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If your taste in show music runs to Rodgers and Hammerstein as well as Stephen Sondheim, you’ll find that Polkadots is a good cast album for your young children, nieces and nephews. If your taste in show music runs to Rodgers and Hammerstein as well as Stephen Sondheim, you’ll find that Polkadots is a good […]

In 1999 — literally the 70th anniversary of Robert Wright’s meeting George “Chet” Forrest — I interviewed the gentlemen at their impressive apartment at 100 West 57th Street. I loved that the place was a veritable Wright-and Forrest Museum. The walls were covered to the square inch with memorabilia from their Hollywood films, Copacabana days […]

Could it really already be forty-two years later? Figures don’t lie. On Sept. 8, 1974, I saw Angela Lansbury try out her Rose in Gypsy at the Shubert Theatre in Boston – the first professional production of that landmark musical that I’d see. I knew she’d be marvelous. By then I had gleaned what Lansbury […]

Some songs inspire us: “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” “(You Gotta Have) Heart.” Some make us feel optimistic: “Good Times Are Here to Stay.” “Happy Talk.” But how many songs actually help an individual while he’s working? And yet, Ken Bloom says that a song from the 1966 TV special Alice Through the Looking Glass actually […]

And just how important was stereo to 1960s record-buyers? The Music Theater of Lincoln Center’s 1965 production of Kismet, recently re-released by Masterworks Broadway, once again reiterates how potent the Stereo Revolution was. Eleven years earlier, the original cast album of Kismet was issued in monaural, which was then the only option for any recording […]