By every billing it was the musical that could not miss. At the top of the credit lines for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue were two of the arts' most potent names: Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner of My Fair Lady and Camelot fame and West Side Story Composer Leonard Bernstein. The show, about the lives and times of 13 early Presidents, was a Bicentennial natural, and the Coca-Cola Co. eagerly footed the $1.2 million cost of bringing a 45-member cast and a 30-piece orchestra together for five weeks of rehearsals in New York and tryouts in Philadelphia and Washington. But when it finally reached Broadway's Mark Hellinger Theater, the critics found its view of American history "bleak and patronizing" and its humor —typified by such lines as Dolly Madison saying "I must go feed my parrot, his language is becoming scandalous" —unbearably flat. While some found Bernstein's score strong, rich and melodic, others said it was "self-derivative" and unable to rescue "a bum idea that has arrived in confusion."
So 1600 closed after seven performances (TIME, May 17), probably the most costly flop—in terms of tarnished reputations as well as money—in White Way history. What went wrong?
Lerner's original idea, on which the entire show turned, was an incredibly complex white-black Upstairs, Downstairs, a slice of a century of White House life expressed as a play within a play. Last week the survivors of the disaster were wondering what went right. Given the magic of the names involved, Coca-Cola and most of the 1600 actors bought the project on blind faith. Versatile Lead Ken Howard, who played all 13 Presidents, took the job without having seen a line of Lerner's book. British Actress Patricia Routledge, who played all the First Ladies, had heard only one song and Director Frank Corsaro (A Hatful of Rain, The Night of the Iguana) started rehearsals without even a finished second act. "That was," he says now, "a very dangerous situation. I would not have permitted this with any other playwrights."
Idea in Rehearsal. At Coca-Cola, which signed on as a backer because Chairman J. Paul Austin, a chum of Lerner's at Harvard in the late 1930s, had been looking for "something meaningful" as a Bicentennial project.
In retrospect, most of its principals seem to agree, 1600 was probably doomed as early as 1972. That was when Lerner, depressed by the Nixon landslide, decided to write a musical comedy about "the first 100 years of the White House and other attempts to take it away from us." The action would revolve around 13 Presidents, their wives and their black servants. The play within a play would involve performers dropping in and out of character to discuss acting problems along with the problems faced by the various Presidents—Lerner's way of conveying his notion of American democracy as an idea that is still in rehearsal.