NEWLY REVISED VERSION

NOW AVAILABLE FOR PRODUCTION

What Makes Sammy Run?

A Musical About Hollywood

Book by Budd Schulberg and Stuart Schulberg

As Revised by Robert Armin

Music & Lyrics by Ervin Drake

In February of 2000, New York director Robert Armin contacted Budd Schulberg and Ervin Drake and proposed that they take a fresh look at their 1964 Broadway musical, What Makes Sammy Run?  The result is a newly revised script that restores much of the dramatic power of Schulberg's 1941 novel, eliminating a number of secondary characters and the entire dancing ensemble. At the same time, two young women from the original novel, Rosalie Goldbaum and Billie Rand, have been interpolated, adding a poignancy missing from the 1964 version. 

But the primary reason to revive any show is its score and What Makes Sammy Run? boasts one of the lost treasures of the musical theatre. Theatre critic Norman Nadel wrote "Ervin Drake has composed music and lyrics which fit the story in style and mood."  Walter Kerr praised the "sinuous nostalgia" of A Room Without Windows, the "animated fury" of Kiss Me No Kisses and described the lyrics of I See Something as "crisp, candid and fetchingly sassy." 

Whitney Bolton wrote "Ervin Drake’s score is light and witty and capricious and I cannot erase My Hometown and A Room Without Windows from memory."   John McLain wrote "He has a fine idea in Tender Spot, the plaint of a maiden who is a sucker for the wrong guy." Even Martin Gottfried, who disliked the original production, wrote "It’s a shame that rock ‘n’ roll music has killed popular music because at least a half-dozen of them would have been—how did we say it?—humming their way up the Hit Parade."  

For the revised version, Drake has eliminated several Hollywood "ballets" and the hoe-down number, I Feel Humble, to make room for four new songs (Two Cent Encyclopedia, I Can Trust Him, Don't Bite The Hand That Feeds You and the jazzy saloon number, Mother Of All The Blues). He has revised the lyrics of two existing songs (A Tender Spot and My Hometown) and included Bachelor Gal, a defiant anthem for Kit Sargent, which was added during the Broadway run when Bernice Massi took over the role.

Hear the new songs

According to Drake, "The revised show is tougher and closer to the novel that first appeared in 1941.  We were deprived of staging a tougher show by the producer, Joe Cates, who felt it would not appeal to the audience of that time.  Both the script and the songs were softened and Steve Lawrence's "Sammy" was played fetchingly.  The audiences loved him, but we felt the novel had been betrayed.  In our opinion, the social climate has so changed over the years that audiences will take readily to the honesty of the new presentation, without our losing the fun of the original."