Review: ‘How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying’ at the Kennedy Center
The Kennedy Center advertises its Broadway Center Stage series as presenting shows in a “semi-staged concert format.” For Frank Loesser’s 1961 satire of mid-20th century New York corporate life, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (book by Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock, and Willie Gilbert), that claim is too modest. What the enthusiastic full house at the Eisenhower Theater saw Thursday night was a fully realized production of a classic show from the “Golden Age” of Broadway musicals. Every aspect of the show – acting, singing, dancing, costumes, set, lighting – was brilliantly executed.
Like The Pajama Game is an artifact of 1950s labor-management relations in small local manufacturing companies, How to Succeed is also a creature of the corporate world of that era. Shepherd Mead, who wrote the spoof self-help book of the same title that inspired the show, rose from the mail room to the executive suite of a Manhattan advertising agency between 1936 and the 1952 publication of his book.
