Where's How Now Now? Seeking the Forgotten Dow Musical

Forget about the Dow Jones Industrial Average reaching 10,000. Back in the olden days -- 1967, to be precise -- it was silly to think that the Dow could move past even 1000, even though it had butted up against that milestone one year earlier. So ridiculous was the Dow 1000 idea, in fact, that someone wrote a musical hinging on its implausibility.

Over the past three decades, time has been kind to the Dow. It hasn't been, though, to How Now, Dow Jones, apparently the only Broadway musical ever to revolve around the Dow Jones Industrial Average as a plot device.

Not that How Now didn't have a lot going for it. The male lead was Tony Roberts -- then known as Anthony Roberts -- who'd already starred on Broadway in Barefoot in the Park (where he'd replaced Robert Redford), and who later became a staple of Woody Allen movies. Another star was Brenda Vaccaro, nominated for a Tony and later to have a significant role in Midnight Cowboy. Michael Bennett, the eventual creator of A Chorus Line, worked on the choreography. Film composer Elmer Bernstein wrote the score. Future Broadway star Tommy Tune was in the chorus.

And the musical did boast some memorable songs -- the musical introduction to Wall Street, titled A-B-C; the angry lament about men, They Don't Make 'Em Like That Any More; and the brash anthem to success, Step to the Rear.

Just one problem with the musical, which opened Dec. 7, 1967, a day the Dow closed at 892.22: By several accounts, How Now, Dow Jones was awful.

"In my opinion," wrote New York Times critic Clive Barnes, "How Now, Dow Jones has a score as enlivening as an endless chain of ticker tape, and a story as likely as a Lonely Hearts column in The Wall Street Journal." The musical ran for 201 performances before closing -- not a flop, but no Cats, either. "If you read the broad range of reviews at the time," says Roberts, reached recently in New York, "they weren't spectacular." 'The plot is terrible,' New York director Scott Wittman recalls. 'It doesn't make any sense -- any of it.'

The plot, as best it can be reconstructed, is this: Kate (played by Marlyn Mason) has the job of announcing the Dow Jones average on the radio. (Picture her as the Maria Bartiromo of her day.) Her boyfriend, Charley (Roberts), an up-and-coming stock broker, promises he'll marry her as soon as the Dow hits 1000. So Kate falsely reports that it has, creating financial euphoria everywhere -- and then a panic when people learn they aren't as rich as they thought they were. Along the way, Roberts learns the brokerage business secret to getting rich: endear oneself to elderly widows. In the end, an aged billionaire -- a sugar daddy of the character played by Vaccaro -- rolls in on his wheelchair to set everything straight.

"I remember it being fun and silly," says New York director Scott Wittman, who saw the show on Broadway during its original run. "The plot is terrible," he says. "It doesn't make any sense -- any of it." Acknowledges Roberts, "There's not terribly much logic in it, and that's probably why there aren't very many new productions."

If any productions at all. Unlike summer-stock stalwarts like Hello, Dolly, How Now, Dow Jones seems to have disappeared from the canon of the musical theater. You can't even call it a cult favorite. The only trace of the musical's life beyond 1968, if you search the Dow Jones Interactive electronic database of publications, is that it was performed in Oklahoma in 1970. And when the Dow closed above 1000 on Nov. 14, 1972, How Now, Dow Jones became an instant relic.

Face it, if people want to stage a musical about the world of business, they'll probably give the nod to How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

How Now, Dow Jones, if you comb the Dow Jones database, seems to exist nowadays only in the form of its title -- an all-purpose tool for business-page headline writers on slow days. The only fame for the play itself seems to stem from its badness. Two years ago, a Texas critic put the musical on his list of "10 really misguided ideas for musicals." Wittman included fragments of the musical in Broadway 68, a revue he wrote and directed last year devoted to the worst plays of the 1967-68 Broadway season, a season that produced the infinitely more influential Hair.

But Roberts remembers How Now, Dow Jones fondly. "I had top billing," he says. "It was the first musical comedy I would be in on Broadway. ... It was the best time in the world."

But it didn't make him an expert in the stock market, by any means. His last investment, Iomega (IOM), is way down from where he bought it last spring. (He says a cousin begged him to buy the stock.) And he has no idea whether the market is overvalued at 10,000. "You're asking an actor who hasn't a clue," he says. "My IRA is heavily invested in the stock market, so I hope it stays up."

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