Theatre director Garry Hynes is to stage a New York production of Juno, the little-seen musical version of Juno and the Paycock, that closed two weeks after its Broadway premiere in 1959.
The new production by the artistic director of Galway's Druid Theatre Company will be staged in New York in March next year as part of the city's well-regarded Encores! series of obscure musicals.
The 1959 show, produced with the blessing of Sean O'Casey, has been a favourite of musicals fans for years, thanks to a cast recording of a score one critic called "the greatest ever heard in a postwar flop".
O'Casey had already considered turning his 1924 play into an opera, and was unsure of a request in 1956 to adapt it into a musical.
That year's runaway Broadway success, My Fair Lady, based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, helped make up his mind.
The creative team was top class, headed by composer Marc Blitzstein, best remembered today for his English-language translation of The Threepenny Operaand his lyrics to its best-known song, Mack the Knife.
The Junolibretto came from playwright Joseph Stein, who would go on to write Fiddler on the Roof. Legendary Broadway choreographer Agnes de Mille provided two ballet sequences.
Junoopens in the streets of Dublin with the stirring number We're Alive. Other numbers include the duet What Is the Stars for Boyle and Joxerand the solo I Wish it So for Mary, a song recorded by dozens of singers, including Rosemary Clooney and Dawn Upshaw.
Critics were unimpressed by the original Juno, calling the musical adaption superfluous and saying Shirley Booth and Melvyn Douglas were miscast in their roles of Juno and Boyle. The show closed after just 16 performances at the Winter Garden Theatre.
A reworked version of the show, starring Milo O'Shea and Geraldine Fitzgerald, played in US regional theatres in the 1970s to little acclaim.
"Audiences [ in 1959] were not ready for a musical of such tragic solemnity," said Broadway historian Ken Mandelbaum.
" Junoawaits a new staging that manages to scale down the original without slighting the full-bodied emotional power of Blitzstein's contribution."
The choice of Hynes could bode well for Juno.A decade ago she became the first woman to win a best director Tony award for The Beauty Queen of Leenane.
