110 in the Shade begins its tale in a Western state in the 1930s with the hometown return of Lizzie Curry, well down the road to spinsterhood despite the best efforts of her father (H.C.) and brothers (Noah and Jimmy) to play matchmaker. File, the sheriff, is the logical candidate, but ever since his wife ran off on him, he has retreated behind a façade of self-sufficiency. All this happens as the area is suffering under an almost unbearable drought. Just as it seems temperatures couldn't get any hotter, Starbuck, con man and rainmaker, blows into town, promising to produce a downpour for $100. By the time the law catches up with him, he has managed among other acts of hocus-pocus, to convince Lizzie she is indeed a beautiful woman. By story's end, Lizzie finds love and Starbuck does make it rain!

The cast for NSU's production is as follows: Melissa Jacobson will play Lizzie Curry, Nathan Payant is cast as the fast talking rainmaker, Bill Starbuck, Rory Behrens will play the sheriff, File, who Lizzie has her eyes set on, Steven Warzeha plays H.C. Curry, Lizzie's anxious and affectionate father, while Seth Engel plays older brother Noah, Chet Wollan is cast as younger brother Jimmie, and Rachel Engel as Snookie, the object of Jimmie's romantic interests. An ensemble of 25 NSU students and local children complete the company for this musical.

NSU Director of Theatre, Daniel Yurgaitis, directs and choreographs the play and the scenic and lighting design will be by NSU Technical Director, Larry Wild. Music faculty members Robert Glaubitz and Alexander Fokkens will be Vocal and Music Directors respectively for 110 in the Shade. Student Amy Heidenreich will be designing the costumes; Melissa Kindig will be Assistant Director, while the entire production will be stage managed by Samantha Banner.

110 in the Shade will be presented for three performances, October 30, 31 and November 1, at 7:30 pm nightly in the Johnson Fine Arts Center on the campus of NSU. Tickets are $9.00 and $8.00 for students and seniors. There are group rates available for groups of 10 or more. All seats are reserved and tickets will be available in the NSU bookstore beginning on Monday, October 20, or by mail. Call the NSU Bookstore at 626- 2655 or the NSU Department of Theatre at 626-2563 for additional information.

Tom Jones (lyrics) and Harvey Schmidt (music) wrote The Fantasticks in 1959 for a summer theatre at Barnard College. When it closed its record-breaking 42- year-run at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in New York in 2002, it had become the longest-running production in the history of the American stage and one of the most frequently produced musical in the world, including a film version released by United Artists in 2000.

The two first met when they were students at the University of Texas, and Schmidt admits that he would never have had anything to do with show business if he had not met Jones (he was an art major). But Schmidt liked to play piano for the shows put on by the university's Curtain Club and this brought the two into contact. After graduation they moved to New York. After a stints in the Army, the two began to have their songs and skits played in clubs as Julius Monk's Upstairs at the Downstairs, and in shows like The Shoestring Revue.

Their first Broadway show, 110 in the Shade, was nominated for a Tony Award and was successfully revived by the New York City Opera in 1993. I Do! I Do!, their two character musical starring Mary Martin and Robert Preston, was a success on Broadway and is frequently produced around the US. For several years Jones and Schmidt worked privately at their theatre workshop concentrating on small-scale musicals in new and often untried forms. The most notable of these efforts was Celebration, which moved to Broadway, and Philemon, which won an Outer Critics Circle Award. They contributed incidental music and lyrics to the off-Broadway play, Colette, starring Zoë Caldwell, then created a full-scale musical version under the title Colette Collage. In 1998, The Show Goes On, a musical review featuring their theatre songs and starring the authors themselves was presented at the York Theatre to great acclaim. The same year saw the premiere of Mirette, their musical based on the award-winning children's book, at the Goodspeed Opera House in Connecticut. In 2001, their western musical Roadside was given its premiere at the York Theatre in New York.

In addition to an Obie Award and the 1992 Special Tony award for The Fantasticks, Jones and Schmidt are the recipients of the prestigious ASCAP-Richard Rodgers award. In February of 1999 they were inducted into the Broadway Hall of Fame at the Gershwin Theatre.

N. Richard Nash (book) graduated from the University of Philadelphia with a degree in English and philosophy. He published two successful philosophical works and two novels before writing The Rainmaker, which opened on Broadway in 1954 with Geraldine Page and Darren McGavin as Lizzie and Starbuck. The play has since been translated into over 40 languages and was transformed into a classic film starring Katherine Hepburn and Burt Lancaster. (Link to the Internet Broadway Database entry for the original 1954 Broadway production and to The Internet Movie Database entry for the 1956 film.)

Nash went on to write screenplays for such films as Porgy and Bess, Helen of Troy, Dear Wife, One Summer Love and Between Darkness and Dawn. In addition to his work on 110 in the Shade, Nash's other Broadway collaborations were with composer Cy Coleman and lyricist Carolyn Leigh for Wildcat, starring Lucille Ball, and with composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb for The Happy Time, starring Robert Goulet. He died in Manhattan on December 1, 2000 at the age of 87.

New York Playbill

In his book, Making Musicals, Tom Jones relates the beginnings of 110 in the Shade, "A year or so after The Fantasticks opened, we were approached by N. Richard Nash to see, first, if we were interested in working on a musical of his play The Rainmaker and second, if we had ever written anything in a 'western' mode. The answer to both questions was yes. I had been a fan of the play ever since I saw it on television (1952) the night before I was discharged from the army, and Harvey knew the piece from the excellent movie. As for the 'western' part, we were both from Texas and felt we knew this world and these people." Harvey Schmidt adds "I found [the play] extremely moving and beautiful and laced with delightful humor as well. I love theatre where, back to back, you can laugh one minute and cry the next, and musicalization of such juxtaposition should inevitably lead to a richer score… creating the entire score began and ended with [Nash's] wonderful characters, who are at the same time both real and theatrical, and his poetic play, which is deeply felt and expressed with genuine humor, pathos and great, great human warmth, all qualities I believe are timeless."

After agreeing to collaborate with Nash, the authors knew they needed to decide on a shared point of view on how to approach the challenge. Tom Jones noted that, "we had a clear premise, a wonderful plot, strong characters, and as an extra dividend, a wealth of beautiful colorful language, especially in the speeches of Bill Starbuck. We had almost everything you could want except for songs and dances and a musical form." So the work began in earnest. The first decision was to turn the three-act play into a two-act musical. But more importantly, the collaborators needed to find a way to "break it open," to move it out of the confines of a realistic play and into the special world of musical comedy.

A search for key images greatly assisted in the creation of the world of 110 in the Shade. And the solution turned out to be the sun. Tom Jones continues, "the story is about drought. Drought is about sun. We decided that the thing to do was to take the idea of the one-day time frame mentioned in the stage directions of the play, and actually use that day to follow the progress of the sun as it interacts with the story. Then we would follow the sun throughout the course of the first act as it got higher and higher, and hotter and hotter." The play would evolve into a first act that takes place from morning to mid-day, and a second act that takes place magically in the moonlight.

Tom Jones adds in the liner notes for 1999 Studio Recording that "the writing period was extremely happy. The casting and pre-production were creative and enjoyable… (David Merrick) was unhappy that we were all happy."

Robert Horton as Starbuck

Legendary (and infamous) Broadway producer David Merrick expected to have three musicals up and running during the 1963-64 season for one important reason: the New York World's Fair and a guaranteed tourist audience. From the beginning Merrick's reputation for meddling and trouble was in evidence. Early on when considering actors for the role of Starbuck, Merrick insisted that Hollywood star Howard Keel (a veteran of countless MGM musicals) sing, as if he were a green and untried artist. When Keel suggested that he'd be happy to screen any of his films for Merrick, Keel was off the list. Merrick next settled on actor Hal Holbrook (already famous for his portrayal of Mark Twain) until handsome TV star Robert Horton became available. So he bought out Holbrook's contract and hired the inexperienced Horton. Rounding out the cast was Inga Swenson (now better known for her work in the TV series Benson) who was an up and coming actress comfortable in musicals or classical theatre. For the role of File, Stephen Douglass, who had starred in Damn Yankees as baseball player Joe Hardy, was cast.

Joseph Anthony, who had already directed the original Broadway production and film version of The Rainmaker, was hired to direct. Choreographer Agnes DeMille, who had changed the way dance was used and viewed because of her groundbreaking work in the original Oklahoma!, was engaged to create the dances for the show. Merrick butted heads with DeMille over dancer casting insisting on beautiful girls over talented strong dancers. He would finally succeed in cutting most of her dances by the time the show opened.

Tom Jones noted in Howard Kissel's biography of David Merrick, The Abominable Showman, that "it was infrequent that he had creative suggestions. But when he did, the next day he might just say the opposite. He was disturbingly inconsistent and much more likely to trust the opinion of the men's room assistant than his own staff. We had the feeling we were working with a deranged person, but also someone who could use his derangement for his own amusement and his own purposes." Jones came to believe that Merrick would try to upset the generally congenial collaborators because he felt that when people got along too well they were seldom very hard on themselves, meaning a less than inspired end product.

Souvenir Program

Out of town engagement were scheduled for Boston and Philadelphia with a planned opening in October on Broadway. The show in Boston was met with a range of comments from "can stand on its own feet and saunter into the ranks of great American musicals" (Christian Science Monitor) to "mediocre fare in need of pep pills and shears." (Variety). The meddling that Merrick had begun in rehearsals escalated into "full-blown trench warfare" when the show opened to these mixed notices according to Tom Jones. In Boston, Merrick suddenly decided that the play needed to be three acts instead of two. Then when the show moved to Philadelphia, Merrick, again disappointed with the modest notices, announced that he would close the show there. Harvey Schmidt remembers thinking after all the Merrick induced turmoil, "Great! We were relieved, it would be better to close than go on like that." But, true to fashion Merrick reversed himself and decided to give the show one last chance. The show was quickly returned to a two-act structure, and a new number "Poker Polka" was rushed in overnight. Harvey Schmidt adds, "It was a big up moment and made a huge difference. Things started to click. Audiences were loving it."

Jones, Schmidt and Nash continued to make cuts, taking out some songs while adding newer and better numbers. It is interesting to note that in composing this score a total number of 114 songs were written of which only 16 would make the final cut! Out of town, a total of three new songs were added. One of the songs, "A Man and a Woman," was added to the show so quickly that Jones remembers that cue cards were made for Lizzie and File who had to come downstage and read them as they were held aloft by the stage manager in the orchestra pit!

The musical finally made it into New York and opened at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York on October 24, 1963 to generally excellent notices, with the sole exception being the New York Times. The show would play a total of 330 performances. Link to the Internet Broadway DataBase entry for the original 1963 production.

Original Cast Album

The 1963-64 theatre season was a highly competitive one and this gentle, sentimental and low-key musical was easily lost among the more aggressive competition, namely Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly!, Richard Burton in Hamlet and Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl. So when Tony Award time came around, 110 in the Shade was swamped by the other shows, only receiving nominations for Inga Swenson (Best Actress in a Musical), Will Geer (Featured Actor in A Musical), Joseph Anthony (Director of a Musical) and Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt (Score of a Musical). The show won no awards instead seeing most of that year's Tonys collected by the wildly successful Hello, Dolly! (also produced by David Merrick).

The show continued to do well until an accident on April 22, 1964, when star Inga Swenson slipped and fell during curtain calls in a puddle of water (that was one of the effect employed during the final moments of the play) and fell and broke her ankle, keeping her out of the show until late July. During that time, attendance fell off and that, and the lack of Tonys, brought the show to a close on August 8, 1964. Its national tour started that fall in San Francisco, continued until May of 1965 and earned revenue putting the show in the profit column.

There have were no major revivals until the New York City Opera staged it in 1992 to wide critical acclaim. The production was directed by Scott Ellis and choreographed by Susan Stroman. Most recently the Signature Theatre in Virginia staged a production earlier this year to great critical and audience acclaim under the direction of Eric Schaeffer. For that production, Jones and Schmidt reinstated a song cut during initial tryouts in Boston in 1963 ("Evening Star") and composed a new one for Lizzie, H.C., Noah and Jimmy Curry ("You Gotta Get a Man the Way a Man Gets Got").

For those farming and ranching in the driest parts of dust bowl America, the sorcerer's trick of producing rain was much sought after. Desperate measures were frequently taken to deal with pressing needs and rainmakers managed with their forked sticks and other superstitions to convince many a farmer to part with money in the hope of getting needed rain. Rainmakers had their vogue in the Midwest in the 1880's and 1890's. It was a long held belief that certain noxious fumes (such as the stench of bodies after a major battle) had the ability to produce rain. With the changes in modern warfare that saw the addition of artillery, Benvenuto Cellini wrote of explosions causing rain, a theory that explained for some the storm that crippled the Spanish Armada and the storms that created the muddy fields at Waterloo. This same theory crossed the Atlantic during America's War between the States. In War and the Weather- The Artificial Production of Rain, a work by Edward Powers, it was presented that the Civil War battles actually produced rain.

Even the government jumped on the bandwagon committing $20,000 to Robert St. George Dyrenforth. His procedure involved the explosion theory on a grand scale complete with balloon busting and cannonading. With the eventual demise of the explosion theory came the re-emergence of the perfume theory.

The major practitioner of this theory was Frank Melbourne (dubbed the Australian Wizard) and G. B. Jewell (whose base of operation was a specially equipped railroad boxcar). One of Jewell's disciples persuaded San Diego to pay the cost of sending aloft the fumes of zinc dissolved in sulfuric acid (that was described as Jewell's secret formula). An interesting account by Thomas W. Patterson of one specific rainmaker, Charles Mallory Hatfield, and his attempt to get paid $10,000 for producing rain for San Diego in 1904 can be found in The Journal of San Diego History, Summer 1970, Volume 16, Number 3.

Before long, science would step in to better predict weather, and these con men and medicine-show men were forever discredited.

As early as 1946 Vincent Schaeffer began experiments in the laboratories of the General Electric Company that led him to discover that dry ice dropped into clouds from an airplane could make them condense into rain. His colleague, Bernard Vonnegut, later discovered that silver iodide, a compound used chiefly in connection with photography, could also "make rain" when strewn on clouds. Enter the era of the scientific rainmaker.

Hordes of these professional, scientific rainmakers bobbed up in the Southwest regions where rain is as rare as it is precious. None of these achieved the success of a man named Irving P. Krick, who made a fortune by sowing clouds with silver iodide, according to an account by Robert Jungk in his book, Tomorrow is Already Here. With a firm Dr. Krick organized under the name of the Water Development Corporation headquarted in Denver, he turned weather making into Big Business. With reports coming night and day from all parts of the world about weather conditions, the firm's rainmaking planes were ready to meet any cloud that might be headed in their direction. By means of computers and private telephone wires, instructions could be rushed to modern rainmakers in all parts of the West, who operated not only with planes going up to bombard clouds with chemicals, but with little stoves on the ground that coated charcoal balls with silver iodide and shot them into the air.

Dr. Krick had contracts with ranchers by which he was to be paid for every inch of rainfall coverage the average of previous years. When this modern technology worked (there still had to be some natural clouds around for success), Dr. Krick's receipts were in the millions.

Since then scientists have continued experiments to bring rain from the heavens, but after much failure have come to believe that if clouds are seeded properly - rain will come. The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has conducted extensive fieldwork in Texas and Mexico and found that rain from seeded clouds lasted longer than rain from unseeded clouds, and covered a larger area. The seeds they used are a mixture of sodium, magnesium and calcium chloride. But the only hitch for this procedure is the one that Dr. Krick figured out years earlier - there needed to be the presence of clouds. So far no one has figure out how to make one.

A final footnote: Thailand's 75-year-old King Bhumibol Adulyadej was granted a patent in May of this year for his development of an artificial rainmaking technique. In his process, he has two aircraft seed warm and cold clouds at different altitudes to make rain over a wider area than in other methods.

Visit this science website, for a simple at-home experiment in personal rainmaking: http://www.nerdscience.com/rain.htm

"We've had to wait a long spell for a topnotch new musical, and we've got one with the opening of 110 in the Shade Here are class and originality. Schmidt and Joes have written exhilarating music and lyrics and there doesn't seem to be a hackneyed phrase in the many songs. ." John Chapman, New York Daily News

"The Rainmaker was a wonderfully wistful and weepy play which, I thought, never did the business it deserved. But last night it came to the Broadhurst as a musical called 110 in the Shade and my private guess is that it will more than make up for any loot that may have been overlooked by the original. The strong elements of the story are still there, and they are actually heightened by a haunting and melodious score from Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt. This is our first top-flight musical of the season and a distinct credit to this or any other year." John McClain, New York Journal-American

" There's a lot of showmanship here. The score is agreeably tuneful (and) the lyrics capture the proper mood and everything else is also attractive. Mr. Nash has adapted his own comedy with fidelity, telling his romantic story of a girl in a small western town who has difficulty finding a man to love her The triumphant emergence of the ugly duckling is always appealing A lot of tunefulness, color and romantic charm are to be found in this production." Richard Watts, Jr., New York Post

"A sassy, gay and exhilarating evening… A bland and caustic kidding of the American success story goes on all evening, without ever losing its frosty and lunatic attitude." Walter Kerr, New York Herald-Tribune

"The show opened in a dazzling rain of glow. This is the kind of musical that grabs you at the overture and kicks you right up to the ceiling, where you hang around to the final curtain… It ends in an exciting, upbeat and rousing real rainfall, the rain is falling all right, but while it looks like water it's really joy." Martin Gottfried, Women's Wear Daily

"There are moments when 110 in the Shade appears to be trying to capture the mood and manner of Oklahoma! however, Mr. Schmidt is no carbon copy. There is melody in a great many of his ballads and a lilt in his livelier numbers." George Oppenheimer, Newsday

"Nash did the book of this musical with a blessed minimum of alterations from his original (play) on which it is based, and composer Harvey Schmidt and lyricist Tom Jones have enhanced an honest and gladsome story with the friendly spirit of their songs. 110 in the Shade is a happy show about a wonderful country family. It's not brittle, satirical or sophisticated or frenzied, but infused with goodness of heart and embellished with laughter." Norman Nadel, New York World-Telegram & Sun

"The wistful melodic score has heart." Time Magazine

"It's an entertaining, very touching and undeniably moving show and it should be good for a long run on Broadway, extended touring and a honey of a picture." Variety

"One of the best musicals I have seen at City Opera. It was a measure of the spirited conducting and polish of the direction that I, along with the audience, was willing to suspend skepticism and be entertained. By the end there was enthusiastic and sustained applause, as this production deserves." Edward Rothstein, The New York Times

"City Opera's production could hardly be bettered… directed with sparkling imagination and (with) sprightly new choreography splendidly danced. 110 in the Shade is as good a show as you can see." Bill Zakariasen, New York Daily News

"Red hot staging, terrific performances a good time is had by one and all." Clive Barnes, New York Post

"A refreshing entry in this unusually active theatre season. City Opera's production moves with taut, precise energy. 110 in the Shade may be City Opera's best Broadway show, briskly entertaining and fun." Peter Goodman, Newsday

"A ray of sunshine. The voices pierce (this) remarkable new 110 in the Shade like whistling winds across the prairie. You hear so much in these voices, so much of the raw emotion that the authors sought to instill in this tender musical of 40 years ago ... A piece of heartfelt Americana … with the most feverishly melodic score that Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones have ever come up with … (that) finds a bracing musical vocabulary of longing." Peter Marks, Washington Post

"In focusing on melody as a natural extension of thought and conversation, in which the spoken word segues fluidly into song, this production makes a case for 110 in the Shade as one of the most purely organic musicals ever, a fine-grained, late-blooming cousin to mid 20th century masterworks like Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma and Carousel. And you start to appreciate the emotional intensity of what is sounding more and more like Mr. Schmidt's best score." Ben Brantley, New York Times