Blog

We’re about to begin the one month of the year that doesn’t have a big holiday. But at least August contains days that have been chosen as commemoratives. One such is Sisters’ Day, which might be celebrated by more sisters if they knew that it existed. Certainly Judy Turner (from A Chorus Line) should be […]

Last week, when I wrote about the cast album of Seven Come Eleven, I stressed its topicality. The 1961 nightclub revue mentioned The Peppermint Lounge, the Peace Corps, Mayor Wagner, civil rights, mononucleosis, The John Birch Society – all names that were then making the news. Revues have often been considered as here-and-now entertainments, never […]

Decades ago, I vowed to obtain each and every original cast album. That meant searching second-hand dives and thrift shops and making many clandestine trips downstairs to dingy basements in record stores. As a result, I was able to get most everything from The Athenian Touch to the bootleg Zenda. But there was one long-playing […]

So on July tenth, we’ll celebrate Jerry Herman’s eighty-second birthday. And what do we immediately think of when we think of Jerry Herman? Title songs, of course. Herman’s first four Broadway musicals had them: Milk and Honey, Hello, Dolly!, Mame and Dear World. Mame came close to having a different one; for a while, the […]

We’ve often heard the expression variously attributed to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Aby Warburg and Gustave Flaubert. But whichever of these men was the first to say it had a point. “God is in the details.” God has often blessed the Broadway musical, for (S)He has allowed many of its performers to leave their […]