The cast included Anthony Perkins as Gideon Briggs, Cecil Kellaway, Pert Kelton, Ellen McCown as Dorrie Whitbred, William Chapman, Marian Mercer and Tommy Norden.

The New York Times described the production as “an enchanted fable” in a very positive review: “an ideal libretto”....”warm and varied score that captures the simple moods of the story”....”the makers of ‘Greenwillow have never faltered”....”winning cast”...joyous ballets”....”these are some of the elements of a musical play that brings distinction to the stage and pleasure to the people out front.”[4] Reviewer Ward Morehouse wrote, “Frank Loesser retains his standing as a composer but he is lost as a librettist….the book that he has written in collaboration with Lesser Samuels is hopelessly stodgy.” Morehouse, however, thought Perkins “ingratiating” and a capable singer, and McCown “an attractive heroine,” and had compliments for Larkin’s sets and Layton’s “imaginative dance routines.

But ‘Greenwillow’ is a lost cause.”[5] The Philadelphia Inquirer handily excerpted opening-week reviews from several New York papers: “The new musical is do-it-yourself folklore, which means that it is spun right out of someone’s head instead of out of somebody else’s past…In the theater…Greenwillow is nowhere—not in Brigadoon, not in Glocca Morra, not in the valley just below Old Smoky.

Being neither Irish nor Dutch, Scotch nor good Broadway, it is forced to invent a language of its own that is a mélange of all four but with the special delights, rhythms and authenticities of none (Walter Kerr, NY Herald Tribune).” “[It] has moments of fresh charm, but it also turns out to be upsettingly flat, stodgy and lacking in emotional effectiveness...scenes and characters that possessed touching or humorous charm in the novel become excessively whimsical and uncomfortably coy, when not simply dull, on the stage (Richard Watts, Jr., New York Post).” “[It] brings heart and hope to a season that has not been distinguished by either...It is not, perhaps, what the trade regards as a ‘sockoo success,’ like ‘Guys and Dolls,’ but it is musically more ambitious, and is loaded with the sort of homespun pathos and humor which should keep it running until the scenery quietly comes apart (John McClain, New York Journal-American).”[6] This musical was being rehearsed in New York while Anthony Perkins was simultaneously filming the Alfred Hitchcock classic shocker Psycho (1960) in Los Angeles.

[7] Stephen Rebello in his book Alfred and the Making of Psycho documented that because the filming of the movie's now-iconic shower scene did not "require the services of Anthony Perkins", Hitchcock allowed him to attend play rehearsals in New York.