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A thread on Facebook’s All Things Broadway recently asked for The Best Reprise of a Musical Theater Song. Easy: “Staying Young” from the 1959 musical Take Me Along. Two years before that, Bob Merrill showed us his score for New Girl in Town, a musicalization of Eugene O’Neill’s 1922 Pulitzer Prize- winner Anna Christie. Adapting […]

There are three levels of Cast Album Nirvana. The first occurs when you hear the score and love it so much that you immediately replay the recording again and again. The second comes after many listens. Now you only need hear the vamp of any song to make you immediately recognize it, smile and say […]

There’s a possibility that SpongeBob SquarePants may force the Tonys Awards to move from Radio City Musical Hall this year to a grammar school auditorium next year. If “The Broadway Musical for Everyone,” as it calls itself, wins the Best Score Tony, the American Theatre Wing will have to dispense no fewer than sixteen trophies […]

Fifty years ago last month The Twenty-Second Annual Tony Awards were dispensed. Hallelujah, Baby! beat out The Happy Time, Illya Darling and How Now, Dow Jones for Best Musical. It might not have won if George M! had opened just a little bit sooner – or if NBC hadn’t made a demand that the Tonys […]

So what musicals were specifically tailored for certain performers? We know that from the outset Judy Holliday and no one else would be considered for Ella Peterson in Bells Are Ringing. Betty Comden and Adolph Green purposely wrote it for their old pal whom they first knew as Judith Tuvim; they all had performed together […]