Welcome to a new Musical Theatre Monday! This month, I’m celebrating one of my favorite 1950s musicals — Top Banana (1951), a vehicle for the great Phil Silvers with a score by the prolific Johnny Mercer and a loving wink at, well, one of my favorite subjects!

Long before My Favorite Year sent up Sid Caesar’s legendary comedy-variety staple, Top Banana took aim at another icon — Milton Berle, or Uncle Miltie, “Mr. Television” himself, who hosted The Texaco Star Theater, the nation’s most-watched laffer prior to the rising success of I Love Lucy. That is, before the sitcom took this new medium by storm, comedy-variety shows were all the rage, with their roots even more firmly entrenched in vaudeville than their predecessors on radio had been, for the added visuality enabled a return to a broader, gaggier, more slapsticky style of humor. Heck, in Top Banana, Phil Silvers’ character wisely opines that television is just “burlesque with antennas.” And indeed, the way Mr. TV handled his show, “burlesque” was apt!

Top Banana is, today, even more of a TV-lover’s dream than it was then, for Hy Kraft’s book doesn’t just offer a lampoon of the industry with a figure like Milton Berle at its center, it’s also got a version of Berle played by another master of television, Phil Silvers, who would later in the decade headline one of the funniest sitcoms of the 1950s, playing the iconic Sergeant Bilko. A fellow burlesquer, Silvers’ take on Uncle Miltie in Top Banana became naturally filtered through his own comic persona — essentially making it Miltie by way of Bilko — and so it’s doubly fun, with rapid-fire jokes inside an overarching satire where the medium is ruthlessly mocked. (It’s the kind of thing that Silvers and Nat Hiken — who’d also written for Berle, mind you — would do a lot on the forthcoming Phil Silvers Show.) Interestingly, Berle not only approved of this lighthearted but obvious parody, he even sang the score’s title tune on television and played the entire show in stock about a decade after the original production.

The story itself is slight. Silvers’ character Jerry Biffle is tasked by his sponsor, the soap company Blendo, to spike his ratings with a promotional stunt: he must select a lady ambassador. He chooses the department store model with whom he’s been flirting, not knowing that she’s already fallen for the lead singer on his program. It all ends happily, of course, with Biffle not getting that girl, but winding up with her wisecracking best friend, a smoky-voiced aspiring singer played originally by Rose Marie, another familiar TV face who’d also wind up in a classic sitcom — the following decade’s The Dick Van Dyke Show, where she portrayed a writer on a comedy-variety series inspired by Sid Caesar’s. During the original Broadway run, Rose Marie was replaced by both Audrey Meadows, soon to be the leading lady of “The Honeymooners” sketch (and later sitcom) on yet another classic comedy-variety program (Jackie Gleason’s), and then eventually, Kaye Ballard, who made her own mark (however brief) in TV comedy via The Mothers-In-Law, and to a lesser extent, The Doris Day Show. But I digress…

As a book musical, Top Banana is not a great example of the form. It’s insultingly unserious. Yet that’s sort of the point. The show argues that TV is like vaudeville, or more precisely, burlesque, and it thus takes on that ethos, with the spirit of a musical revue more than a musical comedy. Case in point, the 11 o’clock centerpiece is a ballet tribute to burlesque. So, when songs either pop into the action with little bearing on the plot, or exist as mind-numbing examples of the kind of fare seen on Biffle’s TV program, Top Banana feels more like what it’s spoofing than just a spoof. However, if television is a burlesque, and so is this production, then that description becomes not a pejorative, but a compliment — a paean to this art form that Phil Silvers, and Uncle Miltie, and Rose Marie, and everybody else up there actually loves. Thus, it’s also a salute to television… and an effective one, for as far as comedy-variety shows go, Top Banana is indeed funny, worthy of its subject and all the people involved. And that thematic synergy, supported by real comic verve, makes it a winning show — one that, often dismissed as an amusing but inconsequential piece of star-led fluff, deserves, like all comedy, a little more respect.

There’s still another part of the equation though. This is a musical. So, how’s the music? Well… it’s hit and miss, for there are too many forgettable, generic tunes. Most of these “misses” arise from Biffle’s TV show, so one could excuse them as deliberately inane. But that’s not the case with, say, the young lovers’ duets. Also, as for the “hits,” it must be said that there’s not a lot of strong and specific plot-leading or character-revealing numbers either, because, again, character and plot aren’t big concerns here. Jokes are. Now, to that point, Johnny Mercer, remembered most as a lyricist, does pair smart, funny words to a few genuinely swinging melodies — I love the stellar internal rhymes in “My Home Is In My Shoes” (seen above, in a 1966 rendition on The Hollywood Palace with slightly tweaked lyrics for Chita Rivera), the thematic brilliance of “You’re O.K. for T.V.,” and the joke-a-second fun of “A Word A Day.” So, frankly, I do like a lot of the score, and I think Top Banana remains underrated in terms of individual songs, as there’s several that should be better known. Here’s my favorite — the closest thing to a character number, Rose Marie’s “I Fought Every Step Of The Way.”

Of course, you might not know about that one if you’ve only seen the 1954 film adaptation, which excised a bunch of the score, including all Rose Marie’s numbers. (This was allegedly a vindictive move by a producer whose advances she rebuffed.) What’s more, that theatrical cut — which ran about 100 minutes — isn’t even the one that’s widely seen now. The version released on home video and available for streaming as of this writing on Amazon Prime is further slimmed down to 84 minutes, with even more songs cut, along with the funniest scene of the entire show, where Biffle tries to school his inexperienced ingenue on how to do a soap commercial and ends up launching into a spontaneous rumination on Freud and Spinoza. It was apparently added to the script after Silvers made a mistake in a performance and went off on a tangent, much to the delight of the audience. (For the record, Silvers and Nat Hiken later adapted this monologue for two separate episodes of the forthcoming The Phil Silvers Show.)

Nevertheless, if the 1954 movie — a color spectacle that features the original Broadway cast and a few replacements from the run — isn’t ideal, it’s still fascinating. It looks like a play — the actors are literally on a stage, the curtains open and close, and they’re performing the show as it was on Broadway (with “Be My Guest” replacing “That’s For Sure,” just as it did during the run) — but it was actually filmed on a Los Angeles soundstage, and without an audience. The movie was also originally released in 3-D, but the elements for that version are no longer extant today either. So, both then and now, and regardless of length, the film never fully captured what was on Broadway. Accordingly, I think Top Banana deserves a reappraisal — it needs an Encores!-like production that maintains the score and also doesn’t lose any of the comedy. Is there someone who can do Milton Berle by way of Phil Silvers? There’s gotta be.

But I digress again… In the meantime, I don’t have anything spectacular to share with subscribers who comment below to alert me of their private, non-commercial interest… except a soundtrack rip of the 84-minute cut of the film, with all the existing numbers tracked out. As a sample, above is “You’re So Beautiful That–,” sung by Danny Scholl (who replaced Lindy Doherty during the original production). Check out those very 1950s lyrics — some of Mercer’s best from Top Banana! And here’s a clip of the film — available now on Amazon — Phil Silvers with Danny Scholl, plus Jack Albertson, Joey Faye, and Herbie Faye (all TV people, too)!

By the way, for more on early TV, including the rising popularity of sitcoms as a result of I Love Lucy — which owed some of its success to its willingness to embrace the visuality of its new medium (as folks like Sid Caesar and Milton Berle were already doing with their comedy-variety shows) — be sure to check out my book, GREAT AMERICAN SITCOMS OF THE 1950s, available here and here. In it, I also talk a lot about Nat Hiken and Phil Silvers, along with Audrey Meadows and Jackie Gleason, for both The Phil Silvers Show and The Honeymooners are right up there with I Love Lucy as my favorites from the decade!

Come back next month for another musical gem! And stay tuned tomorrow for more Big Bang!