Born in Los Angeles, California, Saidy began his writing career in 1943 with the screenplay for the Red Skelton comedy I Dood It.
The following year, he scripted both the Lucille Ball-Dick Powell feature film Meet the People and the book for the Harold Arlen-E. Y. Harburg musical Bloomer Girl.
Finian's Rainbow has had three major revivals (1955, 1960 and 1967), and was also made into a film starring Fred Astaire and Petula Clark, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, in 1968.
Directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle, it starred Tony Award-winner Jim Norton and Kate Baldwin as Finian and Sharon, with Cheyenne Jackson as Woody and Jeremy Bobb as Og, the leprechaun.
Newly added to the Broadway cast are Christopher Fitzgerald as Og and Chuck Cooper as Billboard; Jim Norton, Kate Baldwin and Cheyenne Jackson all reprise their roles Saidy collaborated with Neil Simon and Will Glickman, among others, on Satins and Spurs, an original television musical for Betty Hutton, which was broadcast by NBC in September 1954.