– was a nine-performance bomb (although it introduced Angela Lansbury to musical theater). Do I Hear a Waltz?, based on Laurents's 1952 play The Time of the Cuckoo, was intended as another Rodgers and Hammerstein musical with Mary Martin in the lead. A new lyricist was needed, and Laurents and Rodgers' daughter, Mary, asked Sondheim to fill in. Although Richard Rodgers and Sondheim agreed that the original play did not lend itself to musicalization, they began writing a musical version. The project had many difficulties, including Rodgers's alcoholism. Sondheim later called it the one project he truly regretted writing, given that the reasons he wrote it – as a favor to Mary, as a favor to Hammerstein, as an opportunity to work again with Laurents, and as an opportunity to make money – were not reasons to write a musical. He then decided to work only when he could write both music and lyrics. Sondheim asked author and playwright James Goldman to join him as bookwriter for a new musical. Inspired by a New York Times article about a gathering of former Ziegfeld Follies showgirls, originally titled The Girls Upstairs, it became Follies. In 1966, Sondheim semi-anonymously provided lyrics for "The Boy From...", a parody of "The Girl from Ipanema" in the off-Broadway revue The Mad Show. The song was credited to "Esteban Río Nido", Spanish for "Stephen River Nest", and in the show's playbill the lyrics were credited to "Nom De Plume". That year Goldman and Sondheim hit a creative wall on The Girls Upstairs, and Goldman asked Sondheim about writing a TV musical. The result was Evening Primrose, with Anthony Perkins and Charmian Carr. Written for the anthology series ABC Stage 67 and produced by Hubbell Robinson, it was broadcast on November 16, 1966. According to Sondheim and director Paul Bogart, the musical was written only because Goldman needed money for rent. The network disliked the title and Sondheim's alternative, A Little Night Music. After Sondheim finished Evening Primrose, Jerome Robbins asked him to adapt Bertolt Brecht's The Measures Taken despite the composer's general dislike of Brecht's work. Robbins wanted to adapt another Brecht play, The Exception and the Rule, and asked John Guare to adapt the book. Leonard Bernstein had not written for the stage in some time, and his contract as conductor of the New York Philharmonic was ending. Sondheim was invited to Robbins's house in