DOWN IN LOS ANGELES,

Franklin Lacey was considering taking on an ambitious new project of his own. He had finally found and opened that sealed envelope with the message he had written to himself when he was 14, the one urging him to become a successful playwright. Had he read it at 21, as intended, he might have thrown it away without giving it much thought. At 21, he had seemed well on his way to success as a live performer. At 28, however, things looked different. The note evidently prompted him to take stock of his career.

“The Franklin Lacey Show” was no longer on the air. Lacey the monologist was still in demand with women’s clubs, but this did not appear to be a path to stardom.

If performing was not going to take him to the top, what about a behind-the-scenes career? Lacey already had put in several years as a stage manager for the L.A. Civic Light Opera, and he had worked as an assistant for theater directors and producers. But he had not yet made the leap to directing or producing himself. His various show-business pursuits added up to a living, but Lacey wanted something more.

He was already an established writer of comedy skits and radio scripts. Writing a successful full-length play required a different skill set. But he still had time to acquire those skills. The unsealed note gave him until he turned 38 to write a play and have it produced. That left him 10 years to get it done. He set to work. The result was “Pagan in the Parlor,” a comedy which was booked for a two-week run at the Pasadena Playhouse early in 1951 — more than four years ahead of Lacey’s self-imposed deadline.

The play was about two spinster sisters leading a very proper existence in New England circa 1900, when their lives are disrupted by a South Seas native who comes to stay with them. The play was directed by the retired film director James Whale, whose Hollywood oeuvre (“Frankenstein,” “The Invisible Man,” etc.) made him an odd choice to direct a zany farce like “Pagan.” Nevertheless, the opening-night audience loved it.

The L.A. critics were more lukewarm, suggesting that it still needed work. Franklin did a rewrite and, at Whale’s suggestion, set his sights on London rather than New York. The plan was to tune up the play by touring it in the English provinces, then take it to London’s West End, and eventually to Broadway.

At first, all went well. “Pagan” opened in Bath in September 1952 and was a smash. Alas, its star, Hermione Baddeley, was binging on alcohol to cope with a love affair gone wrong. As the tour went on, she began missing her cues, ad-libbing her lines and heckling the audience.

“They said a bottle of whiskey went down her every night,” Glady Lacey told Whale’s biographer James Curtis.

By the time the tour reached Brighton, “Pagan” had degenerated from a sure-fire hit to a disaster. Baddeley couldn’t be fired because she had a run-of-the-play contract, so the producers had to close the show. “Pagan in the Parlor” never made it to London. For Franklin Lacey, it was back to the drawing board.

At least he could still perform his comic monologues to help pay the rent while he tinkered with his playwriting projects. In June 1954, he brought his act to Ojai and presented it at the Happy Valley School, apparently at the request of his old friend Rosalind Rajagopal. After the performance, Rosalind invited him to join the school’s faculty as its drama and speech teacher.

“I’m no schoolteacher,” he protested. But he was a Theosophist who had grown up revering Annie Besant, and he knew that Happy Valley was one of Besant’s pet projects. Twenty-six years had elapsed since Besant had met 12-year-old Franklin in Wheaton and saw something special in him. Now he would join the team that was keeping her dream alive. He took the job, and in 1955 began commuting from Hollywood to Ojai.

Also on that team was Aldous Huxley, who still served on the Happy Valley school board. (This board was distinct from, and subordinate to, the Happy Valley Foundation Board. Eventually the school board would be eliminated.) Huxley was still very involved with the school he had co-founded almost a decade earlier. The title of his 1951 commencement address, “Aun Aprendo” (“I am still learning”), became the school’s motto.

Lacey at 38 already had fulfilled his own dream of writing a play and seeing it produced, even though “Pagan in the Parlor” had not made it to Broadway. Like many another theater professional, Lacey apparently had reached a point in his career where producing and directing high-school plays seemed more rewarding than chasing the brass ring and never quite catching it. But his luck was about to change.

Happy Valley drama teacher was a parttime job, which allowed Lacey to remain active in the regional theater world, where he now enjoyed a certain reputation as a script doctor. In the summer of 1956, he was hired to punch up the book of “The California Story,” an outdoor historical pageant with a cast of 1,300 that was scheduled for a two-week run in San Diego’s Balboa Stadium. The music was by a composer named Meredith Willson, who would also be in San Diego conducting the orchestra.

As it happened, Willson for several years had been struggling to complete a musical co medy based on his turn-of-the-century childhood in small-town Iowa. Called “The Music Man,” the show was about a traveling salesman named Professor Harold Hill who tries t o con the credulous citizens of River City into buying instruments and uniforms for a boys’ band. His plan is to take the money and run, but he is stymied by Marian Paroo, the local librarian, who sees through his crooked scheme. They fall in love, and by the end of the play the con-man Hill has gone straight, redeemed by Marian’s faith in him.

In musical comedy, usually one person writes the music, another person the lyrics, and a third person the book. In this case, Willson was writing all three. He was an old hand at songwriting, but he had never written a play before, and he was having trouble making the story line cohere.

Theater fans today who consider “The Music Man” too schmaltzy might be surprised to learn that the original book was much darker and more challenging. Willson had included a subplot featuring Marian’s younger brother, a profoundly disabled teenage boy who is confined to a wheelchair. The problem for Willson was that this subplot was difficult to write in the context of musical comedy, especially as the genre was defined in the 1950s. And, to the extent that Willson did succeed in dramatizing his serious-minded subplot, it tended to overwhelm the book’s love story.

Years had gone by, and many drafts written, and “The Music Man” remained unfinished. In his memoir “But He Doesn’t Know the Territory: The Story Behind Meredith Willson’s ‘The Music Man,’” Willson recalled that by 1956, he was so frustrated by his slow progress on the script that he and his wife were looking forward to forgetting all about the project for the two weeks they would be in San Diego doing “The California Story.”

“Well,” he wrote. “Down there the first person we met was a 6-foot-4 skinny extrovert of a homemade apple-pie smile on stilts, like we’d known him all our lives, by the name of Franklin Lacey, who was adapting and otherwise trouble-shooting the book … Franklin was the brightest thing that had happened in our lives for a long time.”

Impressed by Lacey’s script-doctoring work on “The California Story,” Willson invited him to his vacation home in the San Jacinto Mountains and showed him the two-foot-high pile of rewrites he’d done on “The Music Man.”

“I can wade you through this jungle overnight,” Lacey assured Willson. “I can see how the scenes should follow as clearly as if I was seeing this show on the stage!’”

“Overnight” turned out to be a tad optimistic. But, with Lacey’s help, Willson soon whipped the story into shape. They made the con-man character less villainous, molding Hill into the sort of lovable rogue that audiences tend to root for. But Lacey’s biggest contribution was solving the subplot problem.

Inspiration struck one rainy morning in New York when he and Willson were having breakfast. Willson was talking about the first-act finale, “The Wells Fargo Wagon,” in which the townspeople sing excitedly about the goodies that might be arriving on the freight delivery wagon. Among the singers was a young boy with a lisp, a character so minor he did not even have a name. But his contribution to “Wells Fargo Wagon” was what really put the song over. Willson wondered aloud whether they should give this kid a name and make him part of the plot somehow. Lacey had an immediate reaction.

“Franklin was bug-eyed, grabbing the table with both hands,” Willson recalled in his memoir. “Then I knew what had hit him. It was spontaneous combustion. For the first time in his life, at least in my presence, Franklin whispered instead of hollered.”

What Lacey whispered was this: Let’s promote the lisping kid into the key role of Marian’s little brother, in place of the boy in the wheelchair. The kid is ashamed of his lisp – a problem much more easily resolved, in a musical comedy, than a profound disability. The subplot snapped into place, and the show was now ready for Broadway.

In mid-June 1957, “The Music Man” was announced for a December opening in the Majestic Theatre, with Robert Preston as Harold Hill, Barbara Cook as Marian, and Eddie Hodges as her lisping younger brother. This announcement made news in The Ojai: Local Drama Teacher Broadway Bound!

“Writing for a musical is quite different than playwriting,” Lacey told the newspaper. “In a musical you keep adding and shaping, you’re continually open to new ideas. Changes are always being made, but with the story line always in mind to maintain the show’s integrity.”

Lacey praised Willson as a collaborator, especially his generosity: “He’s scrupulous about giving credit where credit is due.”

Script doctors usually don’t get official credit for their contributions. In this case, however, Lacey had lucked out again.

“At the 11th hour,” co-producer Stuart Ostrow would recall in his memoirs, “Meredith told me to add the following to his billing: Based on a Story by Meredith Willson and Franklin Lacey.”

On opening night, after the final curtain, everybody retreated to Sardi’s restaurant near Times Square to wait nervously for the reviews to come in. They need not have worried.

“I still remember the brotherly hugs I had with Meredith and Franklin as the ecstatic reviews were read aloud at the after-theater party at Sardi’s,” said Laurence Rosenthal, a young composer who wrote ballet music for some of the show’s dances. (Rosenthal at 96 is still hale and hearty; he sent his comments for this story via email from Switzerland, where he now lives. He will play a major role in our narrative later on.)

The show was an enormous hit, and Lacey’s name was on it. True, it was printed in much smaller type than Willson’s, but nonetheless it was there. And a few months later, when “The Music Man” won the Tony Award for “Best Musical,” co-author Lacey took home a trophy that was exactly the same size as Willson’s.

“The Music Man” changed Lacey’s life, literally overnight. Previously obscure, he was now the Tony-winning co-author of the biggest hit on Broadway. He became a boldface name in the show-business gossip columns. Producers were eager to stage his next hit, and he had a lot of ideas for new shows. He quit his drama teacher job at the Happy Valley School and went back to being an actual dramatist.

Soon he had at least three separate playwriting projects plus a movie treatment in progress, along with creating a Zeigfeld-style nightclub review for the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas.

He and Glady maintained their Ojai connections. After leaving the Happy Valley faculty, Franklin ascended to the Happy Valley Foundation board in 1959, the same year he accepted the position of artistic adviser for the Ojai Music Festival’s upcoming in the future already was almost upon us. On the other hand, he wanted to offer humanity an escape route to an alternative future. He could accomplish that goal by writing his long-gestating utopian novel. But he wasn’t quite ready to tackle that project, so he put it off in favor of rewriting “Brave New World” – not as a novel, but as a movie.

1960 season.

(The Music Festival gig was the result of a boardroom coup against longtime artistic director Lawrence Morton, who was away in Europe on a Guggenheim Fellowship. Rebelling against Morton’s preference for difficult, challenging music, the board hired “Music Man” Lacey to program a more tuneful festival. He brought in the Broadway belters John Raitt and Anna Maria Alberghetti. Longtime Festivalgoers who prefer Morton’s approach still shudder at the memory of Lacey’s 1960 installment.)

All in all, Franklin Lacey was a very busy man in 1959. Nevertheless, he responded favorably when “a dear friend” asked him for help with yet another theatrical project. The friend was Aldous Huxley, and the project was adapting “Brave New World” as a musical.

There was, as usual, a hitch. RKO still held the film rights, and still had no interest in exercising them. The studio was willing to sell the rights back to Huxley for $50,000. He could not afford it.

But what about the dramatic rights? If Huxley couldn’t make a film of his novel, perhaps he could dramatize it for the stage. Fortunately, Louis Walinsky proved to be more cooperative than he had been in 1945. Huxley struck a deal with him (“half a loaf is better than no bread,” Huxley noted to a friend) and in mid1956 the novelist began adapting Walinsky’s “Brave New World” script into a musical comedy.

Why a musical? Because musicals are fantasies, and so is science fiction. With musicals, people come in the door prepared to suspend their disbelief and leave reality behind. If they will buy a world where people dance and sing, they will buy Huxley’s brave new world with all its strangeness. That was the theory, anyway.

Thus wrote Huxley in January 1958, even as Lacey was basking in his newfound “Music Man” success. Huxley had just wasted two years of his life trying to dramatize his 1955 novel “The Genius and the Goddess” and shepherd it to Broadway. The play had opened there on Dec. 10, 1957, a week before “The Music Man” was scheduled to premiere. But by the time Lacey’s play opened on Dec. 19, Huxley’s already had closed.

Throughout his long career, Huxley had clung to the notion that turning his novels into plays would yield box-office triumphs that would make him financially secure. He kept trying, and he kept failing. Soon he would try again, with “Brave New World.”

The roots of this particular project go back to 1955, a year of transition for Huxley. He lost Maria to cancer in February, and later struck up a new romance with Laura Archera, whom he would marry a year later. He also agreed to let writer-producer William Froug adapt “Brave New World” as a radio play. Froug’s hour-long version ran on “CBS Radio Workshop” in January 1956, with Huxley himself as narrator. (You can listen to it on YouTube.)

Notably, this version does not end with a suicide. The Huxley of 1956 was not the Huxley of 1932. On one hand, he now was convinced that the dystopian world he had foreseen 600 years

“Everyone tells me that science fiction can never succeed on the stage as a straight play, but that it would be accepted when the medium ceases to be realistic and makes use of music and lyrics,” Huxley told his son.

Another plus: To make room for all the songs, the book of a musical is half the length of a straight play. Huxley would have to compress the narrative considerably, “but the streamlining will be a dramatic improvement,” he noted.

Recall also that the biggest hit on Broadway in 1956 was “My Fair Lady,” a musical version of George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion.” If a literary lion like Shaw could lend his name to a musical-comedy marquee, why shouldn’t Huxley? And Huxley, unlike Shaw, was writing the “Brave New World” lyrics himself:

“Sex galore and no more marriages.

No one pushing baby carriages.

No one has to change a nappy.

Ain’t we lucky, ain’t we happy?

Everybody’s happy now.”

Huxley was quite pleased with his work: “If all goes well and I can get somebody good to do the music – such as Leonard Bernstein – the results might be remarkable.”

And more to the point: “It might be very profitable.”

Alas, the right composer was not found. Bernstein turned him down, as did Huxley’s friend Igor Stravinsky. There was talk of offering it to Rodgers and Hammerstein, but nothing came of that, either. By the middle of 1957, Huxley had put the project aside to focus on “The Genius and the Goddess.” Six months later, after that play had opened and closed in the blink of an eye, he despaired of ever finding success as a playwright.

Let us pause here for moment to contemplate the unlikely fruit of Huxley’s project if he had succeeded: A peppy-yet-dystopian science-fiction musical with lyrics like the above, set to music by Igor Stravinsky. O brave new world indeed! But it was not to be, and Huxley moved on. By 1959 he was hard at work on his utopian novel, “Island,” the counterpoint to “Brave New World.”

He was also giving a series of lectures at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Huxley’s bad eyesight prevented him from doing much driving, so he relied on friends to shuttle him back and forth between L.A. and the Goleta campus. One of those friends was Franklin Lacey. At some point, in a car traveling along the Pacific Coast Highway, Huxley asked Lacey to have a go at “Brave New World.”

One can see what Huxley was thinking. Show-doctor Lacey famously had taken on Meredith Willson’s troubled script and helped transform it into a Broadway phenomenon. Two years after its opening, “The Music Man” was still a hot ticket. If anyone could make a hit musical of “Brave New World,” surely that person was Franklin Lacey.

We know from an L.A. Times society item that Franklin, Glady and Huxley attended a party together in Santa Barbara on Nov. 11, 1959. Perhaps it was on the ride up from L.A. that day that Huxley popped the question. A month later, Lacey’s friend Sheilah Graham broke the news in her syndicated Hollywood gossip column:

“Franklin Lacey, who doesn’t get the credit he should for ‘The Music Man,’ is currently writing the ‘Brave New World’ book; enlarging the [film] treatment of ‘Little Lord Fauntleroy’ to star Eddie Hodges; and polishing a musical version of ‘Pagan in the Parlor.’ Other than that, he has nothing to do.”

Lacey was writing the book and the lyrics for “Brave New World,” but he needed a composer. He didn’t waste time pursuing big names like Bernstein or Stravinsky. Instead, he approached Laurence Rosenthal, whom he already knew from “The Music Man.”

Rosenthal would go on to have a remarkable career scoring such classic films as “A Raisin in the Sun,” “The Miracle Worker,” “Beckett” and “Man of La Mancha,” and TV shows like “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.” He would be nominated for two Oscars and 13 Emmys, and would win seven Emmys. But in 1960 he was a little-known young composer who was hungry for work. Fortuitously, he also was a big fan of “Brave New World.”

“I was immediately enthusiastic about the idea, having read the novel more than once, and considering it to be one of the most astoundingly prophetic books of our time,” Rosenthal told the OQ via email.

Lacey had found his composer. With Glady in tow, he and Rosenthal repaired to Rosenthal’s vacation house on an island off the coast of Maine, where they went to work.

“Soon we flew out to Los Angeles to show Mr. Huxley what we had done so far,” Rosenthal said. “He and Franklin seem to have been good friends. … He was cordial and gracious.”

“Huxley’s response to the songs was very positive. However, recognizing that we still had a considerable way to go before completion, he joked, ‘You fellows had better get cracking on this show, or before you finish it, everything I predicted in the book will already have happened!’”

Lacey and Rosenthal were stunned by the novelist’s conversational fluency.

“I had heard of Huxley’s phenomenal encyclopedic erudition, but this was quite unexpected,” Rosenthal said. “We all shared a dessert that was mostly of pineapple. It was delicious. Suddenly, out of the blue, with complete casualness, Huxley launched into a 15-minute dissertation on the history of the pineapple. It was vastly entertaining, not boring in the least, but told in the breezy style of an expert raconteur.”

At the same dinner, Rosenthal told Huxley how much he’d admired “Doors of Perception,” Huxley’s 1954 non- fiction book about using mescalin to expand one’s mental horizons. Rosenthal and Huxley then exchanged accounts of their recent experiments with LSD.

“All of which seemed to interest Mr. Huxley very much,” Rosenthal said.

Huxley was not the only interesting dinner partner that Rosenthal met through Lacey.

“Franklin was a good friend of Jiddu Krishnamurti, the eminent Indian spiritual master,” Rosenthal said. “Franklin kindly invited me to a dinner party with Krishna and some of his disciples in Ojai. I had a wonderful conversation with the great man. We spoke of religion and spirituality, but also about music, Sanskrit and Gregorian chant, etc. I am forever grateful to Franklin for introducing me to this extraordinary man.”

Lacey’s take on “Brave New World” was less dark and less weighty than the novel, as befitted a musical comedy.

“The No. 1 purpose of a play is to be entertaining,” Franklin later told an interviewer. “Avant Garde plays do nothing for me — they’re like building a house with no blueprints.”

In Lacey’s “Brave New World,” John the Savage recedes into the background, and he does not kill himself at the end of the play. Instead, Lacey arranges a deus ex machina conclusion wherein a passing space flotilla from Mars rescues the Adam-and-Eve couple Bernard and Anina, and transports them to a pleasant and unpopulated planet — an Eden, a brave new world where they can start anew:

“Nurtured by the Earth, and warmed by the sun, The greatest and least of creatures thrive.

And oh, what a boundless miracle it is, To be alive! To be alive! To be alive!”

Was this the sort of thing Huxley had in mind? Apparently so, for he encouraged Lacey to keep at it, and looked forward to seeing it on the stage. Bottom line: Huxley wanted a hit, and he figured Lacey could deliver one.

But Lacey had many other irons in the fire. He was retooling “Pagan” as a musical called “Captain Isabel,” intended as a vehicle for his old friend Beatrice Lillie, with Lacey composing the tunes himself. He also was writing the book for a musical about the showman P.T. Barnum, and a play called “The Lotus Position,” and a revue called “Summer Love.” So “Brave New World” had a lot of competition for his attention.

Huxley too was busy with other projects. He published “Island,” his utopian novel, and tried again to make a success of his “The Genius and the Goddess” play, this time in London’s West End. It only lasted a few weeks before closing.

“The Music Man” itself finally closed in 1961, after a three-and-ahalf-year run on Broadway. The movie version, also starring Robert Preston, was released in 1962 and became one of the year’s biggest screen hits. Lacey had his name on that version too. Huxley might have felt a twinge of jealousy, since “Brave New World,” the novel, remained unfilmed. In a letter to his brother-in-law in October 1962, Huxley complained about “the RKO people, who have never done anything with it but who nevertheless retain ownership.”

“Meanwhile,” he added, “a musical adaptation has been made and I hope that the play will soon be produced. We shall see.”

Huxley never did see “Brave New World” performed on a stage. The musical was still not quite finished when the 69-year-old writer died of cancer in Los Angeles on Nov. 22, 1963, the same day President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Knowing that the end was near, Rosalind Rajagopal drove down from Ojai that day to be by Huxley’s side. She watched as Laura Huxley administered a dose of LSD, per Aldous’s request. He died a few hours later, tripping into infinity.

after Huxley ’s death, Sheila Graham reported in her column that Lacey finally had “Brave New World” ready for Broadway. John

Raitt and Anna Maria Alberghetti, late of the Ojai Music Festival, were to play Bernard and Anina. Rehearsals were to begin in November, with the show set to open in February 1965. But the curtain never went up. The producer ran into financial difficulties. Which may have been just as well, since according to composer Laurence Rosenthal, “Brave New World” was not at all ready for Broadway.

“We never finished the show,” Rosenthal said, and Lacey “literally disappeared from my life. … I never heard from him again. A rather disconcerting and disappointing conclusion of a lively relationship.”

Lacey’s name kept popping up in the Broadway columns into the late ‘60s, always in connection with a play or musical he was writing. None were produced: Not “Captain Isabel” with Beatrice Lillie, not the Barnum musical, not “The Lotus Position” play that was supposed to star Joan Fontaine, not “The Big Island,” a musical set in Hawaii, which a newspaper reported was “now in the hands of New York producers, and which, hopefully, will open there in 1968.”

Lacey did make a notable return in 1968 — not to Broadway but to Ojai, where Rosalind Rajagopal hired him as the new Happy Valley School headmaster.

The school finally was getting ready to move from Meiners Oaks to its namesake valley in Upper Ojai. This was to be a two-step process. First, the school would move to temporary quarters in a pre-existing office building adjacent to the Happy Valley property. Meanwhile, the Foundation Board would raise money to build a brand-new campus on the land Annie Besant had purchased back in 1927. Franklin oversaw the first move, but — like Moses — he didn’t complete the journey himself by leading the school to the promised land. That happened after he stepped down as headmaster in 1970.

“In that decade, with the school in its darkest period, Franklin was persuaded to be the director and he forthwith attempted to keep afloat what was a very leaky craft indeed,” Radha Sloss wrote. “Perhaps his own line from ‘The Music Man’ served him well at this time. When Professor Hill had flimflammed the whole town into buying costumes and instruments for the school band and the moment arrived to play, one voice cried out, ‘But we don’t know how.’ The professor said ‘FAKE IT’ and it worked! Floating between two makeshift campuses, in serious deficit, down to seven students, the school continued, with very little substance, to project the impression of itself as a school.” After stepping down as headmaster, Lacey returned his focus to show business. He co-wrote the story for the 1971 film “Rain For A Dusty Summer,” a western starring Ernest Borgnine. Then Lacey went back to his theater roots and wrote “Don’t Hate Money,” a musical which opened in December 1976 at the Las Palmas Theater in Hollywood. The critics were not especially impressed, and “Don’t Hate Money” did not linger long at the Las Palmas before it disappeared into theatrical oblivion. But indirectly this production would have an enduring impact on L.A.’s comedy scene, thanks to the involvement of Franklin’s nephew Mike Lacey.

“My uncle … had a new play that needed some punching up and he wanted me to produce it,” Mike told an interviewer. “I went to the Comedy Store to look for a writer and met this young comic [Robin Williams] who was pretty funny. That’s when I decided I didn’t want to produce plays. I wanted to open a comedy club.”

Mike Lacey went on to found the now-legendary Comedy & Magic Club in Hermosa Beach, and he still runs it today.

As for Mike’s Uncle Franklin, “Don’t Hate Money” seems to have been his last hurrah in show business, albeit he was still earning a living from “The Music Man.”

In retirement, Franklin and Glady frequently drove up to Ojai from L.A. to see old friends. They would check in with Beatrice Wood in her studio, or catch up with Alan and Helen Hooker over a meal at the Ranch House. The Laceys led a comfortable life, thanks in part to their ongoing proceeds from “The Music Man.”

Franklin retired from the Happy Valley Foundation board in 1986, after serving on it for 27 years, and he died two years later at the age of 70. Glady died in 2006, at 93. She and Franklin had no children, so she left his “Music Man” royalties to the Foundation, for which they provide a reliable stream of income.

“There is seldom a day when somewhere in the world, a theater is not lit up with a performance of this all-time popular musical,” Radha Sloss observed in “The Story of Happy Valley.”

“The royalties have helped to support the Chamber on the Mountain chamber-music series, and the rebuild after the

Thomas Fire,” adds Portia Johnson, the current Besant Hill head of school.

Happy Valley today is not the Theosophist utopia that Besant envisioned as the cradle for a more-evolved golden race. But it grew from seeds she planted, and drew upon her ideas about education, culture and politics to create a community that is a blend of Besant and Huxley and Rajagopal and others – including Lacey.

As it happens, “The Music Man” is not the only musical comedy Franklin and Glady bequeathed to the Happy Valley Foundation. There’s also “Brave New World’’ — not the rights, but the actual script Franklin wrote for Huxley in the early ‘60s. A copy resides in the foundation archives. One day about 20 years ago, Radha Sloss dug it out and gave it to Susan Kelejian, who at the time had Lacey’s old job as the school’s head drama teacher.

“She handed me ‘Brave New World’ and said, ‘It’s yours — do what you want with it,’” Kelejian told the OQ

The script seemed unfinished, and there was no music to go with the lyrics. Kelejian asked a fellow teacher to compose some tunes: “He wrote music and we put it on.”

And so, some 40 years after he wrote it, Franklin Lacey’s version of “Brave New World” finally had its premiere on Feb. 11, 2004 – not on Broadway but in Happy Valley’s Zalk Theater, in a staged reading featuring Kelejian’s students. To date, that remains the show’s one and only public performance.

Kelejian is not surprised that it has never been professionally produced. The concept — making an uplifting musical comedy of Huxley’s darkly dystopian novel — seems fatally flawed.

“It makes no sense to me to do song-and-dance with ‘Brave New World,’” she said. “It was a little odd to think of it as a quote-unquote comedy. But for historical purposes it was fascinating.” Lacey’s “Brave New World” resurfaced again at the school in 2007 or 2008, not long after the actor and playwright Peter Fox started working there in the development office. One day Paul Amadio, who was then the head of school, handed Fox the script.

“He knew that I was a published playwright,” Fox said in an interview. “He said, ‘Why don’t you take a shot at this.’”

Amadio evidently hoped that if Fox could freshen up Lacey’s script, then “Brave New World” might join “The Music Man” in Happy Valley’s portfolio of revenue-generating musicals. But Fox was not especially impressed by what he read.

“It struck me as kind of outdated,” he said.

Rather than rewrite it, Fox wrote his own version from scratch. But after he finished it, he says, the Huxley estate somehow got wind of the project and quashed it.

A few years later, the estate licensed the novel’s dramatic rights to a team of Broadway musical-comedy professionals, who fashioned their own version. It premiered at the North Carolina Stage Company in Asheville in 2016, to good reviews. Its creators have been trying to get it to Broadway ever since, with no luck thus far.

But Huxley’s novel will enter the public domain in 2028, at which point some producer may want to have a peek at Lacey’s script. Currently a copy is available for purchase on eBay for $465. Huxley’s own copy (actually two copies, both dated 1961) can be found at UCLA among the Aldous and Laura Huxley papers (Box 23, Folders 14 and 15). And the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley has a copy that includes sheet music for six songs composed by Laurence Rosenthal.

Closer to home, there’s a copy that Lacey may have given to Meredith Willson, which recently was acquired by the Ojai Valley Museum. And, of course, there’s that copy that reposes in the Happy Valley Foundation archives. Perhaps in 2028 the Besant Hill School will dust it off again and give Lacey’s version of “Brave New World” a full-scale production, just for old times’ sake. Appropriately, they could fund it with some of their ongoing proceeds from “The Music Man,” which will continue to benefit Happy Valley for many years to come.