Paint Your Wagon (1951)

Music by Frederick Loewe
Book and Lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner

Playbill Notes

When the 1951-52 Broadway season closed on June, 1952, the tally for new musicals was a dismal one. Of the scant nine tuners that had opened, only a Pal Joey revival (with Vivienne Segal and Harold Lang) and the eagerly awaited Paint Your Wagon had proved to be cause for celebration.

Paint Your Wagon, in fact, rode into New York on November 12,1951 as the most keenly anticipated show of the season. James Barton, a beloved character actor best remembered for his role in The Time of Your Life, was starring as Ben Rumson, a song-and-dance role that represented a return to his Vaudeville roots. Olga San Juan, a deft comedienne in motion pictures like The Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend, was cast as Rumson's daughter Jennifer and displayed a commanding alto that played stunningly against Tony Bavaar's rising tenor as Julio Valveras. The shows biggest ace, however, was that it marked the Broadway return of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, who had triumphed four years earlier with Brigadoon.

Paint Your Wagon was Lerner and Loewe's fourth time at bat before New York audiences although Lerner also had Love Life (written with Kurt Weil) and the movies An American In Paris and Royal Wedding to his credit. Wagon's tale of the California Gold Rush represented an abrupt turn from the whimsical Scottish fantasy of Brigadoon-a deliberate choice on the team's part.

Although the reviews ranged from raves to mixed-to-negative, the critics were in agreement on the score. Abundant with Western-themed songs like "Wanderin' Star," "I'm on My Way," and "They Call the Wind Maria" as well as the Latin rhythms of Julio's "I Talk to the Trees" and "Carino Mio," Wagon's score proved to be a spectacular success, with "Trees," "Maria," "Wanderin' Star," and "Another Autumn" achieving "pop hit" status.

Paint Your Wagon ran for a year but registered as a disappointment next to Brigadoon's triumph. The show acquired cult status as Lerner and Loewe's "might-have been" musical and warranted numerous regional and community theatre productions. When Hollywood finally got around to Wagon in 1969, director Josh Logan convinced Lerner to write an entirely new story, keeping grizzled miner Ben Rumson and Mormon Elizabeth Wooding (the secondary female lead on Broadway) and dumping most everyone else along with half the score. Andre Previn provided a handful of new songs to Lerner lyrics, none of which matched the Broadway originals. The film has acquired something of a cult status in recent years for its lush scenery and bizarre casting of Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, and Jean Seberg, in what were to be their first (and by popular demand, also their last) singing roles. It nevertheless was a huge flop in its original run, later derided as being one of the overblown "dinosaurs" that killed off the previously thriving musical genre.

In the late 1970's, Lerner had one more go at fixing what hadn't worked in Wagon originally: the book. Reviews of major regional productions of his rewrite had been strong enough to spark talk of a Broadway revival in the near future. The show you see this evening is essentially Lerner's rewrite (with the restoration of Jennifer's song "All for Him," deleted in the 1970's, and the original Broadway ending.) Fifty years after Broadway, we hope you'll find Paint Your Wagon's robust score and story are still as bracing as the mountain air in the Sierras!

-- Greg MacKellan

Plot Summary

After years of searching for gold out West, Ben Rumson and his young daughter, Jennifer, strike it rich. At the burial service of another miner, Jennifer discovers a gold nugget and Rumson Town is born. The strike encourages other miners to move to Rumson Town and a boom-town is formed. Meanwhile, Jennifer falls in love with a Mexican prospector, Julio Valveras. With the lack of women in the town, the men feel uncomfortable with Jennifer's presence, so Ben sends her back East to school. When, a while later, she returns back to the town unexpected, Rumson Town has turned into a ghost town and Julio is gone. In the end, Julio returns and he and Jennifer are reunited.