When The Boys from Syracuse opened at the Alvin Theatre in New York City on 23 November 1938, Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times said, “Rodgers and Hart have written some of their gayest songs… a beautiful feast of rollicking mummery,” and Richard Watts of The Herald Tribune called it “the finest and most satisfying musical comedy that has reached New York in many a season.” The original production ran for seven months, but the 1963 New York revival ran twice as long and received even more enthusiastic notices.
The book, based on William Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, was by George Abbott, but it was Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart who first thought of using one of the bard’s plays as the basis of a musical comedy. This inspired idea gave them the opportunity to write such songs as “Falling in Love With Love,” “This Can’t Be Love” and “Sing for Your Supper.”
It is rare in show business for nepotism to pay off – but in the case of The Boys from Syracuse, it did so handsomely. Lyricist Hart’s younger brother Teddy was often mistaken for a popular comedian of the day, Jimmy Savo, and they were therefore a natural choice for the twin Dromios in the play, servants to twin brothers. The Comedy of Errors is a story of mistaken identity and as both Dromios state at the beginning of The Boys from Syracuse: “If it’s good enough for Shakespeare, it’s good enough for us.”