Blog

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 […]

A couple of weeks ago, I trumpeted the Tony-winning musicals that can be heard thanks to Masterworks Broadway. And how about Tony-LOSERS in the Best Musicals category? These have been on my mind because of – here comes some shameless self-promotion – my new book called Strippers, Showgirls, and Sharks: a Very Opinionated History of […]

“You’re the one who chose Alan Alda’s entrance music, aren’t you?” So said many people to me after I’d hosted The 69th Annual Theatre World Awards on June 3. Whenever a presenter or awardee sauntered onto the Music Box stage, our expert pianist/musical director Jason DeBord would play a song that was associated with the […]