Breakfast at Tiffany's

Burrows gave audiences the standard musical comedy treatment in Philadelphia. Audiences snored. Albee  restored the darkness of the source material in Boston. Audiences booed and producer David Merrick shut it all down. The scandal lifted the show to mythical flop status. When the score was  given a recording people were disappointed. We were expecting insanity and got mediocrity.

Edward Albee: "They made a perfectly safe, middlebrow, mediocre and, I thought, extremely boring musical that would have probably run a year on Broadway. I managed to turn it into a disaster that never opened on Broadway.”

A similar thing happened to the Richard Greenberg play in 2013. Truman Capote's stories are better remembered for atmosphere than plot. The film Breakfast at Tiffany's rewrote the story considerably but is remembered for Audrey Hepburn and Moon River. A stage adaptation has neither of those to draw from.

House of Flowers

Whimsy to the rescue!

Backstage feuds between the star, director and writers led to many rewrites and an aimless plot. The show closed quickly but the score produced the standards "A Sleepin Bee" and "I Never Has Seen Snow." While Pearl Bailey reportedly demanded more songs for her character these ballads both belonged to Diahann Carroll in her Broadway debut.

The Grass Harp

Once Truman Capote gets his misfits into the tree house he's not sure what to do with them. So Karen Morrow shows up as a hippie revivalist and sings 12 minutes of white gospel!

The Grass Harp would not be Karen's last Broadway musical but it would be for Barbara Cook. After a string of flops she opted to focus on her concert career, coming back for the occasional Sondheim revue.

The New York Times wrote: “The musical is also folksy and fey, in so far as it has any real character at all, for it is the kind of show that is almost as difficult to dislike as to like…. Mr. Capote’s concept of pastoral innocence and goodness suffers from mawkish sentimentality and dies quietly with scarcely a murmured protest.”

Luckily for fans of the score there was a cast album and a televised concert.