Bean received a Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actor in a Musical (his co-star Phyllis Newman won a Tony Award as Best Featured Actress in a Musical). He enjoyed his greatest personal success on Broadway in the 1961-62 season, in the Betty Comden and Adolph Green musical 'Subways are for Sleeping', which was directed and choreographed by Michael Kidd and featured music by Jule Styne. Though the play lasted but 67 performances, Orson Bean had established himself on the Broadway stage. Next up was a succès d'estime as the leading man in Herman Wouk's comic play 'Nature's Way', which co-starred Bea Arthur, Sorrell Booke and Godfrey Cambridge.

He followed this up with an even bigger hit, the leading role in 'Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter'. It was a hit that ran for 229 performances. The following year was to prove kinder: he hosted a summer-replacement television series produced at the Blue Angel, and won a Theatre World Award for his work in the 1954 music revue 'John Murray Anderson's Almanac', which co-starred Harry Belafonte, Polly Bergen, Hermione Gingold and Carleton Carpenter. The play flopped and ran only four appearances. He made his Broadway debut on Apin Stalag 17 (1953) producer Richard Condon's only Broadway production as a playwright, 'Men of Distinction', along with Robert Preston and Martin Ritt. His comedy act premiered at New York City's Blue Angel nightclub, and the momentum from his act launched him into the orbit of the legitimate theater. After the war, he launched himself onto the nightclub circuit with his new moniker, the 'Orson' borrowed from reigning enfant terrible Orson Welles. Too young to see military service during World War II, the future Orson Bean did a hitch in the U.S. The young Dallas, an amateur magician with a taste for the limelight, graduated from Boston's prestigious Latin School in 1946. Through the latter, the newborn Dallas Burrows was a first cousin, twice removed, to Calvin Coolidge, who was President of the United States at the time of his birth. He was of Irish, Scottish, and English descent. Orson Bean, the American actor, television personality and author, was born Dallas Frederick Burrows on Jin Burlington, Vermont to George Frederick Burrows, a policeman who later went on to become the chief of campus police at Harvard University, and the former Marion Ainsworth Pollard.

Orson bean affairs