Everywhere I’m turning lately, I find myself running into 1961.

Saw the 1961 musical Subways Are for Sleeping at Opening Doors Theatre Company. Long before the hippie movement, Comden and Green were writing about people who dropped out of society so they could enjoy the simple pleasures of life. At show’s end, though, they came to the same conclusion that hippies did: There are pleasures in making an honest living, and money isn’t such a bad thing.

What a wonderful cast director Hector Coris has. Erin Cronican excells as Angie, the magazine writer who’s been assigned to study these drop-outs; Spencer Plachy charms as Tom, the most industrious of the idle with whom she falls in love. Of course, Angie doesn’t tell him that she’s doing a story too, and of course seconds before she plans to tell him, he finds out and feels betrayed. Alas, the ol’ I-was-going-to-tell-you plot thing was well-worn by 1961. No wonder producer David Merrick had to hire seven people with the same names as the seven theater critics to rave about the show.

Jule Styne’s music deserves to be better known, for “I’m Just Taking My Time” is a lovely ballad, and “Comes Once in a Lifetime,” a bouncy piece of optimism. The lyrics are fun, with one song’s offering a clever nod to “Old McDonald Had a Farm.” A convoluted piece about taking the subway to such faraway places as Pelham Bay and Van Cortlandt Park allowed me to imagine Comden and Green doing research by taking a field trip all over the New York Transit System. How thrilled straphangers must have felt to see them there!

Lending superb support are Lexi Windsor as Martha Vail, a vixen who never leaves her apartment and only wears a towel so no one can come in and evict her, and Scott McLean Harrison as Charlie, the drop-out who’s willing to drop back in when he comes to love her. Windsor has a smile that makes Mary Tyler Moore’s look like a guppy’s, and was also worthy of the Tony that Phyllis Newman won in this role. Harrison has the chance to be the next Dudley Moore.

In 1961, Carol Channing opened Show Girl. Today, she’s still glowin’, crowin and goin’ strong – maybe not by doing eight a week, but by releasing a gospel-themed album called For Heaven’s Sake. This can’t be the “Voice of God” that was referred to in Les Miserables, could it?

1961 was the year that Jerry Orbach got his first Broadway lead in Carnival. Now we can read his poetry in Remember How I Love You: Love Letters from an Extraordinary Marriage. It takes in the 13 years when the star started the day by writing a short verse to show his feelings for his wife. She was Elaine Cancilla Orbach who, in 1961, left her dancing job in one Pulitzer prize-winning musical (Fiorello!) to join what would be  another (How to Succeed). Ken Bloom collected and curated the letters in this tender 189-page book. What’s bittersweet is seeing on the back cover a note from Mrs. Orbach saying, “My love poems from Jerry are keepsakes that I will treasure forever,” for she died unexpectedly this past April.

Both Channing and Orbach are among the 39 choices that Robert Viagas made for his thoroughly winning book, I’m The Greatest Star. It’s such a great coffee table book that I’ve just got out and buy a coffee table.

“I’m the Greatest Star” is associated with Barbra Streisand, but Viagas didn’t choose her as one of his 39. Streisand, who made her stage debut in 1961 off-Broadway in a one-performance flop called Another Evening with Harry Stoones, would have easily been included had she not abandoned us after two Broadway shows. Let the punishment fit her crime.

Others whom Viagas chose who were represented on Broadway in 1961 were Zero Mostel (Rhinoceros), Alfred Drake (Kean), and Barbara Cook (The Gay Life). Had a great time with Cook last week – in a manner of speaking. DRG has released the six-disc The Essential Barbara Cook Collection. I immediately grabbed five discs, put them in my car CD player, and loved driving around Jersey and hearing “Bojangles of Harlem,” “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” “Nashville Nightingale,” and “I’d Rather Be Blue” among the 57 cuts. And why didn’t I take the sixth disc? It’s a DVD of Mostly Sondheim. I look forward to the day when we can get just the sound on a car CD player from a DVD.

Drake is the subject of “Alfred Drake,” the Gerard Alessandrini song you can read in Forbidden Broadway: Behind the Mylar Curtain. Alessandrini, with Michael Portantiere, have come up with a honey of a book that details FB’s illustrious history in pungent paragraphs and pictures. But best of all are the lyrics. We’re not told that any lyric is “to the tune of,” so we just have to guess – and that’s part of the fun. This will sit on the other end of that coffee table I’ve got to get.

1961 was the year that Harold Prince – still represented on Broadway today at the Majestic – co-produced Take Her, She’s Mine by Henry and Phoebe Ephron. Now their daughters Nora and Delia adapted Ilene Beckerman’s Love, Loss, and What I Wore that’s a smash hit at the Westside. Every woman I know who’s seen it has been enthralled. Fun for men, too, to see what’s on women’s minds these days.

Come Blow Your Horn opened in 1961, and there have been two recent losses connected to it. One was the recent death of Lou Jacobi, who played the owner of an artificial fruit company whose two sons didn’t share his penchant for plastic grapes. Sorry he didn’t get to do the film, but glad the film happened, because we got a good Cahn-Van Heusen song out of it.

Jacobi lived in my neighborhood, and whenever I saw him, I’d yell out “Fade Out—Fade In!” citing the 1964 musical he did with Carol Burnett. And he’d always smile, stop, do a little dance, and sing, “Every night I dream of her; dream of her; dream of her” – the first lines of his big number. Nice guy.

The author of Come Blow Your Horn was, of course, Neil Simon. It was his first hit, and it ran 75 times longer than his play that opened and closed unexpectedly last week. Who’d ever expect a Neil Simon show to not even reach double figures in performance numbers?

Many theories have been advanced for the failure of Brighton Beach Memoirs, but I’m wondering if Simon himself didn’t like the production and demanded that it be shut down? When producers are taking two full-page ads in the Times, seems to me that they’re trying for a run.

But a more likely reason is that three weeks of previews resulted in unhappy theatergoers who weren’t going to recommend this too-dour play to friends and relatives.

Oh, Brighton Beach Memoirs has plenty of very funny lines, heartwarming moments, and an optimistic finish. But it also features a Depression-era father who loses a job and soon has a heart attack; a son who gets fired at a time the family can’t afford it, and then, through gambling, loses what little money he had; a widow who hadn’t had a date in years, and now that she finally gets one, is left waiting because the suitor wound up in the hospital after a DUI incident. The only family I know to have more strife than the Jeromes are the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath.

All this may have played better in the prosperous ‘80s, where the Depression was a half-century behind us. Now that many families are experiencing times not unlike the Jeromes, they may well prefer entertainment that’s happier from start to finish.

But all those theories that Simon has had his day and that time has passed him by can be supported by one statistic. The 25 original productions of Neil Simon’s plays amassed 13,704 performances, for an average of 548 performances each. (The average would be higher if his last two hadn’t each run under 80.)

There have only been four Broadway revivals of Simon’s plays – that small figure alone tells you something -- and they’ve totaled 597 performances, making for a 149-performance average. Still, who would have expected this Brighton Beach Memoirs to last 1290 performances fewer than the original 1299-performances?

Oh -- one other thing: The Yankees won the World Series in 1961, too.

You may e-mail Peter at pfilichia@aol.com