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One musical from the 1955-56 season was recorded virtually word-for-word and note-for-note. In an era when an original cast album held about forty-five minutes of music, this one weighed in at a shade under two-and-a-quarter hours. It required three long-playing records that were packaged handsomely in a box fit for a genuine opera or full-length […]

How did you mark both the birth date and death date of one William Shakespeare – the 452nd anniversary of the former and the 400th of the latter? Did you play The Boys from Syracuse (based on The Comedy of Errors)? West Side Story (inspired by Romeo and Juliet)? Your Own Thing? (a loose adaptation […]

We’ve seen books that celebrate the making of Annie, The Producers, Hairspray and No, No, Nanette – but did you know that there’s also one on It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Superman? Indeed, in 2003, Bob Holiday and Chuck Harter wrote Superman on Broadway. The former of the two certainly knew the territory, […]

If you’ve been following me the last three Tuesdays, then you know I’ve been dealing with the new (and excellent) two-CD retrospective The Essential Stephen Sondheim that Masterworks Broadway recently issued. As I stated last week, the powers-that-be did a fine job in culling two-and-a-half-dozen Sondheim cuts from cast albums and other sources. Still, I […]

As I mentioned two Tuesdays ago, I can only imagine the anguish of those Sony executives who chose the thirty selections for the new two-CD retrospective The Essential Stephen Sondheim. True, the job had to be done, but how could they possibly choose so few and ignore so many others? I’m not saying that the […]