Without conscious effort on my part, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying is the third (out of nine) Pulitzer Prize for Drama winning musical I’ve seen in the last eight months. This doesn’t rise to the level of seeing a baseball game in every major league stadium in one season, but it’s all I’ve got.

The Music Theater Works pre-show talk discussed all nine winners, but, as for this production, notably, Ken Singleton as J. Pierrepont Finch was terrific (though nobody could ever top Robert Morse, who took the part from Broadway to the movies without getting replaced by Vanessa Redgrave or Audrey Hepburn, or having his voice dubbed by Marnie Nixon), and the recorded voice of the book was done by . . . wait, wait, don’t tell me, oh right, Peter Sagal, a role previously performed for Broadway revivals by Walter Cronkite and Anderson Cooper.

Playwright Abe Burrows was one of the recipients of the award for How to Succeed in 1962, which is interesting because his Guys and Dolls was originally selected as the winner in 1951, but, rumor has it, because of his troubles with the House Un-American Activities Committee, the trustees of Columbia University vetoed the award (and none was given that year). They must have been concerned that the difficulty in finding a location for the Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game was meant as propaganda to symbolize the predicted fall of capitalism.

As with the crap game, the lure of easy money finds its way into How to Succeed, which famously features a treasure hunt as a marketing ploy. In that spirit, if you can name the other eight Pulitzer winning musicals, six of which I’ve seen, without resorting to the internet, you win a year’s free subscription to this free blog (restrictions may apply).