- Performances: 1,141
- Open / Close: November 20, 1952 – August 13, 1955
- Theater: Fulton Theatre.
- Tony Awards: Tom Ewell won for Best Lead Role in a Play. It’s even more mystifying today how popular this play was at the time given the competition at the Tonys. “Dial M for Murder” and “The Crucible” both picked up awards that year, the latter for Best Play.
- Fun Fact: It’s often remarked that Richard Sherman is a sort of “Walter Mitty” type character in “Itch.” That type of character obviously fit Ewell’s acting style: in 1960, he would play Walter Mitty in the Broadway production of “A Thunder Carnival.”
- Fun Fact #2: There was only one woman who played a significant role in developing “Seven Year Itch” for Broadway. She was Dana Suesse who was the composer of the incidental music. Suesse was known as the Girl Gershwin: among the popular songs she wrote were “You Oughta Be in Pictures.” The theme she wrote for “Itch” was called “A Girl without a Name”. Before the end of the Broadway run she would divorce her coproducer husband and reportedly move in with a female lover.
Podcast
Dr. Jesse Rabinowitz is my go-to guy for dissecting older productions that were made into movies. “The Seven Year Itch” is a prime candidate for this kind of analysis because the movie version starring Marilyn Monroe effectively obliterated the image of the stage play in the popular imagination. Why does Jesse call “Itch” the “anti-Blue Velvet?” Did “Itch” become so outdated so fast that it caused the end of a theater company in Virginia in the 1980s? Answers to these questions and many more are in this episode — give it a listen!