Hadju’s presentation made me interested in finding more about the show which never made it to Broadway. He writes about it in Lush Life, his book about about Billy Strayhorn. You can find it a little bit half way through the book.
In short, two young men, Herbert Martin and Christopher Manos managed to persuade Duke Ellington to provide the music for a serious-minded Broadway production based on a novel, Mine Boy, by a black South African writer Peter Abrahams.
Ellington started to work on the task together with Billy Strayhorn and Martin but his interest waned very quickly. He had to take care of the band. But Strayhorn and Martin continued and provided twenty-two songs by the summer of 1958.
By that time, Mine Boy, was not entitled SaturdayLaughter and Martin was working hard to find sponsors for the show, and there was also a working cast which included Joya Sherrill, Thelma Carpenter, Diahann Carroll and others.
But Ellington and Strayhorn were on tour in Europe so “what we got would often be a thirty-two or sixty-four bar tune” says the musical director in Lush Life.
Manos worked hard to find sponsors for the show but he failed, so when Ellington and Strayhorn came back from Europe in late November, it had been disbanded for lack of funds.
In his presentation, Hadjuck plays some music from Saturday Laughter.
Hi Ulf
Do you (or does anybody here) have more details of this CD? It has a lot of significant American names listed on the cover, but it also has two British names – Ian Shaw and James Pearson. And presumably, given how you summarise Hajdu’s presentation, most of the songs would be Strayhorn compositions and not Ellington compositions?