Broadway Musicals Quotes

I've heard it said that people come into our lives for a reason Bringing something we must learn And we are led to those who help us most to grow If we let them and we help them in return.

Some things I cannot change, but 'til I try I'll never know.

Look around, look around at how lucky we are to be alive right now.

The heart may freeze, or it can burn. The pain will ease and I can learn. There is no future, there is no past. I live this moment as, my last.

It's just life, so keep dancing through.

Those who don't try never look foolish.

Cause getting your dreams It's strange, but it seems A little -- well -- complicated There's a kind of a sort of : cost There's a couple of things get : lost There are bridges you cross You didn't know you crossed Until you've crossed.

....Everyone deserves a chance to fly!

Don't wish. Don't Start. Wishing only wounds the heart.

What grinds me the most is we're sending kids out into the world who don't know how to balance a checkbook, don't know how to apply for a loan, don't even know how to properly fill out a job application, but because they know the quadratic formula we consider them prepared for the world` With that said, I'll admit even I can see how looking at the equation x -3 = 19 and knowing x =22 can be useful. I'll even say knowing x =7 and y= 8 in a problem like 9x - 6y= 15 can be helpful. But seriously, do we all need to know how to simplify (x-3)(x-3i)?? And the joke is, no one can continue their education unless they do. A student living in California cannot get into a four-year college unless they pass Algebra 2 in high school. A future psychologist can't become a psychologist, a future lawyer can't become a lawyer, and I can't become a journalist unless each of us has a basic understanding of engineering. Of course, engineers and scientists use this shit all the time, and I applaud them! But they don't take years of theater arts appreciation courses, because a scientist or an engineer doesn't need to know that 'The Phantom of the Opoera' was the longest-running Broadway musical of all time. Get my point?

No, you're wrong. I'm a hundred percent callow and deeply shallow.

Life doesn't discriminate Between the sinners and the saints It takes and it takes and it takes And we keep living anyway We rise and we fall and we break And we make our mistakes

I am the one thing in life I can control. I am inimitable. I am an original

Let the green girl go!

(Questlove) Is this the most revolutionary thing to happen to Broadway, or the most revolutionary thing to happen to hip-hop?

Popular, You're gonna be Popular! I'll teach you the proper ploys when you talk to boys! Little ways to flirt and flounce! I'll show you what shoes to wear, how to fix your hair, everything that really counts, to be POPULAR!!

Excuse me, there's no pretense here. I happen to be genuinely self-absorbed and deeply shallow.

And you find some way to survive And you find out you don't have to be happy at all.. To be happy you're alive.

GLINDA: Well,I'm a public figure now! People expect me to-- ELPHABA: Lie? GLINDA: (fiercely) Be encouraging! And what exactly have you been doing? Besides riding on around on that filthy thing! ELPHABA: Well, we can't all come and go by bubble. Whose invention was that, the Wizard's? Of course, even if it wasn't, I'm sure he'd still take credit for it. GLINDA: Yes, well, a lot of us are taking things that don't belong to us, aren't we? Uh oh! The two stare daggers at each other, then... ELPHABA: Now, wait just a clock-tick. I know it's difficult for that blissful blonde brain of yours to comprehend that someone like him could actually choose someone like me!But it's happened. It's real. And you can wave that ridiculous wand all you want, you can't change it! He never belonged to you -- he doesn't love you, he never did! He loves me!

And Goodness knows The Wicked's lives are lonely Goodness knows The Wicked die alone

You pile up enough tomorrows, and you'll find you are left with nothing but a lot of empty yesterdays.

I've heard it said that people come into our lives for a reason bringing something we must learn. And we are led to those who help us most to grow if we let them, and we help them in return. Well, I don't know if I believe that's true, but I know I'm who I am today because I knew you...

I missed the anonymity-the ability to run to the market without running into my third-grade teacher. I missed the nightlife-the knowledge that if I wanted to, there was always an occasion to get dressed up and head out for dinner and drinks. I missed the restaurants-the Asian, the Thai, the Italian the Indian. I was already tired of mashed potatoes and canned green beans. I missed the culture- the security that comes from being on the touring schedule of the major Broadway musicals. I missed the shopping-the funky boutiques, the eclectic shops, the browsing. I missed the city.

Motormouth: So this is love? Well, love is a gift and a lot of people forget that. So you two better brace yourselves for a whole lot of ugly coming your way on a never ending train of stupid. Penny: So you met my mom?

I'm in love with New York. It matches my mood. I'm not overwhelmed. It is the suitable scene for my ever ever heightened life. I love the proportions, the amplitude, the brilliance, the polish, the solidity. I look up at Radio City insolently and love it. It's all great, and Babylonian. Broadway at night. Cellophane. The newness. The vitality. True, it is only physical. But it's inspiring. Just bring your own contents, and you create a sparkle of the highest power. I'm not moved, not speechless. I stand straight, tough and I meet the impact. I feel the glow and the dancing in everything. The radio music in the taxis, scientific magic, which can all be used lyrically. That's my last word. Give New York to a poet. He can use it. It can be poetized. Or maybe that's mania of mine, to poetize. I live lightly, smoothly, actively, ears or eyes wide open, alert, oiled! I feel the glow and the dancing in every thing and the tempo is like that of my blood. I'm at once beyond, over and in New York, tasting it fully.

Most convicted felons are just people who were not taken to museums or Broadway musicals as children.

Elphaba: "I just wish ..." Fiyero: "What?" Elphaba: "I wish I could be beautiful ... for you." Fiyero: "Elphaba ..." Elphaba: "Don't tell me that I am. You don't need to lie to me." Fiyero: "It's not lying! It's looking at things another way.

while in Manhattan the buses ran on time, the lights never went out, the death of a single white child in a traffic accident was a page one story, while phony versions of black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich—West Side Story, Porgy & Bess, Purlie Victorious—and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.

The most interesting of the classic movie genres to me are the indigenous ones: the Western, which was born on the Frontier, the Gangster Film, which originated in the East Coast cities, and the Musical, which was spawned by Broadway. They remind me of jazz: they allowed for endless, increasingly complex, sometimes perverse variations. When these variations were played by the masters, they reflected the changing times; they gave you fascinating insights into American culture and the American psyche.

Both: "There's been some confusion for you see my roommate is ..." Galinda: "Unusually and exceedingly peculiar and altogether quite impossible to describe." Elphaba: "... Blonde.

There were birds in the sky, but I never saw them winging, No I never saw them at all, Until there was you.

Raise a glass to freedom something they can never take away, no matter what they tell you.

What would Samuel Becket say if he knew that Broadway musicals are all that survived of the theatre world?

You bottoms have to turn everything into a Broadway musical.

Will you join in our crusade? Who will be strong and stand with me? Somewhere beyond the barricade Is there a world you long to see? Do you hear the people sing? Say, do you hear the distant drums? It is the future that they bring When tomorrow comes!

Fiyero: "Why is it that every time I see you, you're causing some sort of commotion?" Elphaba: "I don't cause commotions, I am one." Fiyero: "That's for sure." Elphaba: "Oh! So you think I should just keep my mouth shut! Is that what you're saying?" Fiyero: "No, I'm ..." Elphaba: "Do you think I want to be this way? Do you think I want to care this much? Don't you know how much easier my life would be if I didn't?" Fiyero: "Do you ever let anyone else talk?" Elphaba: "Oh, sorry ... But can I just say one more thing? You could have just walked away back there." Fiyero: "So?" Elphaba: "So, no matter how shallow and self-absorbed you tend to be ..." Fiyero: "Excuse me, there's no pretense here. I happen to be genuinely self-absorbed and deeply shallow." Elphaba: "No you're not. Or you wouldn't be so unhappy.

The comparison might strike you as farfetched. What (you might be asking) can a Broadway musical possibly add to the legacy of a Founding Father--a giant of our national life, a war hero, a scholar, a statesman? What's one little play, or even one very big play, next to all that? But there is more than one way to change the world . To secure their freedom, the polyglot American colonists had to come together, and stick together, in the face of enormous adversity. To live in a new way, they first had to think and feel in a new way. It took guns and ships to win the American Revolution, but it also required pamphlets and speeches--and at least one play.

When Thomas left, it was with the feeling of a summer romance—a trinket that I could take out and examine for the rest of my life, the same way I might save a seashell from a beach vacation or the ticket from my first Broadway musical.

BEHOLD THE FIELD IN WHICH I GROW MY F*CKS, LAY THINE EYES UPON IT AND SEE THAT IT IS BARREN.

Well, we can't all come and go by bubble!

And if I'm flying solo At least I'm flying free

Because isn’t that what eternity is? It’s your own high school. Where the good girls are always good, the stupid boys are always stupid, the marching band always plays some lame tribute to whatever Broadway musical was big twenty-five years ago...

It reminded him of the Sound of Music. Myron liked the ole Julie Andrews musical well enough. who didn't? but he always found one song particularly dumb. One of the classics, actually. My Favorite Things. The song made no sense. Ask a zillion people to list their absolute favorite things, and how many of them are going to list doorbells for crying out loud. You know what, Milly, I love doorbells. To hell with strolling on a quiet beach, or reading a great book, or making love or seeing a broadway musical. Doorbells, Milly, doorbells really punch my ticket. Sometimes I just run up to people's houses and press their doorbells and, well, I think i am man enough to admit I shutter.

THERE are so many things which are impossible to explain! Why should certain chords in music make me think of the brown and golden tints of autumn foliage? Why should the Mass of Sainte-Cécile send my thoughts wandering among caverns whose walls blaze with ragged masses of virgin silver? What was it in the roar and turmoil of Broadway at six o'clock that flashed before my eyes the picture of a still Breton forest where sunlight filtered through spring foliage, and Sylvia bent, half curiously, half tenderly, over a small, green lizard, murmuring, "To think that this also is a little ward of God?

What?" "Nothing, it's just ... you've been 'Galinda-fied'. You don't have to do that, you know?

Because happy is what happens when all your dreams come true! Well ... isn't it?

us.

I don’t want to start a riot I don’t want to blaze a trail

We did it,” Barry says, so quiet it’s almost a whisper. Then he leaps up and shouts into the other room. “Dee Dee! Non-equity cast of Godspell! We did it! Emma’s going to the prom!

I ain't sayin' I'm no better than anybody else, but I'll be damned if I ain't just as good!

A hookup is no more of a commitment than jacking yourself off. It’s convenient, easy and you can go back to watching your collection of Broadway musicals when you’re done.

I know, I should've just shut him down like a Broadway Musical, but that's just not the way I'm wired.

In January 2006, Phantom of The Opera broke the record for the longest-running show in Broadway history, overtaking Cats and reminding us what real entertainment is about: candles, dry ice, big hair, and the sort of synthesized chord progressions only achieved by a collapse at the keyboard.

Rarely offstage, rarely on hiatus, Fiddler on the Roof has already been back on Broadway for four revivals, played London's West End four times, and remains among Broadway's longest-running shows ever.

I'm through accepting limits 'cause someone says they're so. Some things I cannot change but 'till I try I'll never know. Too long I've been afraid of losing love, I guess I've lost. Well, if that's love, it comes at much too high a cost. I'd sooner buy defying gravity.

And there they stayed, a sole phenomenon in the Republic of Brooklyn, where cats hollered like people, dogs ate their own feces, aunties chain-smoked and died at age 102, a kid named Spike Lee saw God, the ghosts of the departed Dodgers soaked up all possibility of new hope, and penniless desperation ruled the lives of the suckers too black or too poor to leave, while in Manhattan the buses ran on time, the lights never went out, the death of a single white child in a traffic accident was a page one story, while phony versions of black and Latino life ruled the Broadway roost, making white writers rich—West Side Story, Porgy & Bess, Purlie Victorious—and on it went, the whole business of the white man’s reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.

When Northwestern and Stanford researchers analyzed the networks that give rise to creative triumph, they found what they deemed a “universal” setup. Whether they looked at research groups in economics or ecology, or the teams that write, compose, and produce Broadway musicals, thriving ecosystems had porous boundaries between teams.

Angelica! (work, work) Eliza! (work, work) And Peggy!

I will kill you friends and family, to remind you of my love. Da-da da-da da, da-da da-da dai-da-da, da-da da da dai da da...

Catch me I'm falling. Please hear me calling. Catch me before it's too late!

Es más de lo que nunca me atreví a desear; es algo épico, donde hay lugar para todo el mundo.

One day you’ll both need my sympathy and will I be there? Probably.

The making of In The Heights was joyful, rich, rewarding, and full of life, much like the show itself.

USNAVI So, did you kick some college ass? NINA I got mine handed to me on a silver platter.

YOU ARE GONNA CHANGE THE WORLD AND THEN WE’RE ALL GONNA BRAG AND SAY, “WE KNEW HER WHEN!” THIS WAS YOUR HOME.

(BENNY finds NINA , grabs her. They kiss, illuminated by fireworks.)

KEVIN I’m sorry. CAMILA Huh. DAMN RIGHT YOU’RE SORRY.

VANESSA, FORGET ABOUT WHAT COULDA BEEN. DANCE WITH ME, ONE LAST NIGHT, IN THE HOOD AGAIN.

I WISH I WAS MAD— (She kisses him.) I’M JUST TOO LATE.

Poor guy's head is spinning!

He doesn't comment on any of the music I play: Sonny Rollins followed by AC/DC followed by the Broadway score from My Fair Lady.

In 2005, The Color Purple became a phenomenally successful Broadway musical, playing to packed houses every night for over a year. In the process it transformed the “Great White Way” into a place where people of all colors, orientations and identities gathered to experience the show and to celebrate “God” as Life and Love, Perseverance, Hope, Creativity and Joy.

Stop being fake and start being real. Start being real with the people around you, and start being real with God. Churches are not Broadway musicals where we can play the role of a Christian. You may think that you can play a role with people and get away with it, but I tell you today that you can't play that role with God. He sees through your plastic smiles and fake veneers.

Fiyero: "Why is it that every time I see you, you're causing some sort of commotion?" Elphaba: "I don't cause commotions. I am one." Fiyero: "That's for sure." Elphaba: "Oh! So you think I should just keep my mouth shut! Is that what you're saying?" Fiyero: "No, I'm ..." Elphaba: "Do you think I want to be this way? Do you think I want to care this much? Don't you know how much easier my life would be if I didn't?" Fiyero: "Do you ever let anyone else talk?" Elphaba: "Oh, sorry ... But can I just say one more thing? You could have just walked away back there." Fiyero: "So?" Elphaba: "So, no matter how shallow and self-absorbed you pretend to be ..." Fiyero: "Excuse me, there's no pretense here. I happen to be genuinely self-absorbed and deeply shallow." Elphaba: "No, you're not. Or you wouldn't be so unhappy.

The universe does not give me meaning. I give meaning to the universe. This is my cosmic vocation. I have no fixed destiny or dharma. If I find myself in Simba’s or Arjuna’s shoes, I can choose to fight for the crown of a kingdom, but I don’t have to. I can just as well join a wandering circus, go to Broadway to sing in a musical, or move to Silicon Valley and launch a start-up. I am free to create my own dharma.

It spoke to every demographic and every age group—it was the kind of show a fifteen-year-old could go to with her friend and have one experience, and then take her grandmother to see and have an altogether different one.

SONNY Uh, my cousin over there with his tongue hanging out, has been meaning to ask you … VANESSA Yes? SONNY What a lady such as yourself might be doing tonight? VANESSA Does your cousin dance? SONNY Like a drunk Chita Rivera.

It is a bad musical, but, like a bad lay, a bad musical can still do its job perfectly well. By the end, Arthur Less is in tears, sobbing in his seat, and he thinks he has been sobbing quietly until the lights come up and the woman seated beside him turns and says, “Honey, I don’t know what happened in your life, but I am so so sorry,” and gives him a lilac-scented embrace. Nothing happened to me, he wants to say to her. Nothing happened to me. I’m just a homosexual at a Broadway show.

From time to time the Chief of Staff, the President, and so on, dressed in sequins and feathers, will entertain the leaders, i.e., the perverts, of all the other countries at balls and parties. Quarrels of any sort could easily be straightened out in the men’s room of the redecorated United Nations. Ballets and Broadway musicals and entertainments of that sort will flourish everywhere and will probably make the common folk happier than did the grim, hostile, fascistic pronouncements of their former leaders.

One common thread ran through the comments: everybody loathes Ticketmaster, for assorted reasons, with the wonderful diversity that makes our country so vibrant. If James Bond movies and other international thrillers weary of their casts of modern stock villains—drug dealers, terrorists, polluting corporations—Ticketmaster is waiting in the wings, universally despised. And if such a movie proved incredibly popular and were then transmuted into a hit Broadway musical, Ticketmaster itself could scalp—sorry, resell—tickets to it.

My mother owns the Drama Queen bookstore in the theatre district and has the Midas touch when it comes to producing off-Broadway gay theatre. Her most recent success was with the all-male musical Oklahomo! The entire cast was clad in tight leather overalls or fringed chaps.

We did get out and walk around on the Strip. Jep, Miss Kay, and I posed for a picture with one of those big, painted picture with face cutouts--Jep was Elvis in the middle, and Miss Kay and I were the showgirls in bikinis with tropical fruit hats. We also splurged and went to see Phantom of the Opera. It was my first time going to a Broadway-style musical, and I loved it. I could relate to struggling to find true love. We did a little bit of gambling and card playing, and I remember visiting a Wild West town, right outside the city. Mostly, though, Jep and I were kind of boring our first year of marriage. All we wanted to do was stay home and spend time together.

YES! MAYBE YOU’RE RIGHT, SONNY. CALL IN THE CORONERS! MAYBE WE’RE POWERLESS, A CORNER FULL OF FOREIGNERS. MAYBE THIS NEIGHBORHOOD’S CHANGING FOREVER MAYBE TONIGHT IS OUR LAST NIGHT TOGETHER, HOWEVER! HOW DO YOU WANNA FACE IT? DO YOU WANNA WASTE IT, WHEN THE END IS SO CLOSE YOU CAN TASTE IT? YOU COULD CRY WITH YOUR HEAD IN THE SAND. I’M A-FLY THIS FLAG THAT I GOT IN MY HAND!

The Broadway incarnation of In The Heights began previews at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on February 14, 2008, almost five years to the day when I had seen the reading in the basement of the Drama Book Shop, and a little over eight years since Lin first presented the material at his twentieth birthday party in his parents’ house in Inwood, the neighborhood just north of Washington Heights where he grew up.

Long ago, when New York City was affordable, people who felt they didn’t fit into the mainstream could take a chance and head there from wherever they were. Bob Dylan came east from Minnesota in the winter of 1961 and made his way downtown to Greenwich Village. Like countless others before him, he came to shed the constricted definition of his birthplace and the confinement of his past. I first saw Bob at Gerde’s Folk City, the Italian bar and restaurant cum music venue on the corner of Mercer and West Fourth Streets, one block west of Broadway and a few blocks east of Washington Square Park. Bob was playing back-up harmonica for various musicians and as a duo with another folksinger, Mark Spoelstra, before he played sets by himself. Mark played the twelve string guitar and had a melodious singing voice. Bob’s raspy voice and harmonica added a little dimension to the act. Their repertoire consisted of traditional folk songs and the songs of Woody Guthrie. They weren’t half bad. Bob was developing his image into his own version of a rambling troubadour, in the Guthrie mode.

Recently, I was in New York with most of the Robertson family promoting the season-four premiere of Duck Dynasty. We were staying at the Trump International Hotel, which is a really nice place near Central Park. I was already uncomfortable being in the big city. I don’t like traffic or concrete, and there are a lot of both in New York. After we checked in, we gathered downstairs to go to a Broadway musical show. I know it might seem bizarre for me to be going to a musical, but my very attractive wife can be mightily persuasive, especially when I have nothing else to do. As we were waiting or the others in the lobby, I asked a doorman if there was a nearby bathroom. He gave me directions to the nearest restroom, which included a walk through the hotel restaurant. As I entered the restaurant, a well-dressed staffer offered his assistance. I informed him I was only going to the restroom. But he very nicely continued to offer assistance and took the role of my escort, which I thought was quite courteous and professional. At his direction, we took a quick left turn and walked out of the hotel. Befuddled, I asked him, “Where is the bathroom?” He painted down the street or maybe toward Central Park and said, “Good luck to you, sir. Have a nice day.” I circled back around to the main entrance of the hotel, where I found Missy, who had witnessed the entire episode. “I thought you had to go to the bathroom,” she said. I laughed and told her I had been escorted out of the hotel because of the way I looked. It was no big deal to us, and I laughed about the incident later that night with my family over dinner. I shared the story the next day with Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan on Live! with Kelly and Michael because I thought it was funny. Well, the story went viral and was all over the news and Internet the next few days. My phone wouldn’t stop ringing and various media outlets were trying to contact me. I’d jokingly labeled the incident “facial profiling” because in my mind that’s exactly what it was. People were surprised that it didn’t bother me, but my family and I have endured those kinds of things our entire lives. I figured the hotel employee was only trying to protect other hotel guests. The incident culminated with a call from Donald Trump’s office. They offered an apology for any inconvenience. I assured them that no apology was needed, and I asked them not to punish my courteous escort.

After witnessing the pogrom, one of the best-known Jewish authors of the twentieth century, Sholem Aleichem, left the city and the country for faraway New York. Anticipation of a pogrom became a major theme in his last story about Tevye the Dairyman. The subject is also prominent in those of his stories on which the Broadway classic Fiddler on the Roof is based. In both the story and the musical, the city policeman is sympathetic to the Jews. That was true of some policemen, but many stood by during the pogroms, encouraging the violence. That seems to have been the case in Kyiv. By the time the police took action against the perpetrators of the pogrom, it had been going on for two days.

threatened at first to overwhelm the lighter soprano instrument of Michelle. Elliot learned to control the instrument in the ensemble, but never relinquished what has been described as her “let it all hang out vitality.”[70] The particular gifts of her voice were in no danger of being stifled, and throughout her career with earlier bands through the post-Mamas and Papas years, her “distinctive voice always emerged from the group in which she sang.”[71] Interested in a variety of genres, Elliot often mentioned her love for classical music, and had appeared regularly as a jazz singer before being drawn into the hippie folk revolution. A Broadway devotee as well, she sang several prominent roles in residence and on tour, and even dueled Barbra Streisand to a near draw for an important role in I Can Get It for You Wholesale on Broadway, before being

When we walk to church on Sunday morning down Broadway,” her mother said, cheeks red in her light brown skin, “you see the dirty men with their shirts all out their pants, drinking the devil’s liquor and stinking to high heaven when good people are going to church. Do you know what they’ve been doing all night?” “No, ma’am.” She did know, because now this discipline had wound its way down the hills away from the music and into a familiar body, and Jennifer was well acquainted with its currents and undertow. She knew all about the good-for-nothing niggers who passed bottles back and forth and were an eyesore. But it seemed best to feign ignorance. “Staying up all night drinking and listening to music like this!” her mother screeched. “Because they are good-for-nothing niggers who don’t care about making a better life for themselves. They want to stay up all night and carry on and pretend that just because they don’t have to pick cotton they have no more duties to attend to. We can’t do anything about good-for-nothing niggers who don’t want to take their place in America, but we can watch ourselves.

Helene Hanff, an aspiring playwright who had been put to work in the Theatre Guild press office, remembered trying to generate some effective publicity for Away We Go! “This was, they told us, the damndest musical ever thought up for a sophisticated Broadway audience,” Hanff wrote. “It was so pure you could put it on at a church social. It opened with a middle-aged farm woman sitting alone on a bare stage churning butter, and from then on it got cleaner.”16 It was the kind of Americana that Larry Hart distrusted. But at the New Haven tryout he tried to keep an open mind. Of the songs in Away We Go!’s first act, five of them—“Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” “Many a New Day,” “People Will Say We’re in Love,” and “Out of My Dreams”—were destined to become instant classics, with “All Er Nuthin’” and “Oklahoma!” delighting the audience in the second act. But Larry wasn’t so delighted. He might have regarded “We know we belong to the land” as a professionally crafted line, as resonant to recent immigrants as to Mayflower descendants; but “The land we belong to is grand”?

New York is a city of eight million people, approximately seven million of whom will be furious when they hear you were in town and didn’t meet them for an expensive dinner, five million furious you didn’t visit their new baby, three million furious you didn’t see their new show, one million furious you didn’t call for sex, but only five actually available to meet you. It is completely reasonable to call none of them. You could instead sneak off to a terrible, treacly Broadway show that you will never admit you paid two hundred dollars to see. This is what Less does on his first night, eating a hot dog dinner to make up for the extravagance. You cannot call it a guilty pleasure when the lights go down and the curtain goes up, when the adolescent heart begins to beat along with the orchestra, not when you feel no guilt. And he feels none; he feels only the shiver of delight when there is nobody around to judge you. It is a bad musical, but, like a bad lay, a bad musical can still do its job perfectly well. By the end, Arthur Less is in tears, sobbing in his seat, and he thinks he has been sobbing quietly until the lights come up and the woman seated beside him turns and says, “Honey, I don’t know what happened in your life, but I am so so sorry,” and gives him a lilac-scented embrace. Nothing happened to me, he wants to say to her. Nothing happened to me. I’m just a homosexual at a Broadway show

Based on a 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, Merrily We Roll Along tells the story of three friends—Franklin Shepard, a composer; Charley Kringas, a playwright and lyricist; and Mary Flynn, a novelist—who meet in the enthusiasm of youth, when everything seems possible. The play traces what happens to their dreams and goals as time passes and they are faced with life’s surprises, travails, successes, and disappointments. The trick here is that the play moves chronologically backward. It begins on an evening in 1976 at a party for the opening of a movie Frank has produced. The movie is apparently a hit, but Frank’s personal life is a mess. His second wife, Gussie, formerly a Broadway star, was supposed to have starred in the movie but was deemed too old; she resents being in the shadows and suspects, correctly, that Frank is having an affair with the young actress who took over her part. Frank is estranged from his son from his first marriage. He is also estranged from Charley, his former writing partner—so estranged, in fact, that the very mention of his name brings the party to an uncomfortable standstill. Mary, unable to re-create the success of her one and only novel and suffering from a longtime unreciprocated love for Frank, has become a critic and a drunk; the disturbance she causes at the party results in a permanent break with Frank. The opening scene reaches its climax when Gussie throws iodine in the eyes of Frank’s mistress. The ensemble, commenting on the action much like the Greek chorus in Allegro, reprises the title song, asking, “How did you get to be here? / What was the moment?” (F 387). The play then moves backward in time as it looks for the turning points, the places where multiple possibilities morphed into narrative necessity.

Their tumultuous love story was adapted into the 1974 Broadway musical Mack & Mabel. * Peeping Pete was released on June 23, 1913, with A Bandit; they are the oldest surviving Arbuckle movies. * Custard tended to break up in flight, and it faded into the background when shot in monochrome, so later pies consisted of blackberries and whipped cream—a concoction local bakeries readily learned to devise.

We see this even more in Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (1954), with Mercer again at MGM, collaborating with composer Gene De Paul. This one has a real Broadway score, every number embedded in the characters’ attitudes. Ragged, bearded, buckskinned Howard Keel has come to town to take a wife, and a local belle addresses him as “Backwoodsman”: it’s the film’s central image, of rough men who must learn to be civilized in the company of women. The entire score has that flavor—western again, rustic, primitive, lusty. “Bless Yore Beautiful Hide,” treating Keel’s tour of the Oregon town where he seeks his bride, sounds like something Pecos Bill wrote with Calamity Jane. When the song sheet came out, the tune was marked “Lazily”—but that isn’t how Keel sings it. He’s on the hunt and he wants results, and, right in the middle of the number, he spots Jane Powell chopping wood and realizes that he has found his mate. But he hasn’t, not yet. True, she goes with him, looking forward to love and marriage. But her number, “Wonderful, Wonderful Day,” warns us that she is of a different temperament than he: romantic, vulnerable, poetic. They don’t suit each other, especially when he incites his six brothers to snatch their intended mates. Not court them: kidnap them. “Sobbin’ Women” (a pun on the Sabine Women of the ancient Roman legend, which the film retells, via a story by Stephen Vincent Benét) is the number outlining the plan, in more of Keel’s demanding musical tone. But the six “brides” are horrified. Their number, in Powell’s pacifying tone, is “June Bride,” and the brothers in turn offer “Lament” (usually called “Lonesome Polecat”), which reveals that they, too, have feelings. That—and the promise of good behavior—shows that they at last deserve their partners, whereupon each brother duets with each bride, in “Spring, Spring, Spring.” And we note that this number completes the boys’ surrender, in music that gives rather than takes. Isn’t

In fact, there were no movie stars in view, though Finian himself was a talent star, one of the last of the Golden Age, Fred Astaire. He hadn’t filmed a musical since Silk Stockings, in 1957, but it was a frustrating return, for Astaire felt Coppola had no feeling for the form. And Coppola didn’t—not the form of musical Astaire was used to making. For instance, some of the show’s many dance sequences became choreography by other means—a festive picnic with a tug-of-war and other contests for “If This Isn’t Love.” Then, too, Astaire was working with his old RKO assistant, Hermes Pan, who was suddenly fired from the picture, offending Astaire’s deep-rooted sense of loyalty—to his profession, to the great songwriters who had made songs on him, and to his colleagues. Still, the movie flows along nicely with a likable confidence, not easy to bring off when the plot takes in a pot of gold that grants wishes.

Not only could it have been a significant commercial disaster, West Side Story could very well have been one of the worst musicals ever written. Our familiarity with the work makes it difficult to imagine the dubious qualities of the original concept: based on a regional and topical subject which would become quickly dated, exploiting a Hispanic musical style which was already overused and stereotyped, and written by four privileged middle-class men who, as Sondheim drily put it, “had never even met a Puerto Rican,” this dark and tragic Broadway show about working-class juvenile delinquents would neither

A 2010 Los Angeles Opera production of Wagner’s Ring Cycle cost $31 million to produce.24 Broadway shows don’t usually cost that much, unless you’re talking about the recent Spider-Man debacle. U2’s last concert-tour budget might be in that range, but those were stadium shows attracting huge numbers of people. And in those latter two instances, the people who wrote the music are still alive, and presumably they get paid a piece out of every ticket sold, which is part of what keeps those production costs up. Wagner has been dead for a long time, so one assumes it’s not his agent who is charging the moon and driving up the cost of these Ring productions. (Granted, it is a four-part epic.) The Los Angeles Opera ended up with a $6 million deficit due to “slack demand for expensive tickets.

Wrestling can be ANYTHING. It’s everything. It’s world-class athletes. It’s Broadway, Shakespeare, summer blockbusters, best-selling novels, soap operas, high art. It’s nobodies from nowhere finding a way to say to the world: “Fuck you!” It’s entertainment, it’s movies, it’s music. … It’s EVERYTHING.

Garlock, you might have thought, had taken the Christian opposition to Rock as far as anyone could: “Bringing racism into his attack, Garlock noted that rock had its roots in the music of Africa, South America, and India, places he said where voodoo, sex orgies, human sacrifices, and devil worship abounded. Garlock linked some rock performers with Satan.”17 Yet, even further excesses of abuse on the theme of Rock-as-Satanic have followed as the years have passed. Possibly the craziest is Jacob Aranza’s claims that “75 percent of the rock and roll today (top 10 stuff!) deals with sex, evil, drugs, and the occult.” And that this is all part of a decades’ long, four step plan, “Satan’s Agenda”, to “pronounce rock stars as messiahs”.18 Jeff Godwin took this even further: “The Lord has also revealed to some Christians that incarnate demons from the netherworld actually are members of some of the most popular bands.”19 Converts are famous for their zeal, and as early as 1957 one celebrated rock’n’roller turned on the music that had propelled him to fame when he found religion. Richard Wayne Penniman, better known as Little Richard, stopped playing rock’n’roll and began to preach against it: “I was in the eighth grade at San Diego Adventist Elementary School, his conversion touched my life. Little Richard arrived at our school with an entourage of about three black limousines and a staff of personal assistants in black suits. He spoke in chapel, then preached Sabbath morning in a local church (probably San Diego 31st Street), then spoke and sang in the afternoon for a standing-room-only Associated MV (AY) meeting at the old San Diego Broadway church.

Verse speakers and opera singers could learn a great deal if they listen to all forms of popular music from Billie Holiday to Edith Piaf, where the passion, the feeling, the intonation, the tempo all arise from the word. In Broadway jargon, this is called ‘reading’ a song. I once asked Richard Rodgers, composer of Oklahoma! and countless other musicals, whether he had a stash of melodies in a top drawer, waiting to be used. ‘Of course not!’ he said. ‘I need the words.’ Like every composer of songs, it is the words that are proposed by a lyric that awaken the tune”.