Popular Broadway Songs [Youtbe Clips]

Tony Awards


This week the nominations for the 2019 Tony Awards were announced. Last year the pickings were slim. This year there were a lot of worthy contenders, which means that good productions and performances were inevitably going to get left out. But with a couple of exceptions the wealth was reasonably spread around.

Let's get to the nominations. (I am skipping over the plays and going straight to the musicals.)


Best musical
Ain't Too Proud — The Life and Times of the Temptations
Beetlejuice
Hadestown
The Prom
Tootsie

Best revival of a musical
Kiss Me, Kate
Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma!

Best book of a musical
Ain't Too Proud — The Life and Times of the Temptations, Dominique Morisseau
Beetlejuice, Scott Brown and Anthony King
Hadestown, Anaïs Mitchell
The Prom, Bob Martin and Chad Beguelin
Tootsie, Robert Horn

Best original score (music and/or lyrics) written for the theater
Be More Chill, music and lyrics: Joe Iconis
Beetlejuice, music and lyrics: Eddie Perfect
Hadestown, music and lyrics: Anaïs Mitchell
The Prom, music: Matthew Sklar lyrics: Chad Beguelin
To Kill a Mockingbird, music: Adam Guettel
Tootsie, music and lyrics: David Yazbek

Best performance by an actor in a leading role in a musical
Brooks Ashmanskas, The Prom
Derrick Baskin, Ain't Too Proud — The Life and Times of the Temptations
Alex Brightman, Beetlejuice
Damon Daunno, Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma!
Santino Fontana, Tootsie

Best performance by an actress in a leading role in a musical
Stephanie J. Block, The Cher Show
Caitlin Kinnunen, The Prom
Beth Leavel, The Prom
Eva Noblezada, Hadestown
Kelli O'Hara, Kiss Me, Kate

Best performance by an actor in a featured role in a musical
André De Shields, Hadestown
Andy Grotelueschen, Tootsie
Patrick Page, Hadestown
Jeremy Pope, Ain't Too Proud - The Life and Times of the Temptations
Ephraim Sykes, Ain't Too Proud — The Life and Times of the Temptations

Best performance by an actress in a featured role in a musical
Lilli Cooper, Tootsie
Amber Gray, Hadestown
Sarah Stiles, Tootsie
Ali Stroker, Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma!
Mary Testa, Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma!

Best direction of a musical
Rachel Chavkin, Hadestown
Scott Ellis, Tootsie
Daniel Fish, Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma!
Des McAnuff, Ain't Too Proud — The Life and Times of the Temptations
Casey Nicholaw, The Prom

Best choreography
Camille A. Brown, Choir Boy
Warren Carlyle, Kiss Me, Kate
Denis Jones, Tootsie
David Neumann, Hadestown
Sergio Trujillo, Ain't Too Proud — The Life and Times of the Temptations


Tony nominations by production
Hadestown - 14
Ain't Too Proud - The Life and Times of the Temptations - 12
Tootsie - 11
Beetlejuice - 8
Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma! - 8
The Prom - 7
Kiss Me, Kate - 4
The Cher Show - 3
King Kong - 3
Be More Chill - 1

Who Are These People???
Meet some of the 2019 Tony nominees.


Random Thoughts
Look at the bottom of that list - Be More Chill with one nomination - two fewer than King Kong. Obviously it didn't resonate with the Tony Nominators. Though, at least they got something - the future can't look bright for Pretty Woman.

I would say that Hadestown is the new front-runner. It is smart and has a very good score and is creative and original - things that Tony voters like to reward. It's followed closely by Tootsie, which is the movie adaption done incredibly well and, again, creatively. There are hardly any lines from the film in the musical and a lot of character changes were made. Oddly enough, both shows have been running for less than two weeks.

The Prom is a dark horse - but still in my opinion the best written show this season. It has a great book and (unlike Tootsie) a great score. But its been running since late summer so it may seem like old news at this point.

The Best Revival of a Musical category was a surprise - we didn't think we were going to get one. According the rules, there has to be at least three eligible shows to have the category - this year there were only two. Fortunately the committee was feeling generous because there really are two great revivals.

Tony Awards will be given out June 9.

Beetlejuice

The Tony campaigns are in full swing. Here is a 360 degree shoot of "That Beautiful Sound" from Beetlejuice, just to give you a feel for that production. The stars are Alex Brightman (School of Rock) and newcomer Sophia Ann Caruso.

Fosse / Verdon

Is anyone watching Fosse/Verdon? It is an eight show limited series on the FX cable network in the US. (I don't know if it is being broadcast elsewhere - but look for it on streaming services this summer.)

As you may know or have guessed, Fosse/Verdon is about the life and collaboration of Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon. They met doing Damn Yankees when Gwen was a star and Bib was a twice married choreographer. But they were married soon after, and though they separated in the 1970s, they never divorced and continued to be involved professionally.


They have shown four episodes so far and this is one of the best television series I have ever seen. Early episodes jumped back and forth in time, but the last two seem to be picking up a main story line moving through 70s - from Sweet Charity to Cabaret to Pippin, and tonight, I assume, on to Chicago and Lenny.

Sam Rockwell is doing a good job telling Bob Fosse's story, but it is Michelle Williams as Gwen Verdon that is a revelation. You completely lose the actress and are only aware of the character. In addition they don't hold back putting all the famous people Bob knew and worked with up on screen - most played by Broadway favorites.

If you are not that familiar with Gwen Verdon's work - here is a trailer from the recent doentary on her career.

(The preview of the doentary has been removed from YouTube.)

Liza With A Z

Ring Them Bells by John Kander and Fred Ebb from Liza With a Z

Here is Liza in her prime surrounded by some Bob Fosse brilliance.

The Pajama Game


Doris did many musicals for Warner Brothers in the 1950s, but one of the best was the film version of The Pajama Game. Warners brought the entire Broadway cast to Hollywood (along with fist-time choreographer Bob Fosse), except they put Doris in the Janice Paige role - Babe Williams, the feisty garment worker / labor organizer who falls for the plant manager in the pajama factory where they both work.

My Fair Lady


Here is Julie Andrews in a PR clip from the original Broadway production being directed by Moss Hart and singing "Just You Wait".

(The video has been removed from YouTube - but you can still find it on Daily Motion here.)

Hadestown

Tony Awards are this coming Sunday! Let's look at some of the nominees.

Hadestown is coming in with the most nominations and could take the Best Musical prize, as well as Best Score. But it is also nominated for its director (Rachel Chavkin) and its set design by Rachel Hauck. (Hadestown is the rare show that has an all-female creative team.)

Here is a look at it set which take the audience to the underworld, by way of Ancient Greece and New Orleans.

The Prom

The Prom is kind of the underdog this year, since it opened all the way back in November.

She may not have the name recognition of Liza or Patti, but Beth Leavel channels the essence of those Broadway divas in her performance as an aging theater actress operating out of her element in small town America. Beth's own career goes back to the original production of Gower Champion's 42nd Street, and she gathered rave reviews and fans in Mama Mia!, Elf: The Musical, and especially her Tony winning role as the title character in The Drowsy Chaperone.

Here she tries to win the high school principle over to her side using her talents for showbiz razzle dazzle.


Another standout performance (also Tony nominated) is Brooks Ashmanskas. Brooks's character of Barry is a gay (officially closeted - but fooling no one) musical theater actor. When he is asked to escort one of the young girls to the prom, it unleashes all the memories of him missing his own high school milestones.


The Prom and Tootsie are two of the funniest musicals to play on Broadway since Book of Mormon opened. They both have laughs and heart, while Tootsie has more laughs, The Prom has more heart.

Judy Garland

Tomorrow is the 50th Anniversary of the death of Judy Garland at 47 - an event that at the time seemed equal parts shock and inevitability. Judy's problems were legendary, yet she always seemed to bounce back with another triumphant comeback. Still, it is said that the New York Times had the headline "Judy Dies of Overdose" set in permanent type at the ready anticipating her sad end.

Here is a performance far from those final struggles, when Judy seemed capable of anything - from Girl Crazy her melancholy rendition of the Gershwins "But Not for Me".


Sometimes my mind reels through the things she could have accomplished has she been healthy and lived on. She would have been the perfect choice to lead 20th Century Fox's Hello Dolly! in 1969. We could have seen her tackle Sondheim - playing Desiree Armfeldt in A Little Night Music and singing "Send in the Clowns", or she would have been hilarious as Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd. And imagine her bringing down the house singing "I'm Still Here" in Follies.

Historians will always look for the threads between her death and the Stonewall Riots that broke out only a few days later - right after the public viewing held at Campbell's Funeral Home in Manhattan. Even before that her ties with the gay community were strong - to the point that "Friend of Dorothy" is still a known euphemism for "gay".

So today is a good day to remember - the joy, the talent, and the life of Garland. Who always seemed willing to pick up and move forward, no matter what life through at her.

I'll finish with this - less than two weeks after John Kennedy died, Judy added "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" as the final song in the taping of that week's episode of her TV show. It was a triumphant high at a very low time for America. It is one of the ways I will remember her.

Cats

It's here! This is what the new Cats movie will look like.

Hal Prince


"Producer-Director" is a hyphenate rarely seen - not since the likes of George M. Cohen and the great early 20th century theatrical managers. But Hal Prince seemed to wear it with ease.

He began his career with the legendary director George Abott, who trusted Prince (up to then a stage manger) to produce back-to-back hits The Pajama Game and Damn Yankees in 1954 and 1955. (He gave Bob Fosse his start as a choreographer in those shows, and then Fosse's first break as a director in New Girl in Town.) His career then reads like a list of the Golden Age of Broadway - West Side Story, Fiorello!, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, She Loves Me, and Fiddler on the Roof.

He hired himself to direct Cabaret - a show few people thought could work - and turned it in to something more daring than Broadway had ever seen.

In the 1970s he partnered with his friend since West Side Story days, Stephen Sondheim, for a string of musicals that redefined the form: Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, and Sweeney Todd.

The pair seemed invincible. They didn't always make money, but each show seemed to push the form past new artistic boundaries. I was in London working when their first musical of the 1980s opened - Merrily We Roll Along - a show about youthful idealism run amok. I made plans to see it when I got back to New York later in the year. But it didn't last past two weeks - the whole concept pretty much fell apart. (If you want to see the behind-the-scenes of that show find the doentary The Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened.) That was the end of the Sondheim-Prince partnership.

But they both went on to better shows. Sondheim did Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods with James Lapine, and Prince directed Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita and The Phantom of the Opera. So, yes, they both landed on their feet.


Two years ago Prince directed a Broadway retrospective of his work - The Prince of Broadway. (Click on the link to see the summary and the reviews.)

Hal Prince was a giant of the American Theater. Tonight all Broadway theaters will dim their lights in his honor.

Princes among men indeed!



Lucky to have lived on earth at the same time as them, as for politics which is verboten hereabout, I missed the FDR era by a long shot.

Good News: Director Richard Linkletter is filming the Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along

Bad News: You can't see it until 2040

Playbill reported yesterday that not only is a film version of Merrily We Roll Along being planned - it is already before the cameras starring Ben Platt, Beanie Feldstein, and Blake Jenner as the three best friends at the core of the story.


The musical looks at the lives and relationships of these three friends over a 20 year period from their optimistic youth to their emotionally burned out middle age. Or, rather from middle age to their youth because the story is famously told backwards.

Apparently, Linkletter has already wrapped filming the ending (!) with his three twentysomething stars. He will then follow his Boyhood model, and reassemble the cast every five or so years to film a new section of the movie over the next 20 years. The end effect will be rather than the cast aging naturally as in Boyhood, they will "youthen" as film marches into their past.

Golly! Linkletter is going to take the play's metaphor absolutely literally and I can't think of a better way to get the impact the show needs than to literally see the actors cast off the actual physical years. It's the aspect of the show that has never quite worked on stage. Either the actors were too young in middle age and looked like kids playing dress up (as in the original production), or they were older actors who had the appropriate gravitas for the beginning, but looked silly and unbelievable when it came to the ending as young adults.

I just hope I'm alive to see it.

Here are some previous posts that have to do with Merrily.

• Six by Sondheim - HBO Doentary
• Best Broadway Musical Overture - Scroll down to find the kick-ass Merrily overture - one of the only shows for which Sondheim wrote one.

King and I

Bartlett Sher's revival of Rogers and Hammerstein's The King and I with Kelli O'Hara was mounted at Lincoln Center in New York in 2015. Most of the cast transferred to London in 2017 where it was filmed for broadcast.

Jerry Herman, RIP

My favorite Jerry Herman song is the beautiful "Marianne" from The Grand Tour. Here it is sung by Michael Feinstein (with Jerry Herman himself at the piano!)


My head is spinning. This is one last cruel blow as the decade winds down.

Jerry is from that generation of Broadway songwriters that struggled for recognition and success in the late 50s and broke through with their own creations in the 1960s (along with Kander & Ebb and Sondheim). And in the 60s no one reached a higher pinnacle of success than Herman. His back to back blockbusters (Dolly and Mame) pushed him into such rarefied company as Rogers & Hammerstein and Irving Berlin.

But my favorite Herman scores are from the 1970s when he did Mack & Mabel with Robert Preston & Bernadette Peters and The Grand Tour with Joel Grey. True, there were problems with both those shows, but 10 years earlier they would have run just on the quality of the score and the performances.

He had his renaissance with La Cage in the 80s and another in the 2000s when Wall-E rediscovered his simple and optimistic tunes.


Jerry Herman, diagnosed with AIDS in 1985, miraculously survived his partner Martin and the many friends who did not last until newer drugs were developed in the late 1990s.

He lived to see Dolly return as a top ticket on Broadway, but I don't think he was ever well enough to make the trip up from Florida to see it. And when Bette and Bernadette and Donna sang "It's so nice to be back home where I belong" - I think they were singing it for Jerry.

A Chorus Line

Barbra Streisand directs Anne Hathaway and Daisy Ridley in their trio "At The Ballet" from Marvin Hamlish's A Chorus Line for Barbra's Encores album.


And here is the final track.

The King and I

The Rogers & Hammerstein Organization has produced another in their series of pop version of songs from R&H musicals. This is the beautiful ballad from The King and I "Something Wonderful" given to Broadway star Gavin Creel with a bit of a gay twist.

There's a fresh article about Cole Porter written by Adam Gopnik in the current issue of The New Yorker for anyone interested

Cole Porter

Speaking of Cole Porter, Harry Connick Jr was just on Broadway with his Cole Porter themed concert. If you are interested he has taken the show on tour in the US.