Lyrics Alan Jay Lerner Productions 1945 Broadway Lyricist Alan Jay Lerner | Book Alan Jay Lerner Playwright Alan Jay Lerner Composer Frederick Loewe | |
Similar Alan Jay Lerner plays, Musicals | ||
The Day Before Spring is a musical with a book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe.
Contents
Productions
The 1945 touring production closed in Chicago after three days due to a crippling coal strike. The show then opened at the Shubert Theatre, Boston, Massachusetts on October 30, 1945, with the Billboard Magazine critic writing "Lerner and Loewe look like potential supermen."
The musical opened on Broadway on November 22, 1945 at the National Theatre, and closed on April 13, 1946 after 167 performances. Directed by Edward Padula and choreographed by Antony Tudor, the cast included Lucille Benson, John Archer, Bert Freed, Irene Manning, and William Johnson.
The show was performed in July 2007 by the York Theatre Company in New York City as part of their Mufti Theatre series. The York staged concert starred Hunter Bell, Amanda Watkins, Richard Todd Adams, Edward Watts and Tia Speros. The restoration of the show was undertaken by musical supervisors Aaron Gandy, Mark York and director David Glenn Armstrong and included material that had been missing since the show closed on Broadway in 1946. A treasure trove of material was bought by the Library of Congress in 1999 which filled the missing holes in the score.
In 2010 the Lost Musicals project (The Lost Musicals Charitable Trust 1069268) presented The Day Before Spring in Sadler's Wells, London. Ian Marshall Fisher, director, Chris Walker, Music Director. Cast included: Madeline Worrall, David Habin, Harry Landis, Kaisa Hammarlund, Henry Luxemburg. This was the UK premier featuring all of the songs as found in the recent discovery of the original piano conductor score.
Plot overview
The plot concerns a married woman who, at a college reunion, meets the man with whom she almost eloped ten years before. Romantically stirred by a novel he has written about her, she considers leaving her husband and reuniting with her former flame.