Subways Are for Sleeping

Subways Are for Sleeping
Original cast recording
Music	Jule Styne
Lyrics	Betty Comden Adolph Green
Book	Betty Comden Adolph Green
Basis	Edmund G. Love's article in Harper's and subsequent book
Productions	1961 Broadway

Subways Are for Sleeping is a musical produced by David Merrick with a book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Jule Styne. The original Broadway production played in 1961-62.

The musical was inspired by an article about subway homelessness in the March 1956 issue of Harper's and a subsequent 1957 book based on it, both by Edmund G. Love, who slept on subway trains throughout the 1950s and encountered many unique individuals. With the profits from his book, Love then embarked on a bizarre hobby: over the course of several years, he ate dinner at every restaurant listed in the Manhattan yellow pages directory, visiting them in alphabetical order.

Angie McKay is a magazine writer assigned to write a story about a group of well-dressed homeless people sleeping in the New York subway system. Their leader is Tom Bailey, a one-man employment agency who finds other drifters odd jobs and sleeping quarters. To help research her story, Angie goes undercover and pretends to be a stranded girl from out-of-town. Trouble ensues when Tom discovers her real identity.

After two previews, the Broadway production, directed and choreographed by Michael Kidd, opened on December 27, 1961 at the St. James Theatre, where it ran for 205 performances. The cast included Orson Bean, Sydney Chaplin, Carol Lawrence, Gordon Connell, Grayson Hall, and Green's wife Phyllis Newman (whose costume, consisting solely of a towel, was probably Freddy Wittop's easiest design in his distinguished career), with newcomers Michael Bennett and Valerie Harper in the chorus.