Working from her kitchen, she manufactured a phony beauty cream using unpleasant and ineffective ingredients, which she planned to sell to her neighbours as revenge for what she perceived as meanness towards her.
[1] To help distribute the phony product, Madame Aphrodite hired an attractive but naive young man named Barney (Jack Drummond) as her salesman.
[1] Madame Aphrodite, touched by the girl's innocence, confesses that the beauty cream is a hoax, and points out that the change in Rosemary's demeanor was, in fact, due to her love for the likeable Barney.
Madame Aphrodite further reveals that she sold the cream to take revenge on womankind because, as a child, she herself had been duped by an advertisement for a fake beauty product.
[2] The musical Madame Aphrodite traces it origins back to a one-hour TV play of the same name, which was written in the early 1950s by playwright Tad Mosel, one of the leading exponents of that genre at that time.
The play told the simple and fable-like story of a middle-aged beautician who manufactured and sold fake beauty cream to gullible woman.
In December 1960, only a few weeks after the opening of All the Way Home, it was reported that Mosel had now turned his attention to adapting his earlier TV play, Madame Aphrodite, into a musical for the off-Broadway stage.
[6] At that time, the producers announced that they had recently secured the services of director Robert Ennis Turoff, whose only previous off-Broadway musical credit was directing a short-lived revival of The Golden Apple, staged by the Equity Library Theatre earlier that same year.
[7] The repeated delays in the development of Madame Aphrodite allowed composer-lyricist Jerry Herman to become involved in the creation of another musical, Milk & Honey, which underwent its out-of-town tryout between August and September 1961 before opening on Broadway on October 10.
[9] By the time that an opening date had been set for Madame Aphrodite, TV and stage comedian Nancy Andrews had already been cast in the title role.
[12] Writing in the New York Times, Lewis Funke commented that "the story is lumbering and humourless, with much of what is passed off as comedy being malapropisms uttered by the fake beautician".
Meanwhile, Robert Ennis Turoff's direction was described as "adequate", and there was some praise for the sets, costumes and lighting,[2] and also for the performances of Jack Drummond and the "tremendously attractive" Cherry Davis as the salesman and his love interest.
[2] He singled out three songs ("Beautiful", "Only Love" and "The girls who sit and wait") as the score's highlights, and further observed that "Beat the world" had "a bitter current to it" while "A drop of lavender oil" had "the right sinister undertone".
[1] Nevertheless, he remains proud of his score and maintains that, despite the show's failure, he became involved for the right reasons - "because I had a very strong affinity for the material, and because I felt it would make me grow as an artist".
A cover version, performed by Fay DeWitt, was included in the 1977 compilation album Contemporary Broadway Revisited, released on Ben Bagley's Painted Smiles label.
[13] Finally, the tune from Madame Aphrodite's "Beautiful" re-emerged some years later as "A Little More Mascara" in Herman's 1983 comeback show, La Cage aux Folles.