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What with staying at home so much, I finally caught up with a much heralded film of two years ago LOVE, SIMON tells of Simon Spier, a teen who’s gay but fears coming out to family and friends. Becky Albertalli’s screenplay gets all the drama out of the situation while managing to include a very […]

My excitement in seeing a musical’s pre-Broadway tryout in Philly, Boston or Baltimore didn’t end when the curtain came down. There’d be another delight a few weeks later when the original cast album was released. Sometimes there’d just be a reordering of songs. When I saw ANNIE at Goodspeed, six months before it debuted on […]

SING STREET. ONCE. DESPERATE MEASURES. What does Dan Dietz think about these musicals? Alas, we don’t know, for they opened too late to appear in his wondrous book OFF BROADWAY MUSICALS, 1910-2007 – a 656-page tome that details and assesses more than 1,800 shows. No detail is too small for Dietz. He relates that DAMES […]

Faithful readers will recall that last week’s column about songs that were dropped during a musical’s Broadway run ended with my notation that I’d have more to say on Yul Brynner’s dropping “A Puzzlement” during his days with THE KING AND I. According to Ethan Mordden’s magnificent RODGERS & HAMMERSTEIN book, Brynner cut the soliloquy […]

I was horrified that Saturday afternoon in the Majestic Theatre before CAMELOT was about to start. I’d reached the page in the Playbill where the songs were listed and saw the terrible mistake. This was late in the show’s original run, months after I’d bought the cast album. By then, I had listened incessantly and […]