George S. Kaufman and Ring Lardner opened their successful (a smash 273 performance run) just 20 days before "The Crash," but its jaundiced comic look at the music industry continued to entertain long afterward. The young Jack Lemon in this hour long cut was just starting to perfect his bewildered "duck out of water" persona which was spot-on for the young composer adrift in New York's Tin Pan Alley and trying to impress a sophisticated set of older composers - and women . . . and being taken advantage of by them.
Coming on 22 June 1949, this 19th episode of the first season of CBS's laudable decade-long dramatic series, cut the play down to half it's original length and obviously lost something in the process but essentially preserved the acid dipped satire of the piece. If some of the structural "niceties" have been so copied as to appear almost cliché today (they were not revelations even when the play was new) the play succeeds because of execution not innovation, and it does succeed.
Some years later, on 30 January 1974, PBS's Great Performances Series returned to the play in an 88 minute cut with a somewhat more grounded Jack Cassidy in the Jack Lemon role and Stephen Sondheim as the composer Maxie Schwartz! The show still worked and is today available on DVD from "The Broadway Theatre Archive." It works well in this Studio One version from 1949, and can be seen in a good print online at Archive.Org.