Blog

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 […]

Is KPOP the first cast album in which the booklet’s lyrics are printed in Korean? No. With all the American musicals that have proliferated and profited in South Korea – EVITA and MAN OF LA MANCHA among them – their cast albums have long had bi-lingual liner notes and lyrics. But yes, this two-language set […]

And now for a very different homage to a 50th anniversary. Much has been made here in recent weeks of some great 1973 events in musical theater. Two involved a certain composer-lyricist whose first name is Stephen. His A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC opened 50 years ago last month, and SONDHEIM: A MUSICAL TRIBUTE was celebrated […]