There are some musicals, often from the late 1960s or early 1970s, whose scores sound so dated today that it’s hard to imagine they were ever en vogue. One such musical is The Fig Leaves Are Falling, which ran for four performances at the Broadhurst Theatre in 1969. With book and lyrics by Allan Sherman and music by Albert Hague (whose Redhead had won the Tony Award for Best Musical a decade earlier), the show was poorly received by critics and audiences alike. Not even the promise of a free chicken – one was raffled by the lead characters at the show’s close – could get tickets moving. Its place as a footnote in the musical theatre history books is thanks to Dorothy Loudon, who snagged a Tony nomination for her performance in the show – a huge stepping stone in her journey as a Broadway legend.

The Fig Leaves Are Falling tells the story of Harry Stone, whose midlife crisis prompts him to question his life and his marriage to his wife, Lillian. He begins a dalliance with Pookie Chapman of the Sexual Freedom League, before realising that everything he was searching for was – you guessed it – at home all along.

Sherman, who was best known for his novelty song “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh”, drew inspiration from his own divorce in writing the show, which attempted to satirise some key moral issues of the time, poking fun at the sexual revolution of the 1960s. By all accounts, it succeeded in delivering very little enlightenment and even less entertainment. Indeed, many found it, if not unpalatable, to be distasteful at the least. A typical example of the way The Fig Leaves Are Falling approached its subject matter is evident in the song, “Give Me a Cause,” which starts off well enough as it lampoons the generic protester, the kind of person who’s happy to hold a placard no matter the cause, and descends into a sort of mid-century “Mambo No. 5.” It’s trying so desperately to be clever and funny that it seems to lose track of what it’s trying to say, and to whom.

The Fig Leaves Are Falling is a show that’s difficult to get a sense of today. There is no cast album, although a compilation of songs performed by Sherman at nightclub and television appearances, augmented by some studio-recorded tracks, is available. This particular album gives little sense of how the score helped craft the show’s story, although when listening to numbers like “We,” “For the Rest of My Life” and “All of My Laughter,” it’s easy to imagine Loudon’s signature style illuminating the material in a way that Sherman isn’t able to. That said, he sells “Today I Saw a Rose,” a key number for Harry, as something that promises more than what the show seems to deliver.

In 2013, Ben West adapted and revised The Fig Leaves Are Falling for an Off-Off-Broadway revival by Unsung Musicals. Today’s critics found as little to love in the show as those did during the show’s original run. It seems that this square-shouldered, faux-mod morality musical is better forgotten than remembered, a relic with creative ambitions that outpaced its cultural intuition.