How to Succeed, the fourth musical to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, is a brilliant satire of the world of Big Business circa early 1960’s as seen through the eyes of J Pierrepont Finch, a disarming young man looking for an easy way to get to the top.  The show opened in October 1961and ran for 1,417 performances.

How to Succeed was inspired by Shepherd Mead’s tongue-in-cheek manual of the same name, in which he skewered American corporate life in the 1950’s. Loesser and Burrows created a musical masterpiece featuring a main character that rises from window washer to chairman of the board not through hard work but rather a series of fiendishly well-formulated deceptions.

There is nothing left unscathed in the corporate world as Loesser and Burrows take on nepotism, old-school loyalty, coffee break obsessions, office parties and the mores and morals of the corporate life.

Walter Kerr said in 1961, “It is crafty, conniving, sneaky, irreverent, impertinent, sly, malicious and lovely just lovely. This is a musical with a mind!”

Presented with special permission from Music Theatre International

Book by ABE BURROWS, JACK WEINSTOCK and WILLIE GILBERT

Based on the Novel by SHEPHERD MEAD

Music and Lyrics by FRANK LOESSER