High Tor is a 1936 play by Maxwell Anderson. It received the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Play of the 1936–37 season. Twenty years after the original production, Anderson adapted it into a television musical with Arthur Schwartz. Play The play is named for a summit overlooking the Tappan Zee portion of New York's Hudson River, near where Anderson lived in Rockland County. The story was inspired by the real life controversy over quarrying the palisades along the lower Hudson. The play also shares the plot element of a ghostly crew of Dutch sailors on the Hudson with Washington Irving's short story Rip Van Winkle. Anderson began writing the play in May 1936. It was first presented onstage in Cleveland, Ohio, in December 1936, with Burgess Meredith (Anderson's neighbor in Rockland County) and Peggy Ashcroft in the lead roles. The production moved to Broadway ten days later in January 1937, where it played 171 performances. High Tor received the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for the best American play of the 1936–1937 season. The award included this citation: In its decision the circle celebrates the advent of the first distinguished fantasy by an American in many years. Imaginative and as comic as it is poetic in both spirit and expression, High Tor is a singular accomplishment, giving rare grace to this theatrical season in New York. In 1942, Anderson helped organize and served as the chairman of the Rockland County Committee To Save High Tor, which helped raise money to purchase the property in 1943 for the creation of a public park. Television adaptations The play was broadcast as an episode of The Philco Television Playhouse on NBC, September 10, 1950, with Alfred Ryder and Felicia Monteleagre in the lead roles. Musical Anderson first considered a musical adaptation of High Tor for television in 1949. He and John Monks Jr. adapted the play as a made-for-television musical fantasy in 1955, with music by Arthur Schwartz and lyrics by Anderson. High Tor was filmed in November 1955 by Desilu Productions at the RKO-Pathé Studio, and broadcast March 10, 1956 on the CBS television network, as a 90-minute episode of the series Ford Star Jubilee. Bing Crosby, Julie Andrews, Nancy Olson, Hans Conreid, and Everett Sloane starred in the film, produced by Arthur Schwartz, and directed by James Neilson. Bing Crosby had seen Julie Andrews in her Broadway