"New Line Theatre's production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas ultimately provides not only marvelous music and dance but substantial food for thought."
-- The Riverfront Times

"[Director Scott] Miller, who loves musical comedy, chooses to emphasize the musical over the comic in this production. . . But, having made his decision, he executes it with care and intelligence, delivering a production with charms of its own."
-- St. Louis Post Dispatch

New Line's twelfth season closed with the Tony Award winning Broadway musical comedy THE BEST LITTLE WHOREHOUSE IN TEXAS, which tells the true story of a hundred year old whorehouse in a small Texas town that became the unlikely target of a crusading TV reporter (assisted by a much younger Larry Connors, now a St. Louis TV anchor on KMOV).

Since the 1890s, the Chicken Ranch had been one of the better pleasure palaces in all of Texas. It was during the Great Depression, when  a man couldn't always scrape together the necessary three dollars that the girls began accepting poultry in trade, and that's how the place got its name. But in 1973, when Marvin Zindler (who's still on the airwaves in Texas) turned his TV cameras on the Chicken Ranch, suddenly every politician in Texas (most of whom were repeat customers) expressed moral outrage that such an institution could be allowed to sully the good name of the Lone Star state. 

In April of 1974, Playboy published an article about the sad tale under the title "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," and it wasn't long before a group of Texans already working on Broadway decided it'd make a good musical. With a script by Larry K. King (based on his Playboy article) and Peter Masterson, songs by Carol Hall, and direction by the hotshot young director Tommy Tune, the show opened in 1978 off Broadway to rave reviews, then moved on Broadway to run for 1,584 performances, where it was nominated for seven Tony Awards and won two.

After a national tour (in which dozens of local papers, including those in St. Louis, refused to print the show's title), the show returned to Broadway for a second run in 1982. That same year, a watered down, kinder and gentler movie version was released with the most miscast leads in movie musical history -- Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds. Believe us, if you've only seen the Dolly Parton movie (or that godawful revival with Ann-Margaret), you have not seen Whorehouse.