Second-Acting Show Music
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that “There are no second acts in American lives.” For many of us, there are no second acts when we listen to original cast albums. We get up in the morning and put on a favorite recording. Chances are that if it’s from The Golden Age, we’ll hear a rousing […]
Shirley Jones and Jack Cassidy – in Happier Times
As of June 25, 2013, the world was divided into two parts. One part consisted of people who couldn’t wait to read Shirley Jones: A Memoir. They wanted to know everything the actress was willing to tell about her adventures with sex, drugs and musical comedy. Until the book’s publication, they’d always assumed that Jones’ […]
Global Forgiveness Day on Record
Some of you may have noticed that I did a column on August’s minor holidays the first and second weeks of the month – but haven’t done one since. Why? I took a holiday. But here we are with the final minor holiday of the month. Perhaps it should be a major one. August 27: […]
La Cage aux Folles: Alas, Jerry Herman’s Last
Was Jerry Herman subtly trying to tell us something in La Cage aux Folles? Note that he saved “The Best of Times (Is Now)” as his eleven o’clock number. No one knew it at the time, but it would be the last new Herman song that would ever be heard on Broadway. Given that Herman […]
Send in the Soundtrack of A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC
Do you know the term “pentimento”? Many of us didn’t until we read Lillian Hellman’s first memoir, in which she used the word as her title. “Pentimento,” she taught us, was the result of an artist looking at what he’d painted, reassessing a section, changing his mind and repainting what he’d already done. In listening […]
