No, the Other Play with Juliet
This was a huge, unexpected find.
Rodgers & Hammerstein wrote three less-than-successful (by their standards) musicals. Pipe Dream was based on John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday (a sequel to Cannery Row), and ran 245 performances, thanks to a huge advance sale, but it lost money. Allegro was a sort of bare-bones experimental show ran for 315 performances, and made a small profit. The third, Me and Juliet was a backstage musical that Rodgers had long wanted to do. (No, it’s not about backstage during a production of Romeo and Juliet.) It also had a huge advance sale, and thanks to that it ran for 358 performances, had a small national tour and made a profit. Though compared to the team’s major works, each that ran into the thousands of performances and have had long lives, these three are considered much lesser-works.
It therefore came as a major surprise to find video of two of Me and Juliet’s leads performing a nine-minute scene on TV with two songs, including the most famous number to come from it, “No Other Love.” [UPDATE: I originally wrote that the Rodgers later used the melody when scoring the TV documentary series, Victory at Sea. But reader George Ferencz corrected me that the music for Victory at Sea came first, a year before -- where it was known as "Beneath the Southern Cross" -- and they used it for the song in Me and Juliet.] I haven't been able to find what TV show this was on, but it’s 1953. The actors here are Isabel Bigley, who was the female lead in the original production of Guys & Dolls, and Bill Hayes, who had a respectable career on stage, and then had a massive career on the soap opera Days of Our Lives for 54 years. Moreover, he received a Gold Record for his famous 1956 recording of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett.” (Yes, that was Bill Hayes of Days of Our Lives!!)
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