High Button Shoes

High Button Shoes is a 1947

The musical opened on Broadway in 1947 (running for 727 performances), and in London's West End in 1948, and has had several regional revivals as well as being televised in 1956.

History

Many involved with High Button Shoes were Broadway first-timers or relatively unknown, except for the director,

As the con men Floy and Pontdue are pursued to the Atlantic City beach while carrying a satchel full of stolen money, the people on the beach dance around them ("The Bathing Beauty Ballet"). They tangle with a large number of people—including bathing beauties, lifeguards, other criminals, identical twins—and one gorilla. The climax occurs when the Keystone Cops arrive, and Floy loses everything when he bets on the wrong football team. But after his being captured we learn that Pontdue has bet on not a football team, but a filly named "Princeton." Floy gives the conned citizens their money back, but before he leaves tries to get the audience to buy one more item of "great worth..."

Dance elements

The highlight of the original production was a long (7- to 10-minute) ensemble dance number ("The Bathing Beauty Ballet", to the song "On a Sunday by the Sea") at the beginning of the second act. Choreographer Robbins staged this number in the manner of a Mack Sennett silent slapstick film. It uses the music of "On A Sunday By the Sea", Liszt's Second Hungarian Rhapsody, and Offenbach's can-can from Orpheus in the Underworld. "This number was so basic to the show that deleting it would render the evening incoherent. It was a major evocation of a period, a tribute to silent-film comedy."^[3] Amanda Vaill, in her biography of Robbins, describes this dance number: "The actors careen across the stage, in and out of a row of boardwalk bathhouses, slamming doors, falling, rolling, leaping to their feet, colliding with one another, in a masterpiece of intricately plotted chaos that bears all the marks of the developing Robbins style: wit, character, drama, and precision."^[4]

Songs

Productions

High Button Shoes opened on

The U.S. national tour ran in parallel with the Broadway shows, with Eddie Foy Jr. as Harrison Floy, Audrey Meadows as Sara "Mama" Longstreet and Jack Whiting as Henry "Papa" Longstreet. It opened at the Boston Opera House April 26, 1948,^[5] played at least 16 cities in the Midwest and Great Plains, including Chicago, Denver and Minneapolis, as well as Los Angeles on August 15, 1949,^[6] and closed December 31, 1949, in Kansas City.^{[citation needed]}

A London production opened at the Hippodrome December 22, 1948, and ran for 291 performances. Two unknowns, Audrey Hepburn and Alma Cogan, were among the chorus girls.

A television adaptation was broadcast live November 24, 1956, on NBC with Nanette Fabray and Joey Faye repeating their original roles, Hal March as Harrison Floy and Don Ameche as Papa Longstreet.^[7]

The musical was revived at the

More recently, the musical was revived again at the New York City Center on May 8–12, 2019.[11]

Principal casts

Response

Brooks Atkinson, theatre critic for The New York Times, wrote that it was a "very happy musical show in a very cheerful tradition." He particularly praised Phil Silvers' performance as "an uproarious comic. He has the speed, the drollery and the shell-game style of a honky-tonk buffoon." He commented that the story was a "sentimentally amusing fable" and that the songs were "simple in style and very pleasant to hear."^[12]

References