Columbia, and Rodgers 16 and just going in, they have never done a stick of work apart. They met, and that decided it. Nor was there any stern parent storming about the house, or lean wolf hanging round the door, to menace their plans. "For the sake of color," says Rodgers, "I should have been a singing waiter at Nigger Mike's. Unfortunately, I was a doctor's son and very well-fed as a kid." Similarly well-fed. Hart was the son of a promoter.