The Baker's Wife

Patti LuPone got a signature song, Meadowlark, from The Baker's Wife despite producer David Merrick's attempts to cut it. That's about all she got as the show closed on the road. Stein's book spends more time with the Baker than his wife and he's a dull protagonist. We've been left with a pleasant, abridged cast album, and the occasional regional production.

Jamaica

Film star Lena Horne made her Broadway debut in a show that was basically a concert. It didn't start that way. Jamaica was conceived as a vehicle for Calypso singer Harry Belafonte. He would play a Jamaican fisherman resisting the commercialization of the local culture and attempting to keep his NYC loving partner by his side. Some accounts say Belafonte left due to illness. Others say he was unhappy with the material.

Lena Horne had turned down St. Louis Woman in the 40's but agreed to play Jamaica's flighty leading lady. The show shifted focus to her character and the book was cut to ribbons. According to wikipedia she opts to stay in Jamaica after her fisherman beau (now played by Ricardo Montalbán) rescues her brother from a hurricane. Sure. Whatever. It ran a year and a half.

The show is so slight and dated that even Encores won't revive it. Instead they gave Vanessa Williams a handful of Horne's songs in a 2018 revue. Songs like "Push de Button," "Cocoanut Sweet" and "Ain't It The Truth" (cut from Horne's Cabin in the Sky) are worth another listen.

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.