Archives - Pal Joey

by Richard Rogers and Lorenz Hart
Book by John O’Hara, based on a series of stories in The New Yorker

Directed by Jack Wood
Musical Director Jeremy Lowkes

Saturday 1st – Saturday 8th February 1992 in the Auditorium

Pal Joey was the twenty-sixth of the twenty-seven musicals written by Rodgers and Hart in their quarter-century partnership. Its first performance in 1940 received mixed reviews, partly because with its radical approach of integrating the plot with the songs and having the first musical “anti-hero”, it seemed ahead of its time. But at its first major revival in 1952 it was hailed as the milestone it was.

It remains the most biting, daring thing Rodgers and Hart wrote, as good to look at and listen to today as it was fifty years ago; brilliant, sardonic and strikingly original, with songs that are a unique, satisfying blend of Rodgers’ warm lyricism and Hart’s street-urchin toughness.