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When musical theater fans think of New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson’s review of the twenty-sixth collaboration between Rodgers and Hart, they usually recall its final line. “Although PAL JOEY is expertly done, can you draw sweet water from a foul well?” No, Atkinson didn’t give PAL JOEY a thumbs-up. But many theatergoers who were […]

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 […]