Every Week, A Broadway Revue

Actors Danny Kaye, Bea Arthur, Imogene Coca, Barbara Cook, Dorothy Loudon, and Carol Burnett, directors Max Liebman, Herb Ross, and Joe Layton, choreographer Jerome Robbins, composers Sylvia Fine, Jonathan Tunick, and Mary Rodgers, and writers Woody Allen and Neil Simon are a small sampling of the major entertainment figures nurtured at Camp Tamiment, an adult summer camp that operated a playhouse in Pennsylvania's Pocono mountains. The Tamiment Playhouse became the preeminent workshop...
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Actors Danny Kaye, Bea Arthur, Imogene Coca, Barbara Cook, Dorothy Loudon, and Carol Burnett, directors Max Liebman, Herb Ross, and Joe Layton, choreographer Jerome Robbins, composers Sylvia Fine, Jonathan Tunick, and Mary Rodgers, and writers Woody Allen and Neil Simon are a small sampling of the major entertainment figures nurtured at Camp Tamiment, an adult summer camp that operated a playhouse in Pennsylvania's Pocono mountains. The Tamiment Playhouse became the preeminent workshop and a major creative outlet for theatre, dance, film, and television of the mid-twentieth century. Under Liebman, a staff of sixty would write, rehearse, and perform a new fully-staged musical revue each week. Much of this original material found its way to the professional stage, nightclub acts, film, and television, including two complete shows, The Straw Hat Revue and Once Upon a Mattress, which were transferred to Broadway. Television's famed "Your Show of Shows" was a Tamiment spin-off, created by Leibman's summer company. In this fascinating social history peppered with anecdotes from oral histories and interviews of the "graduates of Tamiment" and archival materials including original skits and lyrics, Martha LoMonaco documents and illustrates a significant era and arena of American entertainment only obliquely touched upon in a few autobiographies and general works. She explains how the Tamiment Playhouse was a unique development derived from such diverse influences as the burgeoning resort industry, the American socialist movement, the Yiddish theatre, the American musical theatre, and popular entertainment genres like revue and burlesque comedy, all of which came together to produce this "proving ground" for Broadway. Placing this study in the context of theatre history, she focuses on the period when the Playhouse blossomed under Liebman and its continued theatrical innovations under his successor, Moe Hack, to its demise in 1960. This work would be valuable supplementary reading for a wide variety of courses in theatre and entertainment history and will be enjoyed by anyone who remembers this period and the stars that lit up the Poconos and stage and screen.