Posted 8:00 PM by Gene

From the moment I first set eyes on this uncredited poster art several years ago I fell hopelessly in love with it. No woman ever had a figure like that (except perhaps out of a corset [!!!!!]), but to me this speaks the Broadway ideal -- or what was the Broadway ideal, before it became Branson East and a Big Apple honky-tonk. Unfortunately with Drat! the Cat! it appears the poster was better than the show. (The Paper of Re-CORD's review is behind a pay wall, but you can tell from its first sentence.) Columbia was set to make a cast album -- its BABS was a backer, and she recorded the show's lone hit, "He Touched Me" -- but it closed so fast it never happened. The album cover is from an early version of those people who pirate movies with camcorders. (This and other such recordings of flop musicals from the sixties, from a mysterious outfit called Blue Pear, were mostly taken off the theaters' sound boards.) Varèse did it (legitimately) thirty-two years later, but the cover art is a mere fraction. Give me a day when it was still possible to fall in love at the theater, when the stage-door Johnny wasn't the mere stuff of legend, and when feminine show-biz types still had impossible figures -- and faces too.

P. S. It played at the Martin Beck, which is now the Al Hirschfeld theme park. Beck was some kind of big vaudeville wheel who lucked out with Harry Houdini, and is so obviously well remembered he had his own building renamed in 2003.

P. P. S. I think this is supposed to be Lesley Ann Warren, who didn't look quite like this, but came fairly close.

P. P. P. S. on 6/26/2009 at 12:20 p. m. I'm having problems with the image. The .jpg link got changed -- the site it comes from has a new name and URL -- and I got stuck with this unaccountable picture of what looks like a blackbird biting a middle-aged woman's nose. I'll fix it later.

P. P. P. P. S. on 7/6/2009 at 11:50 a. m. I had to change to a poster reproduction from another site as I doubt we'll get the old one back -- a pity, for it was better transferred. I may change it back later, if I can.

P. P. P. P. P. S. on 10/31/2009 at 10:15 p. m. Fixed it -- with my own upload!