Richard Adler

The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees were both critical and commercial successes from the very start. On May 14, 1954, in the New York Times , critic Brooks Atkinson began his opening-night review of The Pajama Game with a simple statement: “The last new musical of the season is the best . . . Richard Adler and Jerry Ross have written an exuberant score in any number of good American idioms without self-consciousness . . . Mr. Adler and Mr. Ross write like musicians with a sense of humor.” The Pajama Game won the Tony Award® for Best Musical in 1954. Damn Yankees was no less successful. Lewis Funke, writing in the New York Times on May 6, 1955, opens: “As shiny as a new baseball and almost as smooth, a new musical glorifying the national pastime slid into the Forty-sixth Street Theatre last night. As far as this umpire is concerned you can count it among the healthy clouts of the campaign.” Damn Yankees was the Tony® winner for Best Musical in 1955. Tragically, in 1956, Jerry Ross died at the age of twenty-nine from a rare lung disease, and Richard Adler never achieved quite such success again. But for three stunning years, Adler and Ross ruled Broadway.