Madame Aphrodite is a musical with a book by Tad Mosel and music and lyrics by Jerry Herman. It is based on Mosel's play of the same name that was broadcast on television in 1953.
The original off-Broadway production was short-lived and only ran for 13 performances in 1961. It is notable as the only stage musical in the entire Jerry Herman canon (which includes smash hits such as Hello Dolly!, Mame and La Cage aux Folles as well as less successful but highly respected flops like Dear World, Mack & Mabel and The Grand Tour) that never spawned an original cast album, and has never been performed since its original production.
Plot
Madame Aphrodite is essentially a modern fable built around the aphorism that beauty is more than skin deep. The titular Madame Aphrodite (Nancy Andrews), described as "a bitter recluse", lived alone in a dingy apartment. Working from her kitchen, she manufactured a phony beauty cream using unpleasant and ineffective ingredients, which she planned to sell to her neighbours as revenge for what she perceived as meanness towards her. To help distribute the phony product, Madame Aphrodite hired an attractive but naive young man named Barney (Jack Drummond) as her salesman. Believing the cream to have genuine magical powers, Barney sells it to a shy young girl, Rosemary (Cherry Davis), who becomes attracted to him. The rather plain Rosemary believes that she is being trandsformed into a beauty, and attributes this to the phony product. Madame Aphrodite, touched by the girl's innocence, confesses that the beauty cream is a hoax, and points out that the change in Rosemary's demeanor was, in fact, due to her love for the likeable Barney. Madame Aphrodite further reveals that she sold the cream to take revenge on womankind because, as a child, she herself had been duped by an advertisement for a fake beauty product. The show concludes with her moment of self-realisation, where "another life has been saved on Second Avenue".
Background
The musical Madame Aphrodite traces it origins back to a one-hour TV play of the same name, which was written in the early 1950s by playwright Tad Mosel, one of the leading exponents of that genre at that time. The play told the simple and fable-like story of a middle-aged beautician who manufactured and sold fake beauty cream to gullible woman. The televised version, first screened on December 9, 1953 as part of the Goodyear Television Playhouse series, starred Ruth White in the title role, with Philip Abbot as her salesman.
Although Mosel was responsible for many similar TV plays during the 1950s, he would not write anything specifically for the theatre until 1960, when he adapted James Agee's novel, A Death in the Family into a play. Entitled All the Way Home, it opened on Broadway on November 30, 1960, to considerable acclaim; by the time it closed ten months and 333 performances later, it had received a Tony nomination, a Drama Critics' Circle Award, and the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
In December 1960, only a few weeks after the opening of All the Way Home, it was reported that Mosel had now turned his attention to adapting his earlier TV play, Madame Aphrodite, into a musical for the off-Broadway stage. It was pointed out that it not only represented Mosel's first stage musical, but also "the first musical to come to off-Broadway from television". The new Madame Aphrodite was to be sponsored by a team of three young producers (Howard Barker, Cynthia Baer and Robert Chambers) who were already well known for producing another off-Broadway show, Little Mary Sunshine, which opened in November 1959 and ran for almost three years. Music and lyrics were to be provided by newcomer Jerry Herman who, at that time, was known in New York only for two minor but well-received off-Broadway revues Nightcap (1958) and Parade (1960). In his memoirs, Herman recalls being brought into the project through his agent, Priscilla Morgan, who often held musical evenings for her clients. At one such event, Herman met Tad Mosel and, after being shown the script for Madame Aphrodite, admitted "I was fascinated because it was so different from the kind of thing that I had been doing".