Blog

Did Rodgers and Hammerstein trouble themselves to watch the 1938 film of Pygmalion? Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe obviously did – and that’s one reason why they succeeded in adapting George Bernard Shaw’s 1912 play into My Fair Lady. That only happened, however, some years after Dick and Oscar had tried to musicalize the […]

“The Boston Merger” turns out to have two meanings in Grand Hotel. In the 1989 musical that last month had a superb revival at Encores! General Director Preysing and his company are in financial crisis. If he can’t manage a merger with a Boston company, his board of directors and stockholders will remove him. So […]

What a difference from 1971. When Jesus Christ Superstar opened at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on October 12th of that year, dozens of Christian fundamentalists were outside brandishing their picket signs. Billy Graham said that the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice show “bordered on blasphemy and sacrilege.” Dr. William A. Marra – then the host of […]

“I met my future husband over an autopsy.” Now there’s a phrase that you’d never hear in a Broadway song. But in the early ‘50s, medical stenographer Anita Luebben was assigned to a post-mortem with Dr. Ronald William Gillette. And that’s how she became Anita Gillette, whom we’ll be able to see in her one-woman […]

As my friend Josh Ellis said when he heard the news, “Roll up the Ribbons.” He was citing the penultimate song in I Do! I Do! – the 1966 musical hit about a fifty-year marriage. In it, Michael and Agnes, now senior citizens, are about to leave the only house they’ve known for the last […]