Pajama Game (Original Broadway Cast 1954) / John Murray Anderson's Almanac (excerpts 1954-1956)

Richard Adler and Jerry Ross only knew each other for five years, from 1950 to 1955. But during that time, they wrote a hit Broadway revue (John Murray Anderson's Almanac) and two of the most enduring musicals in the modern canon (The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees). Their all-too-brief collaboration yielded songs that are still standards over fifty years later ("Rags to Riches", "Heart", "Hey There") and one has to wonder what they might have accomplished had Ross not died of lung disease at the age of 29.

The two men were both from New York City (Adler, the elder by five years, was born in 1921), but they had very different backgrounds. Whereas Ross was the son of Russian immigrants and spent his childhood as a successful performer in the Yiddish theatre, Adler came from a more culturally patrician upbringing, with his father being the renowned classical pianist Clarence Adler. The one thing the two men had in common was that they both wanted to be songwriters and from that day in 1950 when they met at the Brill Building in New York - the Mecca for tunesmiths in those days - there was no stopping them. Composer Frank Loesser took them under his wing, signed them to his publishing company and helped them through a few rough patches at the beginning.

In 1952, they wrote the score for a mini-musical called Six on a Honeymoon (guess how many were in the cast?) which starred a young woman named Barbara Cook with book, direction and choreography by Herbert Ross. It opened at a Chicago steakhouse/nightclub called The Black Hawk to excellent reviews, but the run was cut short when the Board of Health closed the restaurant down for using horsemeat and passing it off as steak. Bloody, but unbowed, Adler and Ross came up with a pop song called "Rags to Riches", but their friend, superstar Eddie Fisher, refused to record it. No problem. Mitch Miller, the guru of Columbia Records, passed it on to Tony Bennett, who made it a No. 1 hit.