One of the surprise hits of Broadway history, Kismet was an unlikely combination of the music of a nineteenth-century Russian composer and a 1911 play. Robert Wright and George Forest, who concocted Kismet "from a storehouse of spare parts," as critic Brooks Atkinson put it, had been high school friends in Miami, FL. They had written the senior class musical, starred in local vaudeville, and got a contract to work for MGM Studios before they were 21.

Their first job for the studio was to arrange the song score for the movie of Sigmund Romberg's Maytime for the singing stars Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. After they were told they could only use one song from it, they arranged music from Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony as popular songs. They got to be known as specialists in making popular music and shows from classics. Their first Broadway show, Song of Norway, a highly fictionalized biography of composer Edvard Grieg, had been an unexpected hit in 1944.

As had been the case with Song of Norway, Kismet was written for a leading West Coast theater company headed by Edward Lester. The story was a 1911 play of the same name by Edward Knoblock. The play's character of Hajj was one of the favorite roles of the actor Otis Skinner, who performed it often for several years, including a 1930 movie version. A remake of the movie, in 1942, starred Ronald Colman and Marlene Dietrich, whose celebrated legs were painted a rich golden tan for Technicolor. The music came from various works by Borodin, especially the opera Prince Igor, which itself is set in old Russian and Turkic tribal territories.

Lester mounted a sumptuous production, evoking legendary Baghdad of the Arabian Nights. It opened at Broadway's Ziegfeld Theater on December 3, 1953. The show's timing was lucky: The only musicals then running were holdovers from prior seasons and those were only mild successes. Furthermore, the newspapers were on strike and critical opinion, such as the Brooks Atkinson quotation already mentioned (from a review that was not written until the strike was over), could not affect the play's success.

The audience liked the richness of the sets and costumes, the large production numbers, and, above all, Borodin's adapted music. One song, "Stranger in Paradise," (adapted from a lyrical interlude in Prince Igor's Polovtsian Dances) became a genuine Top Ten hit, couldn't be avoided on the radio, and itself sold many tickets. The show ran 538 performances. Its stars were Alfred Drake, Richard Kiley, Doretta Morrow, and Joan Diener.

Wright and Forrest recycled Kismet in 1978, by changing its setting from Baghdad to the commercial and educational center of the Islamic African culture, Timbuktu, which became the name of the new version. An African-American cast led by Eartha Kitt, Melba Moore, and Gilbert Price, and the addition of five songs drawn from African folk music updated the production, which was a moderate success, opening at the Hellinger Theater on March 1, 1978.

© Joseph Stevenson, Rovi