Elephant Steps in Time
You’ve heard it said about your town or one nearby. “If you don’t like the weather here, wait five minutes, and it’ll change.” The same standard can apply to Stanley Silverman’s music in Elephant Steps. If on the off-chance you don’t like the melody you’re hearing, wait a few seconds, and you’ll come across one […]
Lady in the Dark: The Ultimate Play with Music
One of the seminal recordings of the 1960s is now with us again via digital download:the first studio cast album of Lady in the Dark. Until 1963, musical theater enthusiasts who’d been too young to have seen this legendary 1941 show — or hadn’t yet been born – enjoyed little opportunity to understand what it […]
The World’s Most Misunderstood Cast Album
So you think that the first “so-bad-it’s-good” musical was The Rocky Horror Show? A case can be made for a very different property: Say, Darling. Truth to tell, Say, Darling was less of a musical than a play with music. We assume that it was a musical because the 1958 show yielded an original cast […]
Song of Norway Is Coming Your Way
My buddy Ingrid Gammerman has told me that she does it. So has my pal Donald Tesione. On occasion, I’ve done it, too. That is, play a cast album on the precise night of an all-star concert version event that I can’t attend. You, too? Then I guess if you can’t be in Carnegie Hall […]
The Other Anyone Can Whistle
On Wednesday, April 8, 1964, Variety told me that Anyone Can Whistle had opened the previous Saturday to three raves and three pans. I’d never seen such an extreme split from the New York newspaper critics. When I read that the Stephen Sondheim-Arthur Laurents musical would close on Saturday, I wasn’t all that surprised; the […]
