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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 […]

You know the expression “to dot the i’s and cross the t’s” – the one that describes utter thoroughness? With the publication of The Complete Lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner from Oxford University Press, editors Dominic McHugh and Amy Asch have done such a meticulous job that the expression must be expanded. These two have […]

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 […]