Breakfast at Tiffany's is a delightful movie, and it became a template for dozens of rom-coms and New York-set movies that followed in its wake. Audrey Hepburn is bubbly and charming as the flaky romantic Holly Golightly, trying to find love and fulfillment in 1960s New York — it was pretty much Sex and the City with the look of Mad Men.

The 1961 film is cute, funny, romantic, and popularized the standard "Moon River." Those sound like excellent ingredients for a hit Broadway musical, except that the creators of the Breakfast at Tiffany's stage endeavor (briefly renamed Holly Golightly) didn't base their work on the movie — they adapted Truman Capote's novella that served as an extremely loose inspiration for the film. According to PopMatters, for example, the book took place in the bleak 1940s (not the 60s), romantic male lead Paul Varjak was gay and also miserable, and Holly never finds her lost cat, a metaphor for her own directionless, open-ended trajectory. Now, imagine all that with singing and dancing and starring TV superstar Mary Tyler Moore as Holly Golightly in her stage debut. 

Despite the involvement of Moore, and with a script by Pulitzer Prize- and Tony-winning playwright Edward Albee, Breakfast at Tiffany's closed in previews, a December 1966 opening never happening. (According to the Internet Broadway Database, producer David Merrick opted to shut it down "rather than subject the drama critics and the public to an excruciatingly boring evening."

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