Henry James' 1903 novel The Ambassadors told the story of Lewis Lambert Strether, a Massachusetts man sent to Paris by his widowed fiancée to retrieve her son from the clutches of a woman there. Once in Paris, Strether discovers some truths about himself, shattering his preconceived notions of the situation. Don Ettingler (book), Don Gohman (music), and Hal Hackady (lyrics) saw the potential of James' novel as a musical, and enlisted director Stone Widney (an associate of Alan Jay Lerner's and