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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 […]

Last week we talked about Columbia record producer (and sometimes president) Goddard Lieberson’s preference in allowing very few lead-in pieces of dialogue when he recorded a show song. Now — what decisions did he make about including lines of dialogue that occurred during a song? Lieberson was a little more liberal there. Needless to say, […]

So — do you agree with Goddard Lieberson on the dialogue issue? Although he’s still regarded as the all-time guru of original cast albums (and probably always will be), the former Columbia Records president decided early on that the original cast albums he’d produce would go easy on the spoken word. Producers of cast albums […]