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What started out as a musical variation on HEE-HAW has had the last laugh. SHUCKED was originally inspired by that erstwhile TV series that’s been rarely off the air since its 1969 debut. Although it had clocked more than 350 episodes, in all that time, it was able to receive one and only one Emmy […]

Wait a minute! Where’s “Johanna”?!? Those who attend the current Broadway revival of SWEENEY TODD and are familiar with the score will miss one of the three songs that happen to have the same name. For those who don’t know Stephen Sondheim’s Tony-winning score for the Tony-winning musical, we don’t mean that there’s one song […]

Who knew that “Follow Me” had so many fans? But since Aaron Sorkin’s revisal of CAMELOT started previews at the Vivian Beaumont on March 9, friends have been calling me to complain. “They dropped ‘Follow Me’!” they’ve exclaimed, in voices that registered astonished surprise to outright contempt. Longtime Broadway publicist Kevin McAnarney said that it’s […]

Can you picture Alfred Hitchcock singing and dancing? In A FINE ROMANCE, Geoffrey Block’s excellent new book from Oxford University Press, he mentions that director Rouben Mamoulian actually considered Hitch for the role of a Communist commissar in the film version of SILK STOCKINGS. Of course, that discussion took place sometime after the early 1950s […]

Sometimes we breeze past an “Author’s Note” because we’re so anxious to get to the meat of a book. Don’t do that with Thomas Mallon’s new 337-page tome. “UP WITH THE SUN,” he wrote, “is a fictionalized rendering of Dick Kallman’s life and death. It is inspired by actual events that have been considerably altered […]