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A trip to the Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario yielded several terrific productions, but the crown jewel was Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd. Artistic director Jackie Maxwell did a superb job of staging, but her greatest achievement was a smart new idea for the show’s most controversial song: Judge Turpin’s “Johanna.” Traditionally it’s […]

  You’ve heard of The Secret Garden, of course, but have you encountered Secret Garden: An Inky Treasure Hunt and Coloring Book? No, it has nothing to do with the 1991 hit by Marsha Norman, who won a Tony® for her book as well as a nomination that she shared with Lucy Simon, who put […]

Were you attending New York cabaret shows in the ‘80s? If you had been sitting at a table and seeing any chanteuse back then, chances are you would have heard a haunting song called “Old Friend.” Even now, decades later, “Old Friend” hasn’t dated. It describes a woman whose latest romance has come to a […]

It’s the last traditional score from a Broadway musical to yield five hit songs that most everyone in the nation knew at the time. It was the precise middle of the ‘60s, and the musical was The Roar of the Greasepaint – the Smell of the Crowd. It had a book, music and lyrics by […]

Isn’t it queer? In “Send in the Clowns,” Desiree sings about “making my entrance again with my usual flair.” And yet, in A Little Night Music, Desiree sings this lyric long after she’s made her first-ever entrance – one that isn’t full of flair. For Hugh Wheeler and Sondheim had decided that provincial actress Desiree […]