Puppet designer Sylvester has created laughing doll Flahooley and is about to unveil it as the company's big Christmas release to the board of directors.

Harburg had successfully blended politics with fantasy in Finian's Rainbow four years earlier, but his bitterness at his 1950 Hollywood blacklisting, which prompted him to write Flahooley, permeated the project.

when turned upside down - but his convoluted plot still included too many thinly veiled references to Joseph McCarthy and his followers, and his harsh parody of the ongoing rabid anti-Communist sentiment that prompted so many witch hunts was not softened by the inclusion of a genie and singing puppets.

The cast included Jerome Courtland as Sylvester, Ernest Truex as Bigelow, Barbara Cook (in her Broadway debut) as Sandy, Irwin Corey as Abou Ben Atom, and Yma Sumac as Princess Najla, with Louis Nye, Nehemiah Persoff, and Ted Thurston in supporting roles.

[1] Bil Baird and his wife Cora played small roles in addition to creating and controlling the marionettes that performed "You Too Can Be a Puppet," the opening number that took a swipe at McCarthy's minions and set the tone for the rest of the evening, although by the time the show opened in New York, several songs and much of the more pointed satire was severely toned down or removed during the out of town tryouts.

[2] This allowed restoration of songs and other material, which was excised from the original production during its out of town tryouts (including the melodic and ironic indictment of the commercialization of Christmas, "Sing The Merry").

The principal cast of the revival production included April Allen, Mark Cortale, Christopher Budnich, Natalie Buster, Clay Hansen, Alan Semok, Cheryl Walsh, Roxy Becker, Mimi Ferraro, J. Michael Zally and Tiffany Card.