Two by Two (musical)

Two By Two
Original Cast Recording
Music	Richard Rodgers
Lyrics	Martin Charnin
Book	Peter Stone
Basis	Clifford Odets's play The Flowering Peach
Productions	1970 Broadway

Two By Two is a Broadway musical with a book by Peter Stone, lyrics by Martin Charnin, and music by Richard Rodgers.

Based on Clifford Odets's play The Flowering Peach, it tells the story of Noah's preparations for the Great Flood and its aftermath.

Directed by Joe Layton, the production opened on November 10, 1970 at the Imperial Theatre, where it ran for ten months. The opening night cast included Danny Kaye, Marilyn Cooper, Joan Copeland, Harry Goz, Madeline Kahn, Michael Karm, Tricia O'Neil, and Walter Willison.

Reviews were mixed, and Kaye, unhappy with the script, began to improvise on a nightly basis. His ad-libbed shtick and comic asides to the audience were crowd-pleasers, and word-of-mouth helped business. When he broke his foot, Kaye continued with the show, appearing at each performance either on crutches or in a wheelchair.

"He appeared with his leg in a cast and either rode around the stage in a wheelchair — in which he sometimes would try to run down the other actors — or hobbled around the stage on a crutch — which he used to goose the girls," wrote Rodgers in his autobiography Musical Stages. "In addition, he began improvising his own lines and singing in the wrong tempos. He even made a curtain speech after the performances in which he said, 'I'm glad you're here, but I'm glad the authors aren't.' Apparently there was a certain curiosity value to all this, because people actually went to see Two by Two because of Danny's one-by-one vaudeville act. Others, of course, were appalled and expressed their irritation in letters to the [New York] Times."