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A history of the American musical theatre in YouTube videos. For shows after 1999, see our other list at http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBD4E07E631D7D06A

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Highlights From "City of Angels" at Goodspeed Opera House

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City of Angels - It Needs Work - Original London Cast

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Such tricks are brilliantly abetted not just by Mr. Wagner and his fellow designers Florence Klotz and Paul Gallo but also by the director Michael Blakemore, who juggles the farcical collisions between reality and soundstage as deftly as he did the on- and offstage shenanigans of ''Noises Off.'' With occasional injections of stock period film, ''City of Angels'' re-creates the swirling flashbacks, portentous tracking shots and swift dissolves of movies like ''The Maltese Falcon'' and ''The Big Sleep'' even as it wallows in the kitschy glamour of nouveau-riche Bel Air mansions where the conversation is ''never at a loss for numbers.''

Mr. Gelbart's jokes come in their own variety of colors. As in his screenplay for ''Movie Movie,'' he is a master at parodying vintage film genres - in this case finding remarkably fresh ways to skewer the sardonic voice-over narration, tough-guy talk and heavy-breathing imagery (''It's as though I was hit by a wrecking ball wearing a pinky ring'') of the Chandler-Hammett film noir. But the funniest lines in ''City of Angels'' may well be those that assault the movie business - as personified by Buddy Fidler (Rene Auberjonois), an egomaniacal producer and director at Master Pictures, the same fictional studio that Mr. Gelbart accused of money-laundering in his Iran-contra satire, ''Mastergate.''

There are no angels in this show's Hollywood. Next to Fidler's self-serving Goldwynisms - ''You can tell a writer every time: words, words, words!'' he complains - the mixed metaphors of Stone's narration and the obfuscating double talk of the ''Mastergate'' polticians almost make sense. In Mr. Auberjonois's gleefully smarmy performance, Fidler congratulates himself on his philanthropic largess while destroying Stine's script in the interests of commerce or blacklist-era political cowardice. As he revises, the rewrites are carried out in the black-and-white flesh on stage, complete with mimed rewinding of the footage bound for the cutting-room floor. ''You're Nothing Without Me'' goes the title of the high-flying duet for Stine and Stone, but, in Mr. Gelbart's jaundiced view, the writer and his fictional alter ego are both nothing next to the greedy bully with casting approval, screenplay-credit envy and final cut.

As the jokes leaven the book's rage until the bitter final number, so does Mr. Coleman's score - a delirious celebration of jazz and pop styles sumptuously orchestrated by Billy Byers and blared out by a swinging pit band led by Gordon Lowry Harrell. Mr. Coleman uses a scat-singing vocal quartet reminiscent of the Modernaires as a roving chorus; he freely mixes be-bop with wild Count Basie blasts, sentimental radio crooning (well done by Scott Waara) and smoky soundtrack music reminiscent of David Raskin's score for ''Laura.'' The effect is like listening to ''Your Hit Parade'' of 1946, except that the composer's own Broadway personality remakes the past in his own effervescent, melodic style.

Though the young and talented lyricist David Zippel keeps up with Mr. Coleman's often intricate music, he only occasionally catches up with Mr. Gelbart's endlessly witty wordplay. His biggest success is Ms. Graff's song ''You Can Always Count on Me,'' which recalls the sophisticated sass of the female solos Mr. Coleman once wrote with the lyricists Carolyn Leigh and Dorothy Fields. By contrast, Mr. Zippel's double-entendre duet for Stone and his femme-fatale client (Dee Hoty) is collegiate, and Mr. Auberjonois's big Act I solo isn't as biting about Hollywood as the dialogue surrounding it.

For all that's right about ''City of Angels,'' one must also question the casting of Mr. Edelman, a powerful singer whose affable boyishness seems inappropriate and anachronistic for a hard-edged 40's novelist like Stine. It's hard to believe he could have created a character as worldly as Mr. Naughton's Stone, a Bogart incarnation that, for once, is not an impersonation. The show could also use much more dancing, a less arbitrarily plotted and more musical second act and a livelier heroine than the lost love (for Stone) and temporarily lost wife (for Stine) decently played by Kay McClelland.

In the large supporting cast, special attention must be paid - and will be, since she first appears wearing only a sheet - to Rachel York, who sings a torrid seduction number (''Lost and Found'') in Act I before serving as a self-promoting starlet in Act II. As Stone says in somber voice-over when describing another Hollywood siren, ''Only the floor kept her legs from going on forever.'' With lines like that, I, for one, would have been happy if ''City of Angels'' had gone on just as long. This Is No Town For the Celestial CITY OF ANGELS, book by Larry Gelbart; music by Cy Coleman; lyrics by David Zippel; musical numbers staged by Walter Painter; directed by Michael Blakemore; scenery, Robin Wagner; costumes, Florence Klotz; lighting, Paul Gallo; sound, Peter Fitzgerald and Bernard Fox; orchestrations, Billy Byers; vocal arrangements, Mr. Coleman and Yarol Gershovsky; musical direction, Gordon Lowry Harrell; fight staging, B. H. Barry; hair styles, Steve Atha; production stage manager, Steve Zweigbaum; general manager, Ralph Roseman. Presented by Nick Vanoff, Roger Berlind, Jujamcyn Theaters, Suntory International Corporation and the Shubert Organization. At the Virginia Theater, 245 West 52d Street. Stone ... James Naughton Alaura Kingsley and Carla Haywood ... Dee Hoty Gabby and Bobbi ... Kay McClelland Stine ... Gregg Edelman Buddy Fidler and Irwin S. Irving ... Rene Auberjonois Oolie and Donna ... Randy Graff WITH: James Cahill, Carolee Carmello, Peter Davis, Shawn Elliott, Tom Galantich, Eleanor Glockner, James Hindman, Gary Kahn, Amy Jane London, Alvin Lum, Jacquey Maltby, Jackie Presti, Keith Perry, Herschel Sparber, Evan Thompson, Doug Tompos, Scott Waara, Raymond Xifo and Rachel York.

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Review/Theater; 40's Hollywood Doubly Mocked In Gelbart's 'City of Angels'

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Such tricks are brilliantly abetted not just by Mr. Wagner and his fellow designers Florence Klotz and Paul Gallo but also by the director Michael Blakemore, who juggles the farcical collisions between reality and soundstage as deftly as he did the on- and offstage shenanigans of ''Noises Off.'' With occasional

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City of Angels - Cy Coleman -The Guide to Musical Theatre

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The Guide to Musical Theatre - Show synopsis - Shows C

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The longest-running show on Broadway almost never came to New York.

Five months after opening to sold-out crowds in London's West End, the producers of The Phantom of the Opera announced their plans to bring the mesmerizing musical to Broadway. The show was scheduled to open at the newly renovated Majestic Theatre in November 1987, and feature the same lead performers from London.

In order to get immigration visas for British performers, producers must first secure approval from the American labor union, Actors' Equity Association. The American group had set up an exchange program with its English counterpart, British Actors' Equity Association, where, for each British actor allowed to appear on Broadway, an American actor would be allowed to appear in the West End. An exception to the 1-for-1 trade deal was carved out for international stars and foreign performers uniquely qualified to play roles that no Americans could perform.

In seeking approval from the American labor union, the producers claimed that the two lead performers, Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman, fell within the exception to the trade deal. Crawford, who had been named an OBE after starring on a popular British sitcom and appearing in the American film Hello, Dolly!, was an international star, and Brightman was uniquely qualified. Brightman's role required an actress with an operatic voice who could dance on pointe, and the director, Hal Prince, argued that he had auditioned 92 American actresses, but "found no one who could accommodate those needs."

Previously, in 1977, the American union had permitted Prince to bring the entire British cast of Side by Side by Sondheim to Broadway, and Prince thought that he would persuade them again. "The powerful creators and producers of Phantom thought that Actors' Equity would accept their arguments for [the performers'] admission without challenge," observed one drama critic.

But, "Actors' Equity tossed us a grenade," remarked Prince.

While the American union's committee on foreign performers did not have an issue with allowing Crawford to reprise his role as the titular character, it denied permission to Brightman. She was not an international star or uniquely qualified to perform the role, it decided.

With imported British musicals like Cats, Me and My Girl, and Les Misérables dominating Broadway, Actors' Equity Association feared that there would be fewer and fewer opportunities for its American members. "Generally, Equity was getting tougher about whom they were letting in, and there was a lot of anxiety," recalled John Breglio, a lawyer for the Phantom producers.

Breglio begged the full council of Actors' Equity Association to reverse the smaller committee's decision. But, the American union stood its ground against the British producers, and refused to allow Brightman to appear in the show.

Union officials insisted that the lead female role would create a star of an American actress, much like how a part in the British play Steaming propelled Judith Ivey to stardom years earlier. "[T]he council has expressed concern that if its prior decision were reversed," commented Alan Eisenberg, the leader of Actors' Equity Association, then "a major career opportunity would be taken away from an American actor at a time when such opportunities are virtually nonexistent either on Broadway or in London."

In blocking Brightman at the border, Breglio observed that "Equity was flexing its muscles." It was making a statement to British producers that "we are still a union that has to be respected, we still have rules, and we do not want anybody stream-rolling us, and deciding they can bring over anybody they want," he said. The besieged union was showing strength to its membership, and Brightman was being used as a pawn in the international game of chess.

Yet, the union's decision almost derailed the plans to bring Phantom to Broadway.

Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer of Phantom, was married to Brightman, and he was furious that she would not be allowed to perform a role that he had created for her on Broadway. "He was very, very emotional and angry," remembered Breglio, confirming that "this was not a cry-wolf situation."

"Andrew regards this as a terrible affront," stated Bernard Jacobs, the president of the Shubert Organization, which owns the Majestic Theatre. After bringing six other shows to Broadway, Lloyd Webber "believes that he has contributed a tremendous amount of employment in America," he said.

Lloyd Webber, whose entertainment firm Really Useful Group was co-producing the musical, threatened to cancel its move to New York. Either the show would come to Broadway with Brightman, or it would not come to Broadway at all.

Jacobs, whose business had invested more than $500,000 in revamping the theater for Phantom, was nervous. "This show could be one of the most important hits of our time," he contended. "We need the employment, and we need the push Broadway gets every time we get a big show like this," he stated.

However, it was reported that Lloyd Webber was considering an offer from his neighbor in Trump Tower, film director Steven Spielberg, to bring the show straight to Hollywood, and create a big-budget film adaptation. The movie could make millions at the box office, and the frustrated composer would not need to deal with Actors' Equity Association.

But, Cameron Mackintosh, the co-producer, did not think that Lloyd Webber would choose to bypass Broadway. "Andrew is a theatrical animal," he said, "and what he will want more than anything else is to bring a show of which he is rightly proud to Broadway."

In addition, it might not have been easy for the creator to turn around, and walk away from Broadway. His business, Really Useful Group, was a publicly-traded corporation, and its shareholders would have been undoubtedly upset to forgo a profitable Broadway run. If Lloyd Webber cancelled the show over his wife, then he might have been slapped with a lawsuit.

Nevertheless, Mackintosh recognized that "[i]t's impossible for us to proceed until this is resolved." The Phantom producers would ask Actors' Equity Association to reconsider its decision regarding Brightman one more time. "If they don't," Jacobs warned, then "the ship may well have sailed."

Setting the stage for a scene that would define the future of Broadway, the American union agreed to allow the producers to present their arguments at its next council meeting.

"Eisenberg tried to be as fair as possible with us," recalled Breglio. As the leader of the union, Eisenberg "represented Equity, and supported their positions," the Phantom lawyer explained. "But, he also had to work with theater owners and producers, and keep relations," Breglio added.

"Alan [Eisenberg] had to prevent this from devolving into World War III," observed Breglio.

With less than a week to prepare for the hearing, Breglio considered different possible strategies. Putting Lloyd Webber in front of the council might draw undesirable attention to his marriage, and asking Mackintosh to argue the case as a producer might not appeal to the group of actors.

"My advice to Brian Brolly," the managing director of Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group, "was that he should present the case on behalf of Andrew as an artist, so it was artist to artist," Breglio said. Removing the politics and economics from the picture, the dispute over Brightman was about artistic choice.

Brolly, speaking like a professor in the tense room, argued that Lloyd Webber as an artist should be allowed to present his artwork how he had envisioned it. Lloyd Webber, as a composer who had fallen in love with a singer, Brightman, had written the role of a masked composer who falls in love with a singer in Phantom for her. Brolly "analogized the situation to a painter being free to use the model of his choice without interference from outside sources," Breglio remembered.

When Brolly finished his speech, Eisenberg turned to his colleagues, and asked whether or not any members of the council had any questions. "He did not know which way it was going to go," recalled Breglio. "He really had no idea," he said.

Brolly fielded a few softball questions from the council about future productions of Phantom. There was no showdown over British musicals stealing American jobs; the hearing was relaxed. "I was worried that perhaps they had all made up their minds to deny the application and were just going through the motions," Breglio admitted.

"We were extremely nervous," stated the lawyer. "Brian [Brolly] didn't know what Andrew would do. It was nerve-wracking," Breglio said.

But, several hours later, Eisenberg called the producers with an offer from the union that would let Brightman reprise her role in Phantom on Broadway.

In exchange for allowing Brightman to perform in New York for six months, the producers needed to give a lead role in their next London show to an unknown American performer. Like Brightman, an American performer would soon be given a chance to become a star, and the producers had to post a bond guaranteeing that the new show would open within three years.

"We immediately called Andrew, who was delighted he could inform his wife that she would indeed have her Broadway debut," remembered Breglio. The producers accepted the offer, and Phantom opened at the Majestic Theatre on January 26, 1988 with a record-breaking $16 million in advance ticket sales.

While most of the individuals involved in the backstage battle have passed away or retired, the fruits of their labor can still be seen on stage at the Majestic Theatre, where Phantom continues to receive standing ovations every night. The Tony Award-winning musical has created jobs for over 6,500 Americans, and will celebrate its thirtieth anniversary on Broadway tomorrow night.

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How 'The Phantom of the Opera' Almost Never Came to Broadway

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The longest-running show on Broadway almost never came to New York. Five months after opening to sold-out crowds in London's West End, the producers of The Phantom of the Opera announced their plans to bring the mesmerizing musical to Broadway.

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The longest-running Broadway musical ever, Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, celebrated Saturday another milestone: its 25th anniversary.

When it all started Jan. 26, 1988, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States, a gallon of gas cost about 90 cents and a ticket to The Phantom of the Opera was a whopping $50. It was the hottest ticket in town.

Times have changed, prices have changed, but that disfigured, tortured genius who haunts the Paris Opera House, creating havoc and causing the chandelier to fall, has endured.

An invited-only audience, in black tie and gowns, packed the Majestic Theater on Saturday to celebrate the first show in Broadway history to run for a quarter century. Director Hal Prince, who's won 21 Tony Awards, including one for directing Phantom, has his theories about the show's unprecedented success.

"I think the enduring appeal is because it's so romantic and because audiences escape into it," he says. "It has a world of its own."

It also has those soaring Lloyd Webber melodies. The composer couldn't make it to the festivities - he's recovering from back surgery - but he provided a video message.

"I'd just like to say, I'm missing this. I really wouldn't have missed this for the world," he said, "but somebody will bore you with the statistics of the show and how long it's run and all of these sort of things, but it's not going to be me because I've forgotten them."

The Phantom of the Opera may be the most successful entertainment franchise of all time. It has grossed $5.6 billion worldwide - more than Avatar, more than Titanic, more than all the Star Wars films combined. A staggering 130 million people have seen the show in 28 countries and 148 cities in 13 languages.

Soprano Sarah Brightman was married to Lloyd Webber when he was writing Phantom; she says he tailored the ingenue role of Christine just for her.

"He'd pull me in and say, 'Let's try this out,' and I'd sort of lead him through various things I knew, and together we - well, really he created everything, but I think I was definitely a muse at that time," she says.

Brightman, wearing a silver tiara, was one of the guests of honor. After the performance, Prince and producer Cameron Mackintosh emceed a little ceremony, which invited the cast, orchestra and crew of Phantom, as well as dozens of former cast members to take a bow. Four actors, who've played The Phantom in New York, London, Stockholm and Toronto took the stage to sing a couple of songs. Then the guests went to the New York Public Library for a big anniversary party.

Come Monday night, Phantom goes back to the business of breaking the longest-running Broadway musical record with every performance. House manager Peter Kulok will be there to make sure the audience is well taken care of.

"There's some kind of magic to this show that keeps people coming back, time and time again," he says. "There are many regular 'Phans,' as they call themselves."

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25 Years Strong, 'Phantom Of The Opera' Kills And Kills Again

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Invited guests packed the Majestic Theater on Saturday night to celebrate the longest-running Broadway musical ever. Times have changed, but the Phantom, that tortured genius who haunts the Paris Opera House, creating havoc and causing the chandelier to fall, has endured.

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The most successful stage musical of all time, the Cameron Mackintosh/Really Useful Group, Inc. production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, directed by Harold Prince, will reach an unprecedented milestone when it celebrates its Twentieth Anniversary on Broadway on Saturday, January 26th. On that date, playing its 8,318th and 8,319th performances at The Majestic Theatre (247 West 44th Street), it will become the first Broadway production ever to run 20 years.

The longest-running show in Broadway history (a feat it achieved in January 2006 when it surpassed the then-record run of Cats), the musical is the winner of 7 1988 Tony Awards including Best Musical. Since its Broadway debut on January 26, 1988, THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA has grossed over $675 million, making it the highest-grossing show in Broadway history. Total New York attendance is at 12.5 million. It has since gone on to play over 8,000 performances - the only show in Broadway history to do so - and all with no end in sight.

Its international success - equally staggering - is represented by total worldwide grosses estimated at over $5 billion. This colossal figure makes PHANTOM the most successful entertainment venture of all time, surpassing not only any other stage production, but also far surpassing the world's highest-grossing film Titanic (at $1.2 billion) and such other blockbusters as The Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park and Star Wars. Worldwide attendance is over 80 million people.

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA has always been a record-breaker, with the New York production setting benchmarks that have dominated the industry: for capitalization (a then-spectacular $8 million), total advance (a then-enormous $18 million), total gross and attendance ($675 million and 12.5 million and counting), total performances (becoming the first and still only show to ever reach 8,000), and even the number of years before a single ticket was ever sold at the TKTS ticket booth in Times Square (over 14 years, which is still the record, by a long shot). And since becoming the longest-running show in Broadway history in 2006, each performance has set a new longevity record.

The musical has also broken all touring records. It continues to be the longest continuously-touring show in U.S. history, with the first of its three National Tours having gone out over 19 years ago in May 1989. The current tour is the longest-running touring production in U.S. history, having recently celebrated its 15th Anniversary on December 13, 2007, and having played over 6,000 performances.

In addition to PHANTOM's amazing longevity and continued box office success, the Broadway production consistently earns rave reviews from returning critics:

In The New York Times, Jason Zinoman proclaimed, "PHANTOM still delivers the goods! Judging by sheer invention, emotional punch and onstage talent, the venerable blockbuster still beats out almost all of the whippersnappers currently on Broadway. Maria Björnson's flamboyant gothic design and Harold Prince's fantastical staging still have the gleam of finely polished professionalism. The solid cast retains the freshness of opening night."

Clive Barnes of The New York Post gave it "FOUR STARS! A marvelous musical! PHANTOM has stayed in terrific shape and right now it is still as taut and sharp as on that first night in 1988. Harold Prince's crisp staging remains as shipshape as ever. Maria Björnson's opulent production perfectly captures the spirit and style of the Paris Opera and Andrew Lloyd Webber's sweepingly romantic score is one of the finest scores Broadway has ever heard. Don't miss it!"

Roma Torre of NY-1 News proclaimed, "PHANTOM rules! It remains as fresh and spectacular as ever. Andrew Lloyd Webber's score has a visceral tug more than almost any score written in the past 20 years. Beautiful and romantic, I have to tip my hat: THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA has aged divinely."

Time Out's David Cote exclaimed, "They're doing something right! A beautifully produced show, PHANTOM is lavish and played well enough to get standing ovations nearly two decades into its run!"

And David Richardson on WOR Radio raved, "PHANTOM is still wonderful and isn't showing its age one bit! The chandelier still falls on cue and the show still rises to the top of all the musicals ever to appear on Broadway. I hope I listen to the music of the night forever!"

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA had its world premiere on October 9, 1986 at Her Majesty's Theatre in London, winning every major British theatre award including the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards. The New York production opened on January 26, 1988 with a then record advance of $18 million. The musical went on to sweep the 1988 Tony Awards, winning seven, including Best Musical. THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA also won seven Drama Desk Awards and three Outer Critics Circle Awards. The original London cast recording was the first in British musical history to enter the charts at number one. It has since gone both gold and platinum in Britain and the U.S. selling over 40 million copies worldwide.

Base on the classic novel Le Fantôme de L'Opéra by Gaston Leroux, THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA tells the story of a masked figure who lurks beneath the catacombs of the Paris Opera House, exercising a reign of terror over all who inhabit it. He falls madly in love with an innocent young soprano, Christine, and devotes himself to creating a new star by nurturing her extraordinary talents and by employing all of the devious methods at his command.

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA stars Howard McGillin in the tile role with Jennifer Hope Wills as Christine and Tim Martin Gleason as Raoul. Having donned the mask in over 2,000 times, Mr. McGillin has performed the title role more than any other actor in the Broadway production.

The musical also co-stars George Lee Andrews (Monsieur André; Mr. Andrews is the only cast member to have been with the Broadway production for the entire run), David Cryer (Monsieur Firmin), Patricia Phillips (Carlotta), Marilyn Caskey (Madame Giry), Wayne Hobbs (Piangi) and Heather McFadden (Meg Giry). At certain performances, Elizabeth Loyacano plays Christine.

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA has music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and is directed by Harold Prince. Lyrics are by Charles Hart (with additional lyrics by Richard Stilgoe) and the book is by Richard Stilgoe and Andrew Lloyd Webber. THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA has production design by the late Maria Björnson, lighting by Andrew Bridge and sound by Martin Levan. Musical staging and choreography is by Gillian Lynne. Orchestrations are by David Cullen and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

The regular performance schedule for THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA is Monday and Wednesday through Saturday evenings at 8 p.m. and Tuesday evenings at 7 p.m. with matinees Wednesday and Saturday at 2 p.m. For tickets, $26.25-$111.25, call Tele-charge at (212) 239-6200, visit www.telecharge.com or visit The Majestic Theatre box office (247 West 44th Street).

www.thephantomoftheopera.com

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THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA TO BECOME THE FIRST SHOW IN BROADWAY HISTORY TO CELEBRATE 20 YEARS

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The most successful stage musical of all time, the Cameron Mackintosh/Really Useful Group, Inc. production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, directed by Harold Prince, will reach an unprecedented milestone when it celebrates its Twentieth Anniversary on Broadway on Saturday, January 26th.

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: Read Playbill's First-Ever Article on Broadway's Special Features The Phantom of the Opera

A flashback to thoughts from Andrew Lloyd Webber, Harold Prince, and Michael Crawford before Phantom became the longest-running musical on Broadway.
Digging into the archives, we unearth the original articles printed in the Playbills of yesteryear. As The Phantom of the Opera continues on its road to a record-breaking 30 years on Broadway, Playbill looks back to 1988, when the musical was already setting records at the box office and poised to make history. Here, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, director Hal Prince, producer Cameron Mackintosh, and title star Michael Crawford talk about creating the theatrical masterpiece before anyone knew what it would become:
Around the middle of October, a remarkable sight was to be seen at the southern end of London's Haymarket: lines of people, many sleeping on the pavement overnight, hoping for standing-room-only returns in order to catch Michael Crawford's last pre-Broadway appearance as The Phantom of the Opera.

After barely a year in the West End, the show had become such a public success that backstage stories such as Crawford's heroic decision to play on despite a severe hiatus hernia, or Sarah Brightman's return to the company after a long summer break, or the transatlantic Equity row (now happily resolved) about whether she could open in New York, were regularly making front-page headlines in Britain's tabloid press.

And now Britain's Phantom phenomenon is being repeated in New York. Scheduled to open at the Majestic Theatre on January 26, the advance sale is over 14 million dollars, a new Broadway record. And on the day the box office opened, another record was smashed when 19,028 tickets were sold in a single day.

One explanation for The Phantom of the Opera 's extraordinary appeal is that it seems to have caught a distinct change in the public mood: the sheer romance of the story and its return to old-fashioned theatrical values at a time when these had seemed threatened, if not abandoned, by the colder and more technical shows of the recent past. But maybe at this point we should go back to the very beginning.

It was in 1911 that Parisian drama critic Gaston Leroux published La Fantome de l'Opera, based, so he told his readers, on the "strange events" that had apparently occurred in the opera house 30 years earlier, events concerning sinister deaths and a mysteriously disfigured recluse who made his kingdom in the vast underground caverns by the lake that lay beneath the building. Curiously, the novel originally found few readers, but it was serialized by an American newspaper and seen there by a researcher for Universal who made, in 1925, the first and, many would still say, the best of all the film versions-the one that made Lon Chaney a star.

The film was frequently remade thereafter, notably by Claude Rains in 1943 and Herbert Lom in 1962; a Spanish version turned up in 1960, and in 1974 Phantom of the Paradise told of a ghostly disc-jockey terrorizing teenyboppers at a disco. Clearly Leroux had found in the vaults of the Opera House a timeless variant on the story that has always worked, whether it is done as Faust or Svengali or Beauty and the Beast -it's the one about the innocence and corruption, beauty and ugliness, hope and despair.

Onstage its history has-until now-been less successful, though it was when Sarah Brightman was offered the role of Christine in a version of the play at Stratford East (intriguingly the London fringe theatre where Stephen Sondheim first saw a play about Sweeney Tod) that husband Andrew Lloyd Webber told me he began to think about its possibilities as a musical: "Sarah never did the Stratford East version because we were too busy getting married at the time, but then I came across a 50-cent paperback copy of the book in a New York store and discovered that it really wasn't as campy or as much of a penny-dreadful as some of the film versions had suggested. It's simply the story of one man's obsession with this girl, and nothing will stop him from getting her, so he haunts the caverns below the opera house where she dances, and he scares everyone by pretending to be a ghost. The only way he can manipulate her is through music."

It is, of course, always possible that there is something faintly autobiographical here. The idea of a composer making public his professional and private commitment to a singer through the music he creates for her seems to have brought Lloyd Webber, writing (as he has always acknowledged) in this instance specifically for the singer he married, a strong emotional power. The show comes, moreover, at a remarkable time in his professional fortunes: his Really Useful Company, which went public in January 1986, reported pre-tax income in its first year of rather more than six million dollars, figures which are unlikely to be anything but drastically increased by the Broadway arrival of Phantom.

For the director Hal Prince, this was also a show whose time had come: "The minute Andrew mentioned it to me, the minute I heard a couple of melodies, I thought I had to do it. It's a potboiler, or a parody like Count Dracula. It's intended-and I hate to sound pretentious about it-to be psychologically layered: there's a lot going on in the character of the Phantom, and I think it addresses very seriously this whole question of physical deformity and how we respond to it and how tragic our initial revulsion is and how dead wrong. It's a romance, and it's also pretty erotic."

Originally, as the producer Cameron Mackintosh (who also has Cats and Les Misérables to his credit, and is the impresario alone responsible for turning the hitherto insular English musical into a world box-office force over the past decade) recalls, the idea was that the Phantom score would use famous classical works, with Lloyd Webber writing only such incidental music as might be necessary. The original novel had, after all, made much use of Gounod's Faust as an operatic background: "Then, late in 1984, Andrew and I were in Tokyo for Cats, and we met there the Australian director Jim Sharman, who had done The Rocky Horror Show and hugely successful London production of Jesus Christ Superstar. He thought the idea of a musical Phantom was fascinating and suggested that Andrew should seriously consider writing the whole score himself. Every year, in July, Andrew has a musical festival at his English home in Sydmonton, and the plan for summer '85 was to present there a draft of the first act of Phantom for which Richard Stilgoe, Andrew's lyrical collaborator on Starlight Express, had agreed to help out. Our designer Maria Bjornson managed by magic to stage it in a 100-seat church on Andrew's front lawn and even managed the dropping of the chandelier."

Exclusive! See How The Phantom of the Opera Set Comes to Life

Exclusive! See How The Phantom of the Opera Set Comes to Life

32 PHOTOS

Encouraged by the reception there, Lloyd Webber continued over the winter of 1985 to work on the score before an accidental meeting in New York with Hal Prince early the following spring confirmed that he too was in search of a romantic musical. By now, however, it was clear that Phantom needed a lyrical dramatist, and the late Alan Jay Lerner was approached: "He listened to the score and read the material and was encouraging, but perceptively critical. He agreed to work on the project, and we had several meetings, and some major constructional decisions were taken, but we noticed during our time together that Alan was not well. His condition worsened, and the day he was due to start working on the actual lyrics, he rang to say that he must bow out as he needed treatment for his illness. Sadly, he never recovered, and the world is a duller place for his loss."

The problem was then, as Mackintosh recalls, "to find a replacement for an irreplaceable talent," and their search led them to a Guildhall contest for young musical writers at which one of the finalist was a lyricist in his early twenties called Charles Hart, grandson of a legendary English theatrical couple (Glen Byam Shaw and Angela Baddeley) who thus now finds himself co-author of The Phantom: "I was auditioned for the job when work on it was already well under way and given a weekend to digest Gaston Leroux's then little-known thriller...from the moths that followed, I have retained a wealth of indelible memories: a first glimpse of Maria Bjornson's astonishing sets in model form, illuminated by one-man rendition-cum-resume from the director Hal Prince, and the first terrifying vision of a newspaper advertisement crediting me with a libretto I had at the time barely begun, and then a weekend of solitary industry in George Abbott's office, 24 stories above the new York traffic."

With a lyricist, a director, a designer, a producer and a composer now duly assembled, the central problem became the casting. It was clear that Sarah Brightman would play the role which had been written for her alone, but who would play the man in the mask on whom the whole plot eventually depends? Lloyd Webber and Mackintosh made, at once, the most obvious and surprising of choices, and one of the joys of the Broadway Phantom is that it re-introduces to American audiences an actor whom the London theatre has been keeping to itself for the best part of the last 20 years.

True, Michael Crawford was in New York back in 1967 in Peter Shaffer's Black Comedy, a performance which brought him to the attention of Gene Kelly, another of the great musical acrobats of our time, and led to Hollywood and starring role in the otherwise less than wonderful Barbra Streisand film of Hello, Dolly!

Crawford then returned to England, to an immensely successful television comedy series called Some Mothers Do 'Ave Em, and to establish himself on the West End stage with shows like Billy and Barnum as the natural leader of the song-and-dance profession in Britain. Though he comes of a long-line of cheery charmers who have also captivated Broadway-a line of stretching back through Robert Lindsay and Jim Dale to Tommy Steele-Crawford alone has established a supremacy in the London musical which corresponds, I guess, to the way that Ray Bolger was considered in New York. Crawford was last in Manhattan seven years ago, as a fee-paying student at one of the most punishing of all academics, the New York School for Circus Arts: "I was here for three months learning how to juggle, jump, balance, above all how to fall off the high wire. Jim Dale had already opened as Barnum on Broadway, and I was determined for London to do all the tricks he was up to and then add a few of my own, including a swing down a 30-foot rope." When the curtain fell on that first night of Barnum in the West End, Crawford was treated to an eight-minute standing ovation, the longest I have ever heard given to a musical actor in Britain.

See the Masked Men of Broadway's Phantom of the Opera

See the Masked Men of Broadway's Phantom of the Opera

20 PHOTOS

Over the next five years, in London and on regional tours and television, Crawford turned Barnum into a marathon personal crusade for show business: like no other musical star in Britain, Crawford is a definition of the theatre at its most sentimental and its most courageous. His continued stunting in both Barnum and the television series that made his name has meant that for most of his recent career (one he, in fact, started as a child chorister for Benjamin Britten) he has been playing through a pain barrier more familiar to Olympic athletes than actors, and his single-minded, almost obsessive dedication to the footlights has cost him both a marriage and a private life: "People say I'm a workaholic, and it is true that after Barnum finally closed on tour last year I was meant to take a long break, so I went to St. Lucia, but after about six days there I heard about Phantom, and I was on the phone after that all the time; when the offer came in I knew I just had to do it for the contrast. In Barnum for five years, I gave everything I had to give physically, but in Phantom what you give is your soul. After hearing just eight bars of that overture, I began to feel tingly."

The surprise in the casting was, of course that Crawford, the most agile and contortionist of actors, should agree to freeze himself behind the vertical half-mask of the Phantom, but it was precisely that bravery of casting that gave the show its element of start surprise. The story is, as one critic has already noted, "God's gift to the musical theatre," and Crawford brings to its rooftop-and-lakeland spectacular a kind of tortured humanity which is quite essential to the storyline. The Phantom has more than its fair share of breath-taking theatrical moments, from the crashing of the chandelier through the masked ball (marvelously choreographed by Gillian Lynne of Cats) to the arrival at the candlelit underground lake, but what Lloyd Webber and Prince and Crawford have realized is that they alone are not enough. In the end, you have to care about the Phantom himself, for his is the music of the night.

The Phantom of the Opera is essentially where the Frankenstein legend meets Citizen Kane, but it is also in some remarkable way a show about the purity of an impossible love, and what matters most about it, always apart from that soaring Lloyd Webber score, is that it puts a well-made plot back at center stage. The book had returned to its rightful place and the music and lyrics.
CELEBRATE 30 YEARS OF PHANTOM BY SHOPPING THE PLAYBILL STORE!

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: Read Playbill's First-Ever Article on Broadway's The Phantom of the Opera | Playbill

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FROM THE ARCHIVES: Read Playbill's First-Ever Article on Broadway's Special Features The Phantom of the Opera A flashback to thoughts from Andrew Lloyd Webber, Harold Prince, and Michael Crawford before Phantom became the longest-running musical on Broadway. Digging into the archives, we unearth the original articles printed in the Playbills of yesteryear.

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PLAYBILL ARCHIVES: The Archives The Phantom of the Opera - 1988

(This is one in a series of Playbill.com features offering a periodic look back at Broadway and Playbill history, timed to accompany a new production or event of a show from theatre's past. The current production of The Phantom of the Opera at the Majestic Theatre will become the longest-running Broadway show in history Jan. 9, 2006. Here's a glimpse at the 1988 Playbill of the original production, with some perspective on the period.)

The United States and Canada just reached an agreement on free trade while on the other side of the globe Australia celebrates its bicentennial. "Good Morning Vietnam," "Three Men and a Baby" and "Moonstruck" top the box office at the movies while Michael Jackson's "The Way You Make Me Feel," INXS' "I Need You Tonight" and Tiffany's "Could've Been" top the music charts. In less than a week, "The Wonder Years" will debut on ABC. A first class stamp costs 22¢. This leap year is 1988.

On the Great White Way, A Chorus Line currently boasts the title of "Longest Running Show in Broadway History." That show plays among last season's Best Musical Tony Award winner Les Misérables as well as Cats, Bernadette Peters in Into The Woods, Joel Grey in a revival of and Anything Goes starring Patti LuPone and Howard McGillin. The new year's first musical, after a successful year in London's West End, hops the pond to its New York counterpart.

The title page in the The Phantom of the Opera Playbill.

Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera, with its original London stars Michael Crawford and Sarah Brightman, now haunts the recesses of the newly landmarked Majestic Theatre. The musical tale of an operahouse ghost and his young chorus girl prodigy takes the stage for a Jan. 26 opening night under the direction of Harold Prince. Also in the cast are Steve Barton, Patti Cohenour, Judy Kaye and a young chorus girl named Rebecca Luker making her Broadway debut.

The cast list on opening night of The Phantom of the Opera.

"It was tremendously exciting, I remember it almost reaching the absurd level. Everyone wanted a ticket," the now-seasoned stage star Luker told Playbill.com about her "first big job." She recalled, "We'd be walking down the street in our Phantom show jackets and people would yell out from cabs at you 'Can you get me a seat?!'" The fresh face who "just graduated from college" landed the understudy for the role of Christine while Patti Cohenour would be Brightman's alternate (at certain performances). (Luker would eventually take over the role the following year.)

Rebecca Luker's bio in the "Who's Who."

In the Playbill, among advertisements for cars (BMW's "Ultimate Tanning Machine", the 325i Convertible or Oldsmobile's Toronado Troféo with "dual tail pipes"), jewelry, cosmetics, airlines ("The only nonstops to Honolulu from Newark" of Continental and "The Official Airline" of Walt Disney World, Delta), furs, Rolex "Day-Date® and Lady Datejust®" watches, local restaurants, cigarettes and plenty of alcohol are full-pagers for the cast album of The Phantom of the Opera (available on album, cassette or compact disc) and the upcoming "My Funny Valentine" salute to Richard Rodgers.

An portion of an ad for the My Funny Valentine concert.

Editorial featured in the Playbill include the signature "Dear Playbill" and "Who's Who in the Cast," a Louis Botto-penned "Passing Stages" about current Broadway shows, a focus on the 40th anniversary of the New York City Ballet and a photo-feature on with production shots from the show in "Scenes From The Phantom of the Opera."

Part of the "Scenes From" photos.
According to "The Phenomenal Phantom" feature in the Playbill, the show had reached more than $14 million in advance sales ("a new Broadway record") and also sold a record-breaking 19, 028 tickets in the first day the box office opened. Luker concurred with the madness for the new show. "Opening night, I was in almost the back row, being in the chorus, and the theatrical paparazzi rushed the stage after the curtain call. It was just a huge mass of flashbulbs and yelling. It remained that way for some time."
The Phantom of the Opera would garner Tony Award wins for stars Michael Crawford (Actor in a Musical) and Judy Kaye (Featured Actress in a Musical), director Harold Prince, designer Maria Björnson (in both scenic and costume categories), lighting designer Andrew Bridge and the top prize for Best Musical. The musical will at last be adapted for the big screen in 2004 - starring Gerard Butler, Emmy Rossum, Patrick Wilson, Miranda Richardson and Minnie Driver - at the hands of director Joel Schumacher who pens the screenplay with composer Andrew Lloyd Webber.

On Jan. 9, 2006 Phantom makes another mark in the theatre annals as the longest-running show in Broadway history, surpassing A Chorus Line (at 6,137 performances), Les Misérables (6,680) and finally another Webber musical (7,485).

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PLAYBILL ARCHIVES: The Phantom of the Opera - 1988 | Playbill

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(This is one in a series of Playbill.com features offering a periodic look back at Broadway and Playbill history, timed to accompany a new production or event of a show from theatre's past. The current production of The Phantom of the Opera at the Majestic Theatre will become the longest-running Broadway show in history Jan.

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Michael Crawford, Sarah Brightman - Phantom of The Opera 1988

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EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: 30 Years of Les Misérables Casts Perform "One Day More" | TheaterMania

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Hugh Jackman, Ramin Karimloo, and more of our favorite Jean Valjeans help celebrate the beloved show's anniversary.

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Is the success of Les Mis bad for women?

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The musical takes the prominent female characters from the book and turns them in to bit players.

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Fifteen years after the premiere of the Mexican theatrical mise-en-scène of Les Miserables, it returns to the Telcel Theatre in Mexico City, with an incredible new production.

Federico González Compeán, along with Morris Gilbert and Julieta González, presents us a high-level theatrical production, with an excellent direction, unbelievable set design with a great display of atmospheres, magnificent costumes, impressive make-up, as well as a great sound.

The orchestra performs operatic passages with incredible force reflecting feelings through voices overloaded with sorrow, joy, sadness, and cries of freedom. The cast performs with a mastery of language and rhythm, keeping every scene taut and tense and perfectly timed, where all the members seem to be endowed with bionic lungs, which cover many extended notes of the musical and emotive crescendos of the first-rate singers.

People who come to see this musical will emerge with a feeling of having had a great theatrical dream, living both a macro story, The French Revolution; and a micro story, the history of Jean Valjean, without any spoken dialogue within global stage sensation.

With 52.23 tons of scenery, we witness shocking, overflowing, giant and bizarre scenes of high impact, as well as minimalist effects in the most intimate scenes.

Moving from the splendid barricade to the catacombs, the effects of video mapping magically turn the stage into a magnificent light creation in the attack on the barricades.

The assembly is excellent throbbing, romantic, and makes vibrate the audiences' soul, in addition to all the members of the cast that have a great performance every minute of the show.

The selection of the cast is part of the success of this play where emotions achieve a perfect emission of every detail that integrates this show. It is composed of 40 actors from various countries, including 28 Mexicans, with a production of almost 100 million pesos, a great orchestra, and 3,000 pieces of costumes that come from Korea, the textiles of each garment have been made with natural fibers: linens, cotton, wool, and silk. Each actor performs between 12 and 15 costume changes resulting in 500 different dresses, and 86 wigs.

The cast

- More than 3,000 actors auditioned and 40 are in the cast.

- Main roles: Daniel Diges (Valjean), Nando Pradho (Javert), Morena Valdés (Fantine), Clara Verdier (Cosette), Daiana Liparoti (Eponine), Agustín Argüello (Marius), Andrés Elvira (Enjolras), Sergio Carranza (Thénardier), and Michelle Rodríguez (Madame Thénardier).

The rest of the cast includes: Leo Wagner, Luigi Vidal, Alex Monge, Manuel Gorka, Mauricio Hernández, Carlos Pérez Banega, Quecho Muñoz, Roberto Hinostroza, Carlos Quezada, Romero Clark, Javier Manente, Luz Aldán, Paola Mingüer, Marisol Meneses, Anaís Loz, Irma Flores, Aitza Terán, María Penella, Lais Lenci, Luis Carlos Villarreal, Erick Sandoval, Gustavo Robles, Estíbalitz Ruiz, and Moni Campos.

The children: María Perroni Garza, Valentina Maldonado Zambrano, Fátima Colín de la Barreda, Jireth Jaquim García, Alexander Tavizón, Alexandre Desvegnes Loyo, and Juan Pablo Hermida Villalpando.

With more than a thousand hours of rehearsals between musicians, technicians, and the cast, each performance of this play takes us back to France of the nineteenth century.

In a few words, Les Miserables is a great epic piece with a great narrative proposal, some heartbreaking interpretations and an incredible interpretative power of all the artists.

The Story

Les Miserables is the masterpiece of the musical theater of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg, based on the novel by writer Victor Hugo published more than 156 years ago.

It is considered one of the great novels of the nineteenth century, a paradigm of French romanticism that analyzes the French society of his time, by reasoning about good and evil, about law, politics, ethics, justice, and the religion.

The play takes place during the events of the June 1832 insurrection, where Victor Hugo presents much of his own political ideology.

It tells an exciting story, where the struggle for freedom and justice is a timeless testimony of great human passions. With some of the most beautiful songs written for musical theater, this epic and inspiring story has become one of the most successful musicals in the history of the theater in the great capitals of the world.

The show takes place in the nineteenth century in France, when Jean Valjean an ex-convict seeking redemption after serving a nineteen-year prison term for stealing a loaf of bread. Unable to find an honest job because of his past, Valjean decides to break his parole in hope of starting a new life under a false identity with the help of a bishop, while suffering the relentless persecution of Inspector Javert over the years, initiating a lifelong struggle for redemption as he is relentlessly pursued by police inspector Javert, who refuses to believe Valjean can change his ways. He becomes an exemplary man who fights against misery and injustice and decides to take charge of Cosette, Fantine's little daughter, and their lives change forever. Thus, Jean Valjean is forced to change his identity several times.

At the same time, he must elude Commissioner Javert, an inflexible policeman who persecutes him, convinced that he has outstanding accounts with the courts.

Barricades, the interior of a factory, an old neighborhood of Paris, a monastery, and a brothel are just some of the images that manage to create a cinematographic concept within the theater.

Finally, during the Paris student uprising of 1832, Javert must confront his ideals after Valjean spares his life and saves that of the student revolutionary who has captured the heart of Valjean's adopted daughter.

The History

It has been seen by more than 70 million people around the world and has been presented in 44 countries on 5 continents, including Germany, Argentina, Austria, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, South Korea, Denmark, Scotland, Spain, United States, Estonia, Philippines, Finland, France, Hong Kong, Hungary, England, Ireland, Iceland, Channel Islands, Israel, Japan, Kuwait, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Norway, New Zealand, Countries Netherlands, Poland, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Dominican Republic, Serbia, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, and Switzerland.

It has been translated into 22 languages: English, Japanese, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, German, Polish, Swedish, Dutch, Danish, French, Czech, Spanish, Mauritian Creole, Flemish, Finnish, Portuguese, Estonian, and Spanish in the version Mexicana and Argentina, has received more than 125 awards from international critics and is composed of 28 musical numbers.

The first production of Les Miserables was by Cameron Mackintosh and the Royal Shakespeare Company premiered at the Barbican Center in London on October 8, 1985. The official premiere on Broadway was on March 12, 1987, at the Broadway Theater, with an investment of 4.5 million dollars of which 4 were recovered before the premiere with the pre-sale of tickets. Under the curtain on May 18, 2003, after sixteen years on stage and 6,680 performances.

Only three years after his farewell, Les Miserables returned to the Broadway stages. The revival was on November 9, 2006, at the Broadhurst Theater and, although a limited season of six months was originally scheduled, it closed on January 6, 2008, having performed 463 regular and 17 previous functions.

Les Miserables returned to the Imperial Theater on Broadway on March 23, 2014. With a special assembly to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the musical and under the direction of Laurence Connor and James Powell, set design by Matt Kinley inspired by the paintings of Victor Hugo and ended his season on September 4, 2016.

The different productions of Les Miserables in the world have won a large number of awards and recognitions, including 8 Tonys (Best Musical, Script, Music, Director, Actor and Actress, Lighting and Assembly); Two Grammys (Best Record of a Musical and Symphonic Recording), Oliver Award, and a London Critics Circle Award for Best Musical and Drama Desk Award, among many others.

When Victor Hugo wrote the novel, he used to say that, although he was sure it was not going to be read by everyone, it was meant to be felt by anyone. In a letter to his editor, he wrote:

"Social problems have no borders. The wounds of humanity, those enormous sores that make the world dirty, do not cease to exist between the red and blue lines of the maps. Wherever man manifests in his ignorance or despair, wherever a woman sells herself for bread, wherever a child lacks a book to learn what a warm heart can teach, in these places my book arrives, knocks on the door and says...Open me, I'm here for you. "

If the purpose of the Greeks in doing theater was to obtain catharsis with Les Miserables this thesis is clearly achieved.

This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.

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"Les Miserables": A Great Theatrical Dream | The Theatre Times

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Fifteen years after the premiere of the Mexican theatrical mise-en-scène of Les Miserables, it returns to the Telcel Theatre in Mexico City, with an incredible new production. Federico González Compeán, along with Morris Gilbert and Julieta González, presents us a high-level theatrical production, with an excellent direction, unbelievable set design with a great display of ...

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"Do you hear the people sing?" runs the rousing finale of Les Misérables - and famously, it was the people that swung it for what, since 2006, has become the world's longest-running musical. But not everyone likes to hear the people singing.

Andrew Davies, who has adapted the original book into an entirely song-free BBC television series, told The Telegraph that his aim was to " rescue Victor Hugo's novel from the clutches of that awful musical with its doggerel lyrics ". He's not the first to have taken against it.

When Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg's bid to convert Hugo's sprawling 1862 epic into gripping theatre was first set before the critics at the Barbican in October 1985 (with...

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Les Misérables: 30 reasons why 'that awful musical' has stood the test of time

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"Do you hear the people sing?" runs the rousing finale of Les Misérables - and famously, it was the people that swung it for what, since 2006, has become the world's longest-running musical. But not everyone likes to hear the people singing.

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The world had never seen a musical quite like Les Miz before. After years of tweaks (and some terrible early press), this operatic take on Victor Hugo's epic novel became an international sensation, beloved by millions. Let's cross the barricade and have a closer look.

1. OLIVER! INSPIRED THE SHOW.

Both stories include a lovable, street-dwelling young rascal. In Oliver! he's known as Jack Dawkins-or "the Artful Dodger"-and is arguably the musical's most popular character. But when French lyricist Alain Boublil took in a London revival performance, he immediately thought of another literary troublemaker.

"As soon as the Artful Dodger came on stage," Boublil recalled, "Gavroche came to mind. It was like a blow to the solar plexus. I started seeing all the characters of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables -Valjean, Javert, Gavroche, Cosette, Marius, and Eponine-in my mind's eye, laughing, crying, and singing onstage."

2. AT FIRST, LES MISÉRABLES DIDN'T MAKE MUCH OF A SPLASH.

Shortly after hatching his million-dollar idea, Boublil asked composer Claude-Michel Schönberg if he'd help him put together a new Les Miz rock opera. "Let's do it," replied the musician, who then started working on the show full-time.

Together, they created a concept album which broke the story down into ambitious, sweeping musical numbers. Released in 1980, it became a decently sized hit that sold 260,000 copies. This led to the first staged incarnation of Les Misérables, which debuted at Paris' Palais de Sports arena a few months later. Though the production was well-attended, it wrapped after a three-month, 105-performance run.

Les Miz could've faded into obscurity right then and there-if one of the biggest names in show business hadn't seen its true potential. British producer Cameron Mackintosh was the producer behind Cats, and as such, he had the theater world in the palm of his hand. In 1982, he obtained a copy of the Les Miz concept album and, liking what he heard, Mackintosh tapped lyricists James Fenton and Herbert Kretzmer to create an English-language version. Their Anglicized Les Miz would premiere in London in 1985 and reach Broadway in 1987.

3. THAT FAMOUS LOGO WAS TAKEN FROM AN ILLUSTRATION IN HUGO'S NOVEL.

Mackintosh's Les Miz had an aggressive marketing campaign that demanded an instantly-recognizable emblem. London-based advertiser Russ Englin really delivered the goods. How? By turning his attention toward the source material.

Early editions of the Les Misérables novel often included artwork by Emile Bayard, Hugo's favorite illustrator. By far the best known of these pieces was an ink drawing in which little Cosette sweeps up the Thenardiers' floor, which appeared on the 1980 concept album. Englin simply cropped her head and shoulders from this image and placed a tattered French flag behind them.

4. "ON MY OWN" EVOLVED FROM ONE OF FANTINE'S SONGS.

In the French-language version, Fantine sings a regretful number called " L'Air de la Misère" ("The Poverty Song"), along with her other big showstopper, "I Dreamed a Dream." However, Mackintosh felt that these tracks were a bit too similar. As he told The Guardian, "we didn't want Fantine singing two ballads back-to-back before she expired-so we re-wrote [one] and gave it to Eponine."

5. THE EARLY REVIEWS WERE ATROCIOUS.

When Les Miz opened in London's Barbican Theatre, most critics panned it. The Observer's Michael Ratcliffedismissed the show as "a witless and synthetic entertainment." Jack Tinker of The Daily Mail complained that "despite the grandeur of the music, the courage of the intentions, Les Misérables has, sadly, been reduced to The Glums." And, in the mind of City Limits reporter Lyn Gardner, it was nothing but a "load of sentimental old tosh."

Mackintosh was devastated-until he took a quick trip to the box office. There, he learned that in less than 24 hours after the maiden performance, Les Miz had sold an unprecedented 5000 tickets. "The public had just voted with its feet," says Mackintosh, "... For me, it was a great lesson in the real power of word of mouth."

6. TODAY, EACH PROFESSIONAL PERFORMANCE INCLUDES A WHOPPING 392 COSTUMES.

That translates to 5000+ individual articles of clothing-and 85 wigs!

7. DURING A PRE-BROADWAY MATINEE, ONE TECHNICAL SNAFU FORCED $120,000 IN TICKET REFUNDS.

Broadway producers will often test out their shows in non-NYC theaters before taking them to the Big Apple. On December 26, 1986, Les Misérables began an eight-week stint at the John F. Kennedy Performing Arts Center in Washington D.C.

But, there was a major malfunction that first week. To get from scene to scene, the original Les Miz production famously used a rotating stage. Half an hour into the December 28 matinee performance, the turntable stopped working properly. Technicians found that, due to "glitches ... in the controls," it could only rotate at unsafe velocities. When the performance was subsequently canceled, $120,000-worth of ticket refunds had to be distributed.

8. "BRING HIM HOME" WAS SUNG AT JIM HENSON'S MEMORIAL SERVICE.

The man behind Kermit the Frog, Cookie Monster, and countless other great American characters adored this prayerful song. On May 16, 1990, 53-year-old Henson suddenly passed away. Five days later, droves of performers that he'd inspired and mentored gathered to honor their captain at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City. Among them was Muppet Show regular Louise Gold, who sang a beautiful rendition of "Bring Him Home" at the service.

9. THE ORIGINAL BROADWAY COSETTE WAS ALSO THE SINGING VOICE OF DISNEY'S POCAHONTAS.

Before taking on the Les Miz gig, Judy Kuhn worked with lyricist Stephen Schwartz on a musical called Rags, which flopped spectacularly and didn't even live to see its fifth performance. But apparently she made a good impression on him. When Schwartz and fellow songwriter Alan Menken started toying with the idea of an animated film about Pocahontas, they asked Kuhn to record a conceptual song they'd put together called "Colors of the Wind." She agreed and eventually did the heroine's singing in the actual movie.

10. OUT OF PURE SPITE, LONDON'S FIRST FANTINE WORE MEN'S CLOTHES DURING ACT II.

In the original British run, leads were required to change costumes and join the chorus when they weren't playing their primary role. Stage icon Patti LuPone, who already had a Tony, was playing Fantine and really hated this policy. For a while, LuPone avoided chorus duty by pointing out that she was also doing another show at the time and needed to rest her voice. Once the other musical wrapped, however, this excuse fell apart. Frustrated, LuPone decided to be difficult and insisted on going out in drag for most of Act II. Today, most professional Fantines now follow her lead and wear male garments after intermission.

11. LES MISÉRABLES IS THE FIFTH LONGEST-RUNNING BROADWAY MUSICAL OF ALL TIME.

Only Phantom of the Opera, Chicago, The Lion King and Cats have enjoyed a longer Manhattan lifespan. Worldwide, over 70 million people have seen a professional production.

12. PRESIDENTS CLINTON AND OBAMA TURNED "ONE DAY MORE" INTO A CAMPAIGN SONG.

Late in Clinton's '92 presidential run, he had Les Miz's stirring Act I finale played at a New Jersey rally. Our current commander-in-chief took a page from his fellow Democrat's playbook and repeatedly used "One Day More" during the 2008 and 2012 races.

13. THE 2012 FILM VERSION HAD AN UNUSUALLY HUGE SOUND DEPARTMENT.

Director Tom Hooper made the unconventional-though not unprecedented -choice to record his actors live on-set, as opposed to taping their vocals in a studio beforehand. This approach demanded a sound crew that was three times larger than what an average film possesses.

"We all know movie sets are very noisy places," says production sound mixer Simon Hayes. To muffle extraneous footsteps, off-screen carpets were laid down wherever the crew could find space for them. Additionally, a silent wind tunnel was used in lieu of standard wind machines.

14. QUEEN ELIZABETH II ONCE THREW A COMMAND PERFORMANCE IN HONOR OF THE LASTING ANGLO-FRENCH ALLIANCE.

In 2004, she treated French President Jacques Chirac to 40 minutes' worth of Les Miz highlights at Windsor Castle. Also in attendance were British Prime Minster Tony Blair and one Cameron Mackintosh-who'd been knighted in 1996. Though some journalists felt that, given the occasion, presenting a British take on something as quintessentially French as Les Misérables was in poor taste, Mackintosh adamantly supported the Queen's choice.

"This," he said, "is the most successful and most exciting artistic collaboration between France and England ever, and it has a universal story about the triumph of the human spirit. What could be more suitable?"

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14 Revolutionary Facts About Les Misérables

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The world had never seen a musical quite like Les Miz before. After years of tweaks (and some terrible early press), this operatic take on Victor Hugo's epic novel became an international sensation, beloved by millions. Let's cross the barricade and have a closer look. 1. OLIVER! INSPIRED THE SHOW.

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"One Day More": A History of News Les Misérables

Playbill.com offers a look at the history behind the award-winning blockbuster musical Les Misérables.

The megamusical Les Misérables opens on Broadway March 23 for the third time, again at its one-time home, the Imperial Theatre. It first settled into that theatre back in 1987. By then, it had been running in London since 1985. Soon enough, it would blanket the globe, eventually being produced in 42 countries and translated into 21 languages.

Given that monolithic history, it's easy to forget that that the Claude-Michel Schonberg-Alain Boublil musical - like Andrew Lloyd Webber 's before it - began as a kind of high-brow, experimental show. After all, not many people in the early 1980s were in the habit of adapting sprawling Victorian French novels into musicals.

The French composers originally released the musical as a concept album (another Lloyd Webber-like move, and Boublil admitted to have been inspired, in this case, by the composer's Jesus Christ Superstar). Its first production was at a Paris sports arena in 1980. It closed in three months. That would have been it for Les Misérables if someone hadn't sent producer Cameron Mackintosh a copy of the concept album.

Mackintosh didn't just agree to produce an English production of the show; he managed to get the esteemed Royal Shakespeare Company to co-produce, therefore lending the enterprise a patina of respectability. Following two years in development, the English-language version premiered at the Barbican Center in London Oct. 8, 1985. Roger Allam was Javert, the American musical stage star Patti LuPone played the unlucky Fantine, and, as the tormented but virtuous Jean Valjean, directors Trevor Nunn (artistic director at RSC) and John Caird (Nunn's co-director on Nicholas Nickleby) cast Colm Wilkinson, a little-known, 41-year-old, Irish tenor. Wilkinson would gain worldwide fame for his performance, and 30 years later almost completely owes his notoriety to his performance as Valjean.

The British critics did not warm to Les Misérables. ("Stands in the same relation to the original as a singing telegram to an epic," went one line.) But audiences didn't care. The highly emotional score, melodramatic story and exciting turntable staging set theatregoers' hearts aflutter. The show broke box-office records at the Barbican, and the three-month run sold out. In October 1985, it transferred to the West End, where it still runs today. Very quickly into its run, fans adopted the show's new nickname: Les Miz. Many took to attending the show more than once. Tickets were scalped for four times the face price. The show's success stunned many. As British critic Benedict Nightingale wrote in the New York Times in 1986: "According to most of the rules, customs and formulae, Les Misérables ought to be a mega-flop. After all, how many hit musicals have originated in France at all, let alone been adapted by Frenchmen from one of their nation's longer and more earnest 19th-century classics? How many have consisted of recitative and song only, but been presented by a troupe famous for its skill with the spoken word? Indeed, how many have been given their British premieres by the Royal Shakespeare Company in its main Barbican Theater? How many have been cruelly trashed by leading critics? And yet in spite of all this, Les Misérables has managed to transfer to the West End, become as hot a ticket as the eternally resilient Cats."

The original Broadway production wasn't as long-lasting as the London version, but it still managed a run from March 17, 1987, to May 18, 2003, racking up 6,680 performances. The show was nominated for 12 Tony Awards and won eight of those, including Best Musical. Wilkinson repeated his performance as Valjean, which Actors' Equity objected to. But, when Mackintosh threatened not to open the show without Wilkinson, the union acquiesced to the casting.

Like Cats before it and The Phantom of the Opera and Miss Saigon after it, Les Miz strengthened its international currency as a brand by becoming known throughout the world by a symbol. The original poster features a poignant drawing of wide-eyed Paris street waif Cosette, her uncombed long hair tossed by the wind. The image was based on a drawing used on the cover of some of the earlier French-language editions of Victor Hugo 's book. As new productions opened in other cities, designers had fun with this would-be heart-rending image, dressing the waif up in different hats and garb, depending on the place the show was opening in.

After being away from Broadway for five years, a revival opened at the Broadhurst Theatre in 2006. It lasted until 2008. In 2012, a film version was released, giving the property a new injection of life. It starred Hugh Jackman as Valjean, Russell Crowe as Javert and Anne Hathaway as Fantine.

Over the decades, the unlikely RSC show has proved a financial boon to the classical nonprofit, contributing much money to its coffers.

From Colm to Karimloo: Looking Back at 31 Years of Les Misérables

From Colm to Karimloo: Looking Back at 31 Years of Les Misérables

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'One Day More': A History of Les Misérables | Playbill

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"One Day More": A History of News Les Misérables Playbill.com offers a look at the history behind the award-winning blockbuster musical Les Misérables. The megamusical Les Misérables opens on Broadway March 23 for the third time, again at its one-time home, the Imperial Theatre. It first settled into that theatre back in 1987.

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Les Misérables is about the suffering of the powerful, not the poor | Adam Brereton

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Forget the merits of state-supplied childcare - Cameron Mackintosh's rebooted Les Mis is a tale of evil cop versus con. No wonder the Liberal party are fans

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Talking FALSETTOS with Broadway Stars Christian Borle, Andrew Rannells & Stephanie J. Block

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Produced by Paul Wontorek for Broadway.com

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Flashback Friday: Remembering the Original Falsettos as the Cast of 2016 Packs Its Bags | TheaterMania

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Watch the original cast of William Finn and James Lapine's musical perform at the 1992 Tony Awards.

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La Cage aux Folles " We Are What We Are " I am What I Am "

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Look Back at the Original Broadway Production of Photo Features La Cage aux Folles

The Jerry Herman-Harvey Fierstein musical opened August 21, 1983, at the Palace Theatre.

The Jerry Herman-Harvey Fierstein musical La Cage aux Folles opened at Broadway's Palace Theatre August 21, 1983. George Hearn and Gene Barry starred in the adaptation of the classic French play and film about a middle-aged gay couple who are forced to hide their sexual orientation in order to meet the fiancée (and her family) of one of the men's sons.
READ: Inside the Risky, First Out-of-Town Preview of La Cage aux Folles That Put a Gay Love Story Center Stage
In a time when homosexuality had yet to become the basis of a big Broadway musical, La Cage proved to be a huge success, winning the Tony Award for Best Musical, and racking up 1,761 performances. Over the course of the run, other actors to play either Albin or Georges included Larry Kert, Jamie Ross, Walter Charles, and Keith Michell.

Look Back at the Original Broadway Production of La Cage Aux Folles

Look Back at the Original Broadway Production of La Cage Aux Folles

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Look Back at the Original Broadway Production of La Cage aux Folles | Playbill

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Look Back at the Original Broadway Production of Photo Features La Cage aux Folles The Jerry Herman-Harvey Fierstein musical opened August 21, 1983, at the Palace Theatre. The Jerry Herman-Harvey Fierstein musical La Cage aux Folles opened at Broadway's Palace Theatre August 21, 1983.

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When ''La Cage aux Folles'' opened at the Palace Theater this week after a successful run in Boston, both Mr. Barry and Mr. Hearn received favorable reviews.

Mr. Barry chooses to view his role in specifically nonsexual terms. ''I'm not playing a homosexual - I'm playing a person who cares deeply about another person,'' he said. ''The role is loving another person onstage. It doesn't matter whether it's a man, a woman or a giraffe; it has nothing to do with sexuality, as far as I'm concerned. I play the dignity of the man, his concern for his lover and his concern and love for his son.''

In one memorable number called

''Masculinity,'' Albin tries to learn how to tone down his effeminate mannerisms and to walk, sit and butter his toast like John Wayne. For Mr. Hearn and Mr. Barry, mastering their roles meant the reverse process of learning how to substitute new gestures and attitudes for the unconsciously masculine postures they had always taken for granted.

Mr. Hearn said that Albin's mannerisms ''accrued slowly.'' Dancer Acted as Coach

''Arthur Laurents, the director, assigned one of the girl dancers to be my coach,'' the actor explained. ''She would say, 'That's a little male; turn your hand this way.' But really, it's not doing it that's hard, it's letting yourself begin to do it - overcoming that first resistance, and the temptation to signal the audience at some point that 'After all, I'm very masculine.' ''

As Mr. Hearn was working to cultivate effeminacy, Mr. Barry was learning that exaggerated mannerisms did not work for him. ''The tendency is to become broad as you try things, but you experiment and you eliminate,'' he said. ''There may have been a time in rehearsal when I went overboard and did too much, but as we developed it, I kept bringing it closer and closer to myself, without too many manifestations of camp.''

Just as Mr. Barry viewed Georges's love for Albin as his most important quality, Mr. Hearn focused on Albin's vulnerability. ''When we were rehearsing 'Masculinity,' Arthur said, 'Go for the pain, the embarrassment, the humiliation,' '' Mr. Hearn reported. ''He said, 'Always come back to that.' The key to Albin is his vulnerability. He goes through one blow after another, and always tries to redeem his dignity, over and over again.''

Mr. Hearn also drew upon a familiar role model. ''I really think of my mother and father a lot,'' said the actor, who has been married and divorced three times. ''They were together for 52 years, and they couldn't keep their hands off each other after all that time. In the show, when Georges says to Albin, 'After 20 years you still bring a blush to my cheek,' Albin says to him, 'You old fool.' '' Mr. Hearn smiled wistfully. ''That was an absolute line reading from my mother. I can't tell you how many times I've heard her say that just that way. Dressing up is just the cosmetic part of this show. It's about middle- aged love, respect for yourself, growing older. It's a universal love story.'' Apprehensions Were Offset

For both actors, any apprehensions about the show were offset by the recognition that it offered a tremendous career opportunity.

Mr. Barry wanted the role of Georges enough to swallow his pride when Allan Carr, one of the producers, asked him to audition. ''I hadn't auditioned for anybody in 30 years, but I wanted the role enough to do it,'' Mr. Barry said. ''I've been trying to come back to New York for years. I made the mistake of going to Hollywood on what was going to be a short trip, and ended up staying 30 years and cutting off my ties with the theater. I felt a hit musical would bring me right back to where I wanted to be. When you're young, all you really want is success. You want to earn a living more than anything, and Hollywood was very seductive. I couldn't resist it. I was so poor; why not have a nice house, a couple of cars, a swimming pool? But I regret that I didn't keep myself available to both coasts.''

''La Cage aux Folles'' thus seemed to offer the possibility of a certain kind of legitimization. ''The theater gives you the stamp of professional approval - that you were not just a lucky shot,'' Mr. Barry mused. ''It makes right the success you've had. The first few years I was in Hollywood, I had the New York stamp on me: I was a New York actor to the Hollywood people, and they treated me with tremendous respect. But after a while that fades, and you become a Hollywood person. I guess I am re-proving that I belong here. This is the beginning of my re-entry into the world of the theater, to receive the acceptance of my peers and to stay in theater for as many years as I can. It's a thrilling experience for me.''

Unlike Mr. Barry, Mr. Hearn does not have much faith that this role will revolutionize his life. ''When I was playing Sweeney, people said, 'This is going to be the springboard for something big,' '' he recalled. ''I would say, 'What are you talking about - this is something big!' People are saying the same thing about this.''

But at the very least, the show offers a part to make other actors drool. Sitting in his dressing room surrounded by his corsets and sequined dresses, his feathers and his wigs, Mr. Hearn paused for a moment before beginning to transform himself into Zaza once again. ''It's a great role,'' he said fervently, ''one of the most extraordinary for a man to act in, ever.''

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HOW STARS OF 'LA CAGE' GREW INTO THEIR ROLES

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When ''La Cage aux Folles'' opened at the Palace Theater this week after a successful run in Boston, both Mr. Barry and Mr. Hearn received favorable reviews. Mr. Barry chooses to view his role in specifically nonsexual terms. ''I'm not playing a homosexual - I'm playing a person who cares deeply about another person,'' he said.

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For the Original Stars of From the Archives La Cage aux Folles, Playing Gay Roles Was a Bold Move

The original Broadway production of La Cage aux Folles opened on Broadway August 21, 1983.
Digging into the archives, we unearth the original articles printed in the Playbills of yesteryear. The original Broadway production of Jerry Herman's Tony Award-winning musical La Cage aux Folles opened on Broadway August 21, 1983. The production would go on to win six 1984 Tony Awards, including Best Score (Herman), Best Book (Harvey Fierstein), Best Direction (Laurents), and Best Musical. In the following interview, George Hearn and Gene Barry, who starred in the central roles of Albin (Zsa Zsa) and Georges-a middle-aged gay couple whose love story was the heart of this unconventional new musical-discuss the decision to take on the roles in an era when playing gay characters on stage was still a risky move.
From all outward appearances, here were two leading roles in a flashy, $5 million Broadway musical (opening in New York at the Palace Theatre on August 21, 1983) for which most acting pros would kill!

There was the diva, Zsa Zsa, a showy part, a character who possessed not only heart, but also a dazzling, bugle-beaded wardrobe plus at least two show-stopping musical numbers crafted by composer/lyricist, Jerry ( Hello, Dolly!, Mame) Herman.

And there was Georges, the solid role of Zsa Zsa's attentive and patient lover and mentor, a character of charm and warmth who also could count at least two heartfelt, show-stopping love ballads as his.

The whole package looked like a first class opportunity for success, with Arthur Laurents ( West Side Story, Gypsy) directing, Harvey Fierstein (Torch Song Trilogy) writing the book, Jerry Herman handling the music, and Theoni V. Aldredge (Dreamgirls) creating the costumes.

But Gene Barry and George Hearn, the two actors earmarked for the lead roles, had qualms!

La Cage aux Folles, the Broadway musical based on the French stage play which became the hit movie, is, after all, a blatantly heartfelt love story about two aging homosexuals. And there were no two ways about it. Both actors were going to have to play it gay.

Ultimately, the two succumbed to the lure of the touching, dignified book, the strong hummable score, and the commitment by all those involved to create a moving, if somewhat unconventional musical love story. Each actor overcame his personal obstacles.

"It's funny, but I never thought twice about playing a cold-blooded murderer like Sweeney Todd," says George Hearn, who acted the demon barber of Fleet Street in the critically acclaimed Harold Prince/Stephen Sondheim musical.

"But this gave me pause." Hearn is seated backstage in his dressing room, a regular Joe in his trousers and white, long-sleeved shirt, open at the neck. But surrounding him are an assortment of primary-colored gowns with sequins and beads, hung one next to the other, and a shelf filled with matching high-heeled shoes. They are his costumes, the wardrobe in which he parades onstage, convincing us of the reality of Zaza, drag queen extraordinaire, and the alter ego of Albin, the domestically inclined partner of a gay household.

"I had seen the movie," Hearn recalls, "and I thought that if you got the right people together, it could be a romp. Then it left my mind . . . until I got a call to put on a dress and a wig and pair of high heels, and come out and audition.

"I had to think about that," Hearn says. "I mean, even Tootsie doesn't do this.
"In that film, Dustin Hoffman impersonates a woman as a means to an end. But in La Cage, it's really dressing up in drag!"

Hearn's friend, actress Colleen Dewhurst, finally convinced him to audition. "She said, 'Don't be a fool. You'll have a great time.' And so I went and auditioned in a bright red gown and heels. I was a bundle of conflicting emotions, but I did it. I sang 'My Heart Belongs to Daddy.'"

Everybody loved him and Hearn softened to the idea of playing Albin. "Arthur Laurents asked me, 'Really, what are you afraid of?' I said, 'I suppose I'm afraid of exposing a female side of myself and of looking foolish.' But Arthur reassured me." Laurents, in fact, said he was "overpowered" by George Hearn's "sense of dignity," in the audition.

Even though the character which Gene Barry was going to portray did not require "dress up" in gowns and high heels, the territory seemed just as perilous for the actor whose decidedly masculine projections, in starring roles for television's "Bat Masterson" series and "Burke's Law," became something of a trademark.

"My two boys said, 'Go on, have fun.' My 16-year-old daughter even suggested I try for the other role," Barry recalls with amusement. He auditioned for producers Allan Carr and Fritz Holt in Los Angeles. "I did it with a little 'flavor,'" he says. "I sang 'What Kind of Fool Am I' and interjected a little of 'Yesterday, When I was Young.' By the time I had finished auditioning I had made up my mind. I had to play the role. And then I went to Jerry Herman's house in New York to hear the music at one of the last backers' auditions, and I was absolutely enthralled. I felt so moved by the size and impact of the music."

Barry, who began his career in the musical theatre, was ready to make a Broadway comeback. And La Cage aux Folles was going to be his vehicle.

Rehearsals brought new trepidations from the actors about their roles. Director Laurents comforted them. "It's the characters the audience will be interested in, not their private lives.

"I refused to acknowledge the gayness as a problem," Laurents continues. "And they had to trust me. This was not going to be any camp show. We really wanted to go for 'heart' in La Cage. I always felt the thing to go for was emotion. These two people care for each other.

They've been together 20 years. Ultimately, I wanted Albin and Georges to be two characters anybody in the audience could and would accept. The show certainly has political importance, because it says 'whoever you are, whatever you are, be it!' But we never hit anybody over the head with it."

"When I walked into rehearsals, there was a muslin dress and a pair of high heels for me to use. I was still nervous," George Hearn admits. "And Arthur said, 'Listen, I don't want to have anyone feel pressured. You can wear the dress and the shoes when you want, when you feel comfortable about them. But use them.' And I did," says Hearn.

The company had an extended rehearsal period of two months. "We really grew to love the characters, and we adored the script and the music," says Hearn. What everyone began to realize, during rehearsals, was the universality of the show. "It's about middle-aged love.

There's nothing prurient about it. And I was impressed watching Arthur and Jerry and Harvey and Allan work together. It was a totally ego-less seaming. It's as if everyone knew there was something really precious in hand, something that had to be cared for and protected."

The show opened in Boston without much anticipation, and then everything went wild. Critics loved La Cage aux Folles. Audiences, eight performances a week, rose to their feet to roar their approval at the curtain calls.

"I have never been in something that's had this kind of acceptance," says Gene Barry. "Heterosexual couples see themselves in Georges and Albin. So does everybody in the audience. It's an amazing transference. What a beautiful gift this play is. To us, the actors, and to the audiences.

"One of my favorite lines in the show is when the son Georges conceived in a moment of abandon, the son Georges and Albin then raised from infancy, brings home his fiancée, and she's asked about us. 'Did you know about them?' And her answer is, 'No. But now that I do, it doesn't matter. I like them.'"

"Well," says George Hearn, "that's how the audiences feel when they've shared this story." And then he talks about a woman who came to see him after a performance to say thank you. "You gave us the best time,' she said. And then she said, . . . 'and I have a beautiful gay son.'" Hearn pauses a moment, his eyes filling with emotion. "I love that," he says, softly.

"Besides, I think there's something important here. This show is going to change attitudes in subtle ways, and to be a part of anything that attacks bigotry is something of which to be proud."

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For the Original Stars of La Cage aux Folles, Playing Gay Roles Was a Bold Move | Playbill

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For the Original Stars of From the Archives La Cage aux Folles, Playing Gay Roles Was a Bold Move The original Broadway production of La Cage aux Folles opened on Broadway August 21, 1983. Digging into the archives, we unearth the original articles printed in the Playbills of yesteryear.

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La Cage aux Folles is proof of theatre's ability to shift sexual attitudes

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Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein's 1983 musical has been revived once more. The show struck an important, rarely acknowledged blow for equality

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Falsettos' Story of Love & Family Amid the Onset of AIDS Is Timeless

"I'm trying to keep sane as the rules keep changing. Families aren't what they were," sings Trina, a mom raising her bar mitzvah-age son with her ex-husband Marvin, his new boyfriend Whizzer, and her new boyfriend - the psychiatrist - Mendel. Composer and lyricist William Finn and James Lapine, who wrote the book and directed March of the Falsettos in the late 1970s, created a story of love and family that predated by nearly 40 years the modern families that proliferate in inclusive pop culture today

Cut to Falsettoland, which Finn and Lapine created 10 years after March of the Falsettos as an extension of the story that began with In Trousers in the '70s, and the lesbian doctor Charlotte sings "Something bad is happening." She's come home to her partner, the kosher caterer Cordelia, from a day at the hospital circa 1981 where young men continue to pour in with a mysterious illness. Written nearly a decade into the AIDS epidemic but taking place just two years after March of the Falsettos, the song taps into the fear of the unknown that plagued the early days before there were words for HIV and AIDS. By the early '90s, March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland were combined into a single musical that would become Falsettos and would leave the era's audiences laughing and sobbing at both the show's thoughtful treatment of queer extended family and the looming AIDS epidemic.

With the help of wunderkind Jordan Roth, president of Jujamcyn Theaters and the producer who shepherded Frozen, Mean Girls, and the revival of Angels in America to Broadway, Finn and Lapine's work that both anticipated modern families and is a stark reminder of the plague that galvanized queer communities premiered in San Francisco last week and heads to Los Angeles in mid-April.

On the day of the Falsettos first national tour premiere in San Francisco in late March, Finn, Lapine, and Roth were reminded of the show's early days of a production at Connecticut's Hartford Stage that ended with the unveiling of panels of the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

"I was [just] talking with Lapine about that Hartford production, because here in San Francisco, they brought two panels of the quilt, the AIDS quilt," Roth tells The Advocate. "They are on display in the lobby and I literally have chills in my body."

There was no predicting that the Falsettos revival that starred Christian Borle, Andrew Rannells, and Stephanie J. Block would arrive on Broadway on the cusp of more turmoil for LGBTQ people following the 2016 election. But the revival, with a first act that predates the incipient stages of the epidemic by about two years with Marvin coming to terms with falling in love with Whizzer and leaving Trina, with whom he has a son, was right on time. The second act, which sees the family planning for Jason's bar mitzvah as Dr. Charlotte alludes to the AIDS epidemic and Whizzer falls ill, was also prescient, not only because of the current political climate but at a time when prevention methods such as PrEP have often relegated important conversations about HIV and AIDS to the back burner.
Audrey Cardwell and Bryonha Marie Parham
"In terms of the story of what was going on in the '80s, or about to go on in our play, it's a good thing to remind people of and to pass on to further generations," Lapine tells The Advocate about the current tour. "I'm thrilled that the show has lasted this long and is being embraced again, just to remind us of what time was like there. And then also that it's, in some ways, not a period piece. What it has to say about people and sex and family is still relevant to us today."

For a time in the late '90s and through the 2000s, as lifesaving drug cocktails were introduced, narratives around HIV and AIDS in pop culture were hard to come by. But even the Falsettos revival that premiered three years ago telegraphed last year's emergence of period pieces like Bohemian Rhapsody, Can You Ever Forgive Me? and Mapplethorpe on the big screen and FX's Pose on television, all of which brought stories of survivors and those lost to the epidemic to light.

"I think maybe after the '80s, '90s, it was such a traumatic time, the generation who lived through [the height of the AIDS epidemic] didn't necessarily want to revisit it," Lapine says. "But I think now we have perspective on it."

"It's important [to note] that a lot of what's happening today is because of what happened during the '80s. [Society] didn't know who was gay for the most part," Finn says regarding closeted people who were exposed as gay through contracting HIV. "When your neighbor or your uncle or your cousin all of a sudden starts dying..."

Speaking with the Advocate minutes prior to a matinee of Falsettos in San Francisco, Finn, who also created The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and Lapine, who directed that show along with Stephen Sondheim classics including Into the Woods and Sunday in the Park With George, say they sound like "old farts." Their concern: that they've encountered young queer people who, through breakthroughs in treatment and prevention, don't have to truly be aware of the impact of AIDS on the community.

"First of all, it [AIDS] pretty much decimated the artistic community, which was hit very hard by it. I think it's interesting that a lot of young gay people don't realize the importance of that here in that period. It's interesting for them to have a sense of the reality of it," Lapine says. "One of the reasons I wanted to do [the revival] ... I was watching The Normal Heart with my assistant, who is a very polite woman, just graduated from NYU. At intermission, she just looked at me and she said, 'Well, I kind of know about AIDS, but was it really like this?'"

The first national touring company of Falsettos

"It's important that [younger generations] know that what is happening today, the freedoms that we have today, are all because of time we spent during the '80s," Finn adds.

While Lapine and Finn acknowledge their perspective of bearing witness to the devastation, Roth, who is 43 and was a teen obsessed with the show when it came out, says that Falsettos couldn't be more of the moment, which influenced his decision to revive it.

"Whenever you're reviving a show, it's always, Well, is it going to be relevant today?" Roth says. "It turns out that Falsettos was so way ahead of its time that it's kind of shocking that it was as successful and as beautifully received as it was originally. Really, [ Falsettos], by all rights, would have been written today. It is so exactly what we are thinking about, grappling with, talking about, struggling with. What is the family?"

Finn and Lapine's creation was a benchmark not only for its depiction of extended queer families but also for its inclusion of women in gay narratives. While a show like The Boys in the Band in the late '60s was groundbreaking in terms of being among the first to portray gay life, Falsettos is also sympathetic to the character of Trina. She grapples with her husband leaving her for a man in the first act in the tour de force musical number "I'm Breaking Down" and also sings about unconditional love in "Holding to the Ground" as her heart breaks for her son Jason and for Marvin as it becomes clear that they are going to lose Whizzer. Beyond that, the show was also one of the first to portray lesbians in musical theater with the characters of Charlotte and Cordelia, an inclusion that pays homage to queer women who stepped in to help care for men with AIDS.

"Gay men's lives have a lot of women in them. This is important to come into the conversation," Finn says of how there wasn't even a question as to whether or not to include women in the story. "They should not be ignored."

Roth agrees that none of the stories Falsettos represents can be extricated from the other.

"It's about us and is all of us, men, women, gay people, lesbians, parents, children. That's our family. And you don't tell half the story of the family - rather, you don't tell the story of half the family," Roth says. "You can say with great certainty that Falsettos is Marvin's story, is Trina's story, is Whizzer's story, is all of these people's stories."

"That's why it stays with us. The us there is all of us, " Roth adds.

The first national tour of Falsettos runs at San Francisco's SHN Golden Gate Theatre through April 14 and at Los Angeles's Ahmanson Theatre from April 16 through May 19.
Watch a clip from the first national tour below.

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Falsettos' Story of Love & Family Amid the Onset of AIDS Is Timeless

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Falsettos' Story of Love & Family Amid the Onset of AIDS Is Timeless "I'm trying to keep sane as the rules keep changing. Families aren't what they were," sings Trina, a mom raising her bar mitzvah-age son with her ex-husband Marvin, his new boyfriend Whizzer, and her new boyfriend - the psychiatrist - Mendel.

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By some miracle, Falsettos, a musical about 1979-1981 that premiered in 1992, is potentially more political and poignant in this 2016 revival than i...

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Why Falsettos' Return to Broadway Is Needed Now More Than Ever
Photography by Kareem Black. Styling by Stephanie Tricola at Judy Casey. Groomer: Joanna Pensinger at Exclusive Artists Management using SK-II. Shirt, tuxedo, and bow tie by Tom Ford.
In 1992, the satirical revue Forbidden Broadway spoofed William Finn and James Lapine's acclaimed musical Falsettos with a parody titled "Marketing Falsettos," a chuckle at the challenge of selling a tuner about the AIDS crisis to the blue-haired Broadway crowd. For the show's producers, however, this was no laughing matter. Falsettos had enjoyed successful runs off-Broadway as two separate one-acts, 1981's March of the Falsettos and 1990's Falsettoland, and the '90s were becoming the era of important gay plays, with works like Angels in America and Jeffrey. But queer story lines, particularly in mainstream theater, were still a risky proposition. Despite rave reviews, an ardent following, and two Tony Awards, Falsettos shuttered at a financial loss after a valiant year-plus stint on Broadway.

Now, as the musical returns to the Great White Way a quarter of a century later, LGBT culture dominates. Even right-wing attacks are essentially a reactionary reflection of an unprecedented queer visibility. The big question looms: Is it time to bring back Falsettos, or is the show dated?

Its casting certainly feels fresh. Two-time Tony winner Christian Borle and Andrew Rannells (who's played queer in HBO's Girls and NBC's The New Normal) are set to make a dynamic Marvin, the young Jewish father who leaves his wife for a man, and Whizzer, that man, who then gets sick with AIDS. The pairing marks a departure from the past, when traditional leading men were employed to compensate for the overt queerness of shows (including, arguably, Falsettos). At the 1984 Tonys, when George Hearn won for playing a drag queen in La Cage aux Folles, he performed its song "I Am What I Am" contradictorily out of drag.

The product of another generation, Rannells is glad to be cast again in a gay role. "There are so many different stories in our community," he says. "I could play a gay person the rest of my career. That's not limiting to me."

Of his straight co-star, Rannells admits to having "a real chip on my shoulder about straight actors playing gay." But, he adds, "Christian as Marvin is totally fine. He's such a huge talent, and there's no fear because he gets it and is part of our community, an ally with a capital A."

Borle balks at labels and is a staunch believer in actors keeping their personal lives private - or at least keeping his own private. "In a way I'd rather be an actor that people don't know," he says, "because the job is to convince you that I'm this other person."

Perhaps Borle represents a new league of stars who are not presumed to be straight until proven gay, as once was the case. On the contrary, having made his name in musical theater and becoming a recognizable face playing gay on NBC's Smash, Borle is often presumed to be gay, especially when on Fire Island with his friend, the agent Joe Machota. "I'll be getting an iced coffee, chatting with the guy behind the counter, and Joe will go, 'I'm standing right here!' and storm out," Borle says. "Our joke is that people say, 'Christian is totally gay - and miserable.' I don't feel compelled to dissuade them. It's not like I'm tweeting about my heterosexuality."

It's a marked difference from Michael Rupert, the original Marvin, who identified as bisexual to the press while promoting Falsettos. Whether Rupert was or is, there have certainly been many gay actors for whom "bi was a kind of purgatory, an in-between transitional step," says Borle. "But even the classifications of sexuality are, what, in the thousands now? There's a much more fluid spectrum, and within that, who's to say? For example, I've been straight all my life. What happens when I fall madly in love with Andrew Rannells?"

Gone, too, are the parameters of the 1992 production, which would seem rather chaste by today's standards. "Christian and I just made out for the dance break," says Rannells. "We're going to have the latitude to explore this physical relationship. We're both sort of tactile people."

But if audiences can expect some flesh, they should also anticipate an unsanitized, very real depiction of a gay relationship - not, as Borle puts it, "a gay fairy tale or some kind of wonderland where everything will be fine and 'We're people too!' "

Whizzer, for example, is hardly innocent. "He isn't a hustler, but he's trying to get what he wants," says Rannells, who plays the character. "I've always thought of him as a seducer. There's gotta be something about him to make Marvin leave his wife."

We've seen Rannells embody this type before, whether it's Elijah scheming to bag a sugar daddy on Girls or Elder Price praying to Heavenly Father for a mission to Orlando in Broadway's The Book of Mormon. His flair for channeling brazen ambition should serve him well in his portrayal of Whizzer, who in the first act of Falsettos sings, "Nothing is everything to me, except sex and money."

Act Two forces Whizzer to face his mortality, as he falls ill with an expediently terminal, yet-to-be-named disease. Rannells has proved himself the man for both aspects of the role, with his tender performance in the Broadway production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch in 2014. The sympathetic quality he exhibited then will be essential in conveying the emotional arc of Falsettos, which depends largely on the audience's investment in Whizzer within his and Marvin's non-nuclear family.

AIDS may have a name now, but it certainly has no cure. Rannells worries that "there's a complacency about the epidemic because of all the medical advances and PrEP," and he hopes to remind audiences that once upon a time, it wasn't as simple as taking a pill.

Lapine, who has returned to direct the new production, remembers witnessing the early stages of the plague when March of the Falsettos opened in 1981.

"A friend of mine brought an infectious-diseases doctor to the show," he says. "I asked him, 'What is this gay cancer thing I'm reading about?' Ten years later we knew we had to write a second act about it. It's very hard to explain to people what that time was like, particularly in the theater, where we lost so many, and in New York. It was really, deeply scary. The stigmatization of it all was just awful. I'm glad to be revisiting that, in a way."

Perhaps the moment for a Falsettos revival has come. Although Ronald Reagan remained silent while AIDS ravaged entire communities, Finn, the musical's composer and lyricist, says he "looks like a statesman" compared to Donald Trump. With so much at stake in the world right now, this show may be more urgent than ever.
Falsettos opens October 27 at the Walter Kerr Theatre in New York. Like what you see here? Subscribe and be the first to receive the latest issue of Out. Subscribe to print here and receive a complimentary digital subscription.

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Why Falsettos' Return to Broadway Is Needed Now More Than Ever

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Why Falsettos' Return to Broadway Is Needed Now More Than Ever Photography by Kareem Black. Styling by Stephanie Tricola at Judy Casey. Groomer: Joanna Pensinger at Exclusive Artists Management using SK-II. Shirt, tuxedo, and bow tie by Tom Ford.

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NEW YORK ( JTA) - The opening number in the Broadway musical "Falsettos" - currently being revived on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre - is called "Four Jews in a Room Bitching."

Featuring sample lyrics like "I'm neurotic, he's neurotic, they're neurotic, we're neurotic. Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch," it immediately places the audience in the often humorous environment of Jewish neuroses and self-deprecation.

"The people I know are kind of neurotic and very funny and quick-witted, and that's what I was trying to write," said William Finn, the show's composer and lyricist, who also co-wrote the book with James Lapine. "I was trying to set up a world where that was the tenor of the conversation."

The critically acclaimed production of "Falsettos," running through Jan. 8, was praised for remaining relevant, even though times have changed - marriage equality is a reality and AIDS is no longer a death sentence. Yet the tribulations of love and family are timeless, and the show also remains an accurate depiction of modern Judaism.

"Falsettos" actually began as two one-act musicals -"March of the Falsettos" was written in 1981 and "Falsettoland" in 1990. In 1992, the two were combined into Act 1 and Act 2 of the Broadway musical.

"Four Jews in a Room Bitching" was supposed to be the title of "March of the Falsettos" until Lapine, who directed the original production and is also directing the revival, insisted Finn change it - Lapine said he wouldn't direct a show with that name.

In Act 1, Marvin (played in the revival by Christian Borle), a selfish but likable man, tries to navigate relationships with his ex-wife Trina (Stephanie J. Block), his boyfriend Whizzer (Andrew Rannells), his psychiatrist Mendel (Brandon Uranowitz) and his son, Jason (Anthony Rosenthal).

Act 2 takes place two years later, in 1981. Marvin and Trina are fighting over planning Jason's bar mitzvah when Whizzer falls ill with the disease that would later be known as AIDS. Jason wants to cancel the bar mitzvah, but in a moving conclusion, ultimately decides to hold the coming-of-age rite in Whizzer's hospital room.

The Marvin character actually first appeared in an earlier one-act, "In Trousers," in 1979.

"He was imperfect, and I found that he could contain a lot of the misery and humanity that I was trying to express," Finn said about why he kept coming back to him.

Now in 2016, Finn is revisiting Marvin again.

"I'm shocked how well it's stood the test of time," he said. "Thirty years later, it could have been written yesterday and I can't tell you how that pleases me because I was petrified that it wasn't going to hold up."

Finn spoke to JTA about his own bar mitzvah, why the show is so Jewish and more.
JTA: A bar mitzvah is a big part of the show. Did you have a bar mitzvah? What do you remember about it?
Finn: I certainly had a bar mitzvah. I remember doing not only my haftarah, but two other Torah portions - and I remember always going for the high notes. I wanted to impress the chorus. In fact [in "Falsettos"], the haftarah Jason starts singing was originally my haftarah - and then I got bored in the middle writing it. Then I just started writing a few Hebrew words because I knew I wanted to end with "abba"- father. That's why it doesn't make any sense if you know Hebrew. I was just musicalizing words.
What was your Jewish upbringing like?
My rabbi was Rabbi Harold Kushner, who wrote "When Bad Things Happen to Good People." I went to Hebrew school and then I went to Hebrew high school at Temple Israel in Natick [Massachusetts].
How would you describe the role Judaism played in your life then and now?
Well, I'm a big Jew. I now belong to Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the gay and lesbian temple in New York City. They just moved to a new building, the first time they've had a permanent home, and I gave the biggest contribution I've ever given because I think it's really important that there be a temple like that for those people. Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum is a wonderful, brilliant gal and an inspirational rabbi. I enjoy going to services. I just don't do it as frequently as I should. And I write songs for them occasionally.
You mentioned that it's important that there be a synagogue like this. As a gay man, were you always in an accepting Jewish community?
I've been going to this temple for a long time. No one calls it temple, only I do. And, of course, there was nothing bad since there was a temple for people like me - there was of course no resistance.
In writing "Falsettos," did you always intend for Judaism to be such a big part of the show?
Yes. Well, when you start out a show with the song "Four Jews in a Room Bitching," there better be a payoff at the end. And the bar mitzvah [scene] I find incredibly moving. There's so much about what it means to be a man in the show. It's not only the kid becoming a man - it's kind of all the men becoming men. It's a metaphor that resonates.
Can you talk about writing "Four Jews in a Room Bitching?" How did that idea come to you?
I know exactly where it happened: I was walking across Central Park going to my friend's house; she lived on 68th and Third. I live on the Upper West Side, much higher. I was right around the Reservoir and thought of "Four Jews in a Room Bitching" and I got [hums the melody] - and I did not want to forget that, so I'm humming this for however long it takes me. I'm not sure why I didn't take a cab, but I'm sure I couldn't afford a cab at that time. She had a piano, so I went to her house and I just wrote it down immediately.
I also wanted to talk about "Miracle of Judaism," Jason's song about which girls he should invite to his bar mitzvah, and "Another Miracle of Judaism," in which Jason tells God he will have a bar mitzvah if Whizzer doesn't die. The first one is funny, but when it comes back, it's heartbreaking.
I'm not sure I knew how it was going to play out, that it was going to end up so moving. I didn't know when I was writing the first "Miracle of Judaism" that he was going to sing it as he was batting [he plays baseball in this scene], but that worked out well. When you put things together, you discover things that you didn't know you knew. I so much love "Another Miracle of Judaism" because it's so incredibly moving where he talks to God asking him to save Whizzer. Everyone's turning out to be mensches because they didn't start out that way.
Why did you decide to have the bar mitzvah in the hospital room?
Basically, we knew that there was going to be another [musical after "March of the Falsettos"], and we had talked about there being AIDS. And I said: "Yeah, but I can't have AIDS be peripheral in the show, and I don't know that I could write about AIDS head-on because the horror is too real and I don't want to trivialize it."

[Then] I had a dream. I always forget my dreams, but in this dream, Jason's getting bar mitzvahed, they fight about the bar mitzvah, Whizzer gets sick, and Jason decides to have the bar mitzvah in the hospital room. I dreamt it, called Lapine the next day and said, "Let's have a reading in two months" - and we did.
"Falsettos" is running on Broadway and so is a revival of "Fiddler on the Roof." These are probably two of the most Jewish musicals ever written. What do you think about having your musical running on Broadway at the same time as "Fiddler"?
I loved "Fiddler." That is a beautiful production and it's a beautiful show. Once I was lucky enough to see a version of it with [lyricist] Sheldon Harnick sitting next to me, and just his being there made me sob during the whole thing. He's so lovely.

I was at this talkback [after "Falsettos"] the other day and a young girl said, "I'm Jewish, but I've never felt more Jewish than at this show," and I said, "I don't know what that means, but I take it as a compliment."

Trending on JTA

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The Jewish story behind the Broadway hit 'Falsettos' - Jewish Telegraphic Agency

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NEW YORK ( JTA) - The opening number in the Broadway musical "Falsettos" - currently being revived on Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre - is called "Four Jews in a Room Bitching." Featuring sample lyrics like "I'm neurotic, he's neurotic, they're neurotic, we're neurotic.

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ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Long before there was "Transparent" or "Modern Family," there was "Falsettos," a frank, funny musical about a Jewish New Yorker who leaves his wife and son for a man. This causes big reverberations in his family. The show, parts of which are 35 years old, is getting a revival on Broadway. Jeff Lunden has this report on how well it's held up, but first a note - you'll hear slang from the '80s which some consider offensive today.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FOUR JEWS IN A ROOM BITCHING")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTORS: (As characters, singing) Four Jews in a room bitching - four Jews in a room plot a crime. I'm bitching.

JEFF LUNDEN, BYLINE: The first act of "Falsettos" premiered in a tiny theater off Broadway in 1981. Former New York Times drama critic Frank Rich says he was bowled over by how the show captured a neurotic New York energy.

FRANK RICH: Just to be hit by this piece was astounding.

LUNDEN: With the score by William Finn and directed and co-authored by James Lapine, it was a quirky examination of the intersection of gay and Jewish life on New York's Upper West Side. Nine years later, the same team returned with another one-act, "Falsettoland." In this one, the same characters confronted the AIDS crisis.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "SOMETHING BAD IS HAPPENING")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS #1: (As Charlotte, singing) Something bad is happening. Something very bad is happening. Something stinks - something immoral. Something so bad that words have lost their meaning.

RICH: The political context, of course, was fraught because it was still perhaps something of a dicey and alarming subject for a lot of Americans.

LUNDEN: Director James Lapine.

JAMES LAPINE: And these people, who might have been immature and carefree at one point, now how to deal with the grimmest of realities.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FALSETTOLAND/ABOUT TIME")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As Marvin, singing) It's about time to grow up, don't you think? It's about time to grow up and face the music. It's about time.

LUNDEN: In 1992, the two one-act shows were combined into a single show, "Falsettos." It moved to Broadway and Finn and Lapine won Tony Awards. Now they're teaming up again for the revival. But 24 years later in a world of marriage equality and when HIV is no longer a death sentence, will the show feel quaint?

WILLIAM FINN: I was petrified.

LUNDEN: That's writer William Finn. He says "Falsettos" has been performed all over the world, but this is its first Broadway revival.

FINN: You know, people were saying, aren't you excited the show is being revived? And I was really nauseated. I've seen it one time in the past five years. And I thought it was all right, but I didn't know that other people would.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MY FATHER'S A HOMO")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As Jason, singing) My father's a homo. My mother was not thrilled at all.

(LAUGHTER)

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #2: (As Jason, singing) Father - homo. What about chromosomes? Do they carry? Will they carry? Who's the homo now?

LUNDEN: To give a sense of how far popular culture has moved, director James Lapine says the young actor who plays Jason, the boy who's preparing for his bar mitzvah, had to be given a history lesson.

LAPINE: The guys in the cast were explaining to the boy what gay life was like - that - you know, he's growing up with there being no stigma against being gay. This is a very different time. And to explain to him, as his character, that would be a very awkward thing to have his father become gay.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "TIGHT-KNIT FAMILY")

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As Marvin, singing) But I want a tight-knit my family. I want a group that harmonizes. I want my wife and kid and friend to pretend that time will mend our pain.

LUNDEN: And Frank Rich says for generations who didn't live through the AIDS crisis, bringing "Falsettos" back isn't quaint at all. It's an important reminder of a devastating time.

RICH: It's probably a good thing, among its aesthetic virtues, "Falsettos" will remind people of a bit of history that seems now to be vanishing, as so much does in America, to amnesia.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTRESS #2: (As Cordelia, singing) We don't know what time will bring.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As Whizzer, singing) I have a clue.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #3: (As Marvin) (Singing) I have, too.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTORS: (As Cordelia, Whizzer, and Marvin) Let's look like we haven't and each say nothing.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #4: (As Whizzer, singing) Sky.

LUNDEN: Director James Lapine says as long as there are shadows hanging over us, "Falsettos" will always be relevant. It opens tonight on Broadway. For NPR News, I'm Jeff Lunden in New York.

UNIDENTIFIED ACTORS: (As Cordelia, Whizzer, Marvin, and Charlotte) (Singing) What a group we four are - four unlikely lovers. And we vow that we will buy the farm, arm in arm. Four unlikely lovers...

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'Falsettos' Still Resonates In Changed Social Landscape

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When Falsettos first premiered in 1981, this frank, funny musical about gay, Jewish life in New York City was covering new territory. Now a revival is in the works, but will it still feel resonant in an age where gay rights have become mainstream?

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William Finn Explains How Special Features Falsettos Came to Be

The Tony Award-winning writer takes us back to the moments he found inspiration for March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland-what is now Falsettos, the musical being revived on Broadway.

Falsettos begins with four Jews in a room bitching. In fact, that's the name of the opening number, and it was also once a possible title for March of the Falsettos, the 1981 one-act musical that now occupies the first half of Falsettos.

The second half is the 1990 Off-Broadway musical Falsettoland. When the twain met on Broadway two years later, the result made a two-time Tony winner of composer-lyricist William Finn, and that is what is rating a 2016 reprise at the Walter Kerr Theatre, opening October 27.

The quintessential Finn song, "Four Jews in a Room Bitching" is delivered by a quirky quartet of contemporary males, kvetching, baring angst and bouncing off the walls of a psychiatrist's office. First and foremost, in the room where it happens, is Marvin, the neurotic everynerd invented for In Trousers, the first of Finn's Marvin Trilogy. Spinning dizzily around Marvin here are his ten-year-old son, his two-faced psychiatrist and the man for whom he left his wife. All four join hands for a hymn on the varieties of masculinity, with the adults affecting falsettos to match the boy's voice.

Finn can still recall the moment that "Who is man enough to march to 'March of the Falsettos'?" came to him.

"I was walking through Central Park to a voice lesson, and it popped into my head," says Finn. "As soon as I got there, I sat down at the piano and got it."

An earlier jaunt through Central Park to visit an East Side pal ushered the curtain-raiser into his brain: "First I thought of 'four Jews in a room bitching,' then the melody came to that. I just kept on repeating it over and over until I got it on paper."

Finn admits that his music is word-led, but only up to a certain point. "I have to write the first line first. Then, I write the music and dummy in the words-but my dummies are good, so, when I go back and write the whole thing, it's not hard. But, without that opening line, I cannot write the song."

Falsettoland and March of the Falsettos were co-written almost a decade apart by Finn and his director, James Lapine, and coupling them on a single bill doubled their strength.

The two shows span only three years-from 1979 to 1981-but they're as different as day and night, as comedy and tragedy. In between came the AIDS crisis, which devastated and disfigured the gay landscape of Marvin's world so, with Falsettos, you enter laughing and exit crying. As Frank Rich said in the New York Times of this inspired fusion, Falsettos "gains exponentially in power by being seen only 15 minutes, instead of nine years, [apart]."

"James is a remarkable person," says Finn, "so much fun, so focused, so fertile. He has so many ideas. When I get stuck-and I often get stuck-he goes, 'What about this?' 'What about this?' 'What about this?' 'What about this?' I'm in awe of him!"

Unless you count A New Brain, which got an Encores! restaging last summer, this is Finn's first major revival, and it is outfitted mostly with old Finn friends. Christian Borle-coming directly from portraying William Shakespeare to play the needy, nebbish Marvin-got his first big part in New York from Finn (the song cycle Elegies), as did Betsy Wolfe who started on the road in his 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. Andrew Rannells, cast here as the home-wrecker Whizzer, was working on Finn's Little Miss Sunshine when he suddenly heeded a higher calling (The Book of Mormon). Completing the cast are Stephanie J. Block, Brandon Uranowitz, Tracie Thoms and Anthony Rosenthal.

A frequent and easy worrier, Finn frets about how Falsettos will play in 2016. "It's a different world we live in now, so I wonder how it's going to be received. I don't even know if the show evinces the horribleness of the times because it's talking about family and a lot of other things-in a world that is being devoured by AIDS."

Aside from rubbing up against those tragic times, he says Falsettos is the least autobiographical of all his works. "There are aspects, of course, but the events of the show aren't the events of my own life. At the time, I couldn't write about anything else. I couldn't not write about it. It was so much a part of all of our lives."

Of course, Finn filters these turbulent years through his own idiosyncratic sensibility, leaning more often than not on the ethnic, especially during the story's lighter moments. As the song "Watching Jason (Play Baseball)" proclaims: We're watching Jewish boys, Who cannot play baseball. For Finn, "Unfortunately, I did [play baseball]. I was in the very Little League-a sad little baseball player. When we did the show in L.A., I asked Sandy Koufax to the opening, and he was offended-not at all pleased."

Then there is the fallout from Marvin's self-centeredness and sexual straddling. With the left-behind wife lamenting "I'm Breaking Down" and an offspring belting "My Father's a Homo," it's easy to trace a line straight to Fun Home, which, it's rumored, Finn was asked to write. "The right people wrote it," he is quick to say, "and the show is wonderful. I just felt that I'd already written it with Falsettos."

Take a Look Back at the Original Broadway Run of Falsettos on Their 25th Anniversary

Take a Look Back at the Original Broadway Run of Falsettos on Their 25th Anniversary

18 PHOTOS

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William Finn Explains How Falsettos Came to Be | Playbill

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William Finn Explains How Special Features Falsettos Came to Be The Tony Award-winning writer takes us back to the moments he found inspiration for March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland-what is now Falsettos, the musical being revived on Broadway. Falsettos begins with four Jews in a room bitching.

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Betty Buckley - Memory (1983 Tony Awards)

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The cast of the revival of "Cats" on Broadway in 2016. Credit Credit Richard Termine for The New York Times

It would take you a long time to meet someone who dislikes cats as much as I do. Before you crumple this paper into a ball, or click away, I admit that my antipathy is irrational. I find cats standoffish and enigmatic, and don't get me started on the cat litter. Thus, when I saw "Cats" the musical sometime in the 1980s, I went reluctantly.

I enjoyed the show more than I expected, considering it was all cats and no plot. And as I left the theater, the songs stayed in my head so deeply that I didn't need to buy the record. Once those earworms disappeared, "Cats" and I were done.

Luckily for the creative team, many people felt otherwise. Opening during the early Reagan years, "Cats" - that unlikeliest of collaborations between T.S. Eliot (words) and Andrew Lloyd Webber (music) - wrapped up during the second Bill Clinton administration in 2000 after 7,485 performances, making it Broadway's longest-running hit at the time. ( "The Phantom of the Opera" has since taken that title.)

Yet when I learned that "Cats" was being revived on Broadway, one question quickly came to mind: Haven't we had a challenging enough summer?

The revival, once again directed by Trevor Nunn, is in previews now and scheduled to open July 31 at the Neil Simon Theater, after a 16-year hiatus in which only everything changed: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Bruce Jenner. Yet "Cats," which promised in its advertising "Now and Forever," is renewing that vow, yak-haired wigs and all.

Who wants "Cats" again? I posed the question to people of all stripes and have come to realize that the question is itself a theatrical acid test: It gives way to passionate replies on both sides. No one seems indifferent. (The first four performances this month grossed about $600,000, a promising start.)

"Cats" arrived from London a pop-music-inflected extravaganza, spectacular yet with the allure of sophistication, thanks to the poetry that inspired it. Families could go; tourists could go; non-English-speakers could get the point.

Mr. Lloyd Webber said that the current version, which features the pop star Leona Lewis as the "glamour cat" Grizabella, will emphasize "the heart of the show."

"When it works really well," he added, "it's the T.S. Eliot that underpins us."

And it's all cats, which in the years since the show closed have become only more ubiquitous. Think of the memes that now clog the internet - grumpy cats, sleeping kittens and more.

Yet the people who feel that "Cats" deserves to be forgotten are succinct in their opinions: Once is more than enough. Or, as Diane Sokolow, a television producer, told me: "Back in the day, it was said that the worst thing about having a mistress is you had to see 'Cats' twice. Ba dum dum."

At the other end are enthusiastic fans, who are thrilled about the return of the thundering pitter-patter of feline feet.

Tim Federle was an 8-year-old in Northern California when his parents took him to see "Cats" at the Golden Gate Theater in 1988. "It happened when Victoria, the white cat, pawed my knee," he recalled. "I didn't want to kiss Victoria; I wanted to be Victoria."

He continued: "'Cats' was my gateway to realizing that all my life as a child of doing flips in the living room and wanting to wear costumes and dance was for a purpose: I could be a professional dancer on Broadway. My dream role was Mungojerrie."

Sure enough Mr. Federle, who wrote the book for the musical "Tuck Everlasting" with Claudia Shear, moved to New York and danced on Broadway, though "Cats" closed the week he arrived.

Among the "Cats" lovers, I found that those who saw the show between the ages of 7 and 14 tended to become fanatical. Of course, one's first musical can have that effect on a person, wherever it happens. When I was about 5, I thought a musical version of "The Prince and the Pauper" was magical, and it was performed without scenery in an unromantic basement.

The television correspondent Mo Rocca is one of those who became (perhaps) scarily infatuated. He and his best friend Mario discovered "Cats" when they were 13, in Bethesda, Md., comparing notes over the London and Broadway cast albums.

At 14, he got the birthday present of his dreams: a family trip to New York to see the show.

Their seats were lousy. And "my father got restless, and in the second act when Betty Buckley started singing, he started jangling his keys - that was when all dads had, like janitor keys," he said. "I couldn't hear the first notes. It didn't matter."

Thoroughly besotted, Mr. Rocca proceeded to write a fan letter to every member of the cast. For Ms. Buckley, the show's Grizabella, he made a replica of the cover of Time magazine with her picture on it. "My older brother used a word I had never heard before," he said. "It was stalker."

Only the actor playing Gus, the theater cat, wrote back. But that was fine. Mr. Rocca carried that letter "everywhere, including to acting school camp. Everyone was inspired by it." He still has it, along with his "Cats" sweatshirt from 1983.

The fashion designer Rachel Antonoff attributes her interest in clothing to the costumes she saw in "Cats" and other plays. "I'm going to the opening," she boasted, "and I can legitimately say I have never been this excited before."

But like so many "Cats" memories, there seems to be a bittersweet quality to one of hers. She and her brother Jack (now a musician) were in their teens, driving "somewhere woodsy" and singing "Magical Mr. Mistoffelees" at the top of their lungs. "We felt something, a bump - my brother was a very bad driver," she recalled. "We got out and saw we had run over a cat while singing 'Cats.' We were very upset, but the cat lived."

While fans talk of how meaningful "Cats" was for them, imagine how transformative it has been for cast members, including Ms. Buckley, who sang the 11 o'clock number "Memory" in the original Broadway production and won a Tony for the role. "My job description," she said simply, "was to stop the show."

From Los Angeles, where she is starring in "Grey Gardens," Ms. Buckley noted that she got to see the show only in London, on its eighth anniversary. "I realized that Grizabella was only onstage for 13 minutes!" Laughingly, she added: "That's it! To me I was constantly onstage, lurking in the shadows, but it's 13 minutes for a role that was so important in my life."

Joey Abramowicz has performed in "Cats" more than a thousand times in nine different productions. The 37-year-old dancer and gymnast devoted most of 20 years to the musical, originally as the very athletic Tumblebrutus, but most recently as Macavity.

When he was first cast for the Westchester Broadway Theater in 2002, "I had to learn the whole show in six days with an associate choreographer," he said. "Next thing I know, I was crawling around the floor like a cat."

What does he see as the enduring appeal? "It's the spectacle, and the sense of belonging to a tribe. No one knows if there's a story to follow. It's silly, but it's fun to look at."

And to participate in. Long before "immersive theater" became trendy - before "Sleep No More" and escape rooms - people were excited by the interactivity of "Cats," especially during the overture. Known backstage as the "green eyes" portion, it's when the cats slither among the audience in the dark and suddenly their green eyes light up. (Rest assured, the revival isn't cutting this out.)

But it's precisely that audience involvement that leaves some "Cats" detractors most allergic.

The comedy writer Janis Hirsch went to see the show with a friend. "We got as high as we possibly could and went to the Winter Garden, and our usherette said, 'Your cat will be with you shortly,'" she explained. "She sounded like [the character actress] Selma Diamond. Maybe it was Selma Diamond in a Peter Pan collar. And then, I swear to God, this cat person came to where we were sitting and started to groom herself. We tried to swat her away with our Playbills."

She was hardly alone. During David Letterman's late-night hosting run, he made fun of "Cats" for months, featuring it on the Top 10 lists, mauling the song "Memory," interviewing fake cat characters.

This G.O.P. primary season brought "RepubliCATS," a video featuring Broadway actors playing Ben Carson (as Old Deuteronomy), Carly Fiorina (as Demeter) and Donald J. Trump (as Rum Tum Tugger). They're all heading to the Evangelical Ball.

A newer spoof, just in time for the show's reopening, is called "Katdashians! Break the Musical!" It's a poppy and bawdy Off Broadway homage to both the digital dominance of the Kardashian family and to cats who carry cellphones. The songs were more Lloyd Webberian a few weeks ago, before the impresario threatened litigation. Now, the only thing the two shows have in common are cat-eared costumes. ("Katdashians" is performed three nights a week in a 155-seat theater on the second floor of a Times Square office building.)

If "Cats" can stand for so many things, perhaps this is the exact right moment for its return to the big stage. Eliot's poems provided "the perfect outline for an entertainment," Mr. Lloyd Webber said.

Personally, as long as no real felines are anywhere near the production, I'm ready to give "Cats" another chance.

A version of this article appears in print on , Section AR, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Mention It, and Watch the Fur Fly. Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

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It would take you a long time to meet someone who dislikes cats as much as I do. Before you crumple this paper into a ball, or click away, I admit that my antipathy is irrational. I find cats standoffish and enigmatic, and don't get me started on the cat litter.

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"It was better than Cats!" Decades after Andrew Lloyd Webber's famed musical opened on Broadway on October 7, 1982, this tongue-in-cheek idiom remains a part of our lexicon (thanks to Saturday Night Live). Although the feline extravaganza divided the critics, it won over audiences of all ages and became an industry juggernaut-one that single-handedly generated more than $3 billion for New York City's economy-and that was before it made a return to the Great White Way in 2016. In honor of Andrew Lloyd Webber's birthday on March 22, let's take a trip down memory lane.

1. The work that Cats the musical is based on was originally going to include dogs.

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, published in 1939, is a collection of feline-themed poems written by the great T. S. Eliot. A whimsical, lighthearted effort, the volume has been delighting cat fanciers for generations-and it could have become just as big of a hit with dog lovers, too. At first, Eliot envisioned the book as an assemblage of canine- and tabby-related poems. However, he came to believe that "dogs don't seem to lend themselves to verse quite so well, collectively, as cats." (Spoken like a true ailurophile.) According to his publisher, Eliot decided that "it would be improper to wrap [felines] up with dogs" and barely even mentioned them in the finished product.

For his part, Andrew Lloyd Webber has described his attitude towards cats as " quite neutral." Still, the composer felt that Eliot's rhymes could form the basis of a daring, West End-worthy soundtrack. It seemed like an irresistible challenge. "I wanted to set that exciting verse to music," he explained. "When I [had] written with lyricists in the past ... the lyrics have been written to the music. So I was intrigued to see whether I could write a complete piece the other way 'round."

2. "Memory" was inspired by a poem that T.S. Eliot never finished.

In 1980, Webber approached T.S. Eliot's widow, Valerie, to ask for her blessing on the project. She not only said "yes," but provided the songwriter with some helpful notes and letters that her husband had written about Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats-including a half-finished, eight-line poem called "Grizabella, the Glamour Cat." Feeling that it was too melancholy for children, Eliot decided to omit the piece from Practical Cats. But the dramatic power of the poem made it irresistible for Webber and Trevor Nunn, the show's original director. By combining lines from "Grizabella, the Glamour Cat" with those of another Eliot poem, " Rhapsody on a Windy Night," they laid the foundation for what became the powerful ballad "Memory." A smash hit within a smash hit, this showstopper has been covered by such icons as Barbra Streisand and Barry Manilow.

3. Dame Judi Dench left the cast of Cats when her Achilles tendon snapped.

One of Britain's most esteemed actresses, Dench was brought in to play Grizabella for Cats's original run on the West End. Then, about three weeks into rehearsals, she was going through a scene with co-star Wayne Sleep (Mr. Mistoffelees) when disaster struck. "She went, 'You kicked me!'" Sleep recalls in the above video. "And I said, 'I didn't, actually, are you alright?'" She wasn't. Somehow, Dench had managed to tear her Achilles tendon. As a last-minute replacement, Elaine Paige of Evita fame was brought aboard. In an eerie coincidence, Paige had heard a recorded version of "Memory" on a local radio station less than 24 hours before she was asked to play Grizabella. Also, an actual black cat had crossed her path that day. Spooky.

4. To finance the show, Andrew Lloyd Webber ended up mortgaging his house.

Although Andrew Lloyd Webber had previously won great acclaim as one of the creative minds behind Jesus Christ Superstar and other hit shows, Cats had a hard time finding investors. According to choreographer Gillian Lynne, "[it] was very, very difficult to finance because everyone said 'A show about cats? You must be raving mad.'" In fact, the musical fell so far short of its fundraising goals that Webber ended up taking out a second mortgage on his home to help get Cats the musical off the ground.

5. When Cats the musical came to Broadway, its venue got a huge makeover.

Cats made its West End debut on May 11, 1981. Seventeen months later, a Broadway production of the musical launched what was to become an 18-year run at the Winter Garden Theatre. But before the show could open, some major adjustments had to be made to the venue. Cats came with an enormous, sprawling set which was far too large for the theatre's available performing space. To make some more room, the stage had to be expanded. Consequently, several rows of orchestra seats were removed, along with the Winter Garden's proscenium arch. And that was just the beginning. For Grizabella's climactic ascent into the Heaviside Layer on a giant, levitating tire, the crew installed a hydraulic lift in the orchestra pit and carved a massive hole through the auditorium ceiling. Finally, the theater's walls were painted black to set the proper mood. After Cats closed in 2000, the original look of the Winter Garden was painstakingly restored -at a cost of $8 million.

6. Cats the musical set longevity records on both sides of the Atlantic.

The original London production took its final bow on May 11, 2002, exactly 21 years after the show had opened-which, at the time, made Cats the longest-running musical in the West End's history. (It would lose that title to Les Miserables in 2006.) Across the pond, the show was performed at the Winter Garden for the 6138th time on June 19, 1997, putting Cats ahead of A Chorus Line as the longest-running show on Broadway. To celebrate, a massive outdoor celebration was held between 50th and 51st streets, complete with a laser light show and an exclusive after-party for Cats alums.

7. One theatergoer sued the show for $6 million.

Like Hair, Cats involves a lot of performer-audience interaction. See it live, and you might just spot a leotard-clad actor licking himself near your seat before the curtain goes up. In some productions, the character Rum Tum Tugger even rushes out into the crowd and finds an unsuspecting patron to dance with. At a Broadway performance on January 30, 1996, Tugger was played by stage veteran David Hibbard. That night, he singled out one Evelyn Amato as his would-be dance partner. Mildly put, she did not appreciate his antics. Alleging that Hibbard had gyrated his pelvis in her face, Amato sued the musical and its creative team for $6 million.

8. Thanks to Cats the musical, T.S. Eliot received a posthumous Tony.

Because most of the songs in Cats are almost verbatim recitations of Eliot's poems, he's regarded as its primary lyricist-even though he died in 1965, long before the show was conceived. Still, Eliot's contributions earned him a 1983 Tony for Best Book of a Musical. A visibly moved Valerie Eliot took the stage to accept this prize on her late spouse's behalf. "Tonight's honor would have given my husband particular pleasure because he loved the theatre," she told the crowd. Eliot also shared the Best Original Score Tony with Andrew Lloyd Webber.

9. The original Broadway production used more than 3000 pounds of yak hair.

Major productions of Cats use meticulously crafted yak hair wigs, which currently cost around $2300 apiece and can take 40 hours or more to produce. Adding to the expense is the fact that costumers can't just recycle an old wig after some performer gets recast. "Each wig is made specifically for the actor," explains wigmaker Hannah McGregor in the above video. Since people tend to have differently shaped heads, precise measurements are taken of every cast member's skull before he or she is fitted with a new head of hair. "[Their wigs] have to fit them perfectly," McGregor adds, "because of the amount of jumping and skipping they do as cats." Perhaps it should come as no surprise that, over its 18-year run, the first Broadway production used 3247 pounds of yak hair. (In comparison, the heaviest actual yaks only weigh around 2200 pounds.)

10. A recent revival included hip hop.

In December 2014, Cats returned to the West End with an all-new cast and music. "The Rum Tum Tugger," a popular Act I song, was reimagined as a hip hop number. "I've come to the conclusion, having read [ Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats] again, that maybe Eliot was the inventor of rap," Webber told the press.

11. Another revival featured an internet-famous feline for one night only.

Congratulations on a furocious Broadway debut, @RealGrumpyCat! We're sure you hated every minute. #CatsBroadway pic.twitter.com/WJlyW2aEAC

- CATS on Broadway (@CatsBroadway) October 1, 2016

On September 30, Grumpy Cat made her Broadway debut in Cats, briefly taking the stage with the cast. Despite being named Honorary Jellicle Cat, she hated every minute of it.

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11 Memorable Facts About Cats the Musical

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"It was better than Cats!" Decades after Andrew Lloyd Webber's famed musical opened on Broadway on October 7, 1982, this tongue-in-cheek idiom remains a part of our lexicon (thanks to Saturday Night Live ).

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Because Jellicles do and Jellicles can. At least, the male ones.

Cats was the first Broadway musical seen by this critic. At the young age of seven, on a family trip to New York, she was first introduced to the Jellicles. Immediately enthralled by the magic of a Broadway musical, she immediately bought the cast recording and the piano music and learned every word. And, she realized upon returning to the Jellicle junkyard, which has now taken up residency in the Neil Simon Theatre, 25 years later, she still knows all the words. But they now hold a very different meaning.

Cats has returned to Broadway, in a fur-trimmed frenzy that is remarkably reminiscent of its original production. The costumes and choreography, the latter of which was updated by Andy Blankenbuehler, could be mistaken for the original record-breaking run - perhaps because this revival is directed by the original director Trevor Nunn, and, of course, and the music and lyrics are the same. But the audience Cats is playing to has changed, and, one hopes, for the better. Because this musical, which was embraced with numerous awards and a lengthy run on Broadway, presents a disturbingly patriarchal atmosphere obsessed with youth and beauty and tainted with slut-shaming and misogyny.

Based on T.S. Eliot's Old Pussum's Book of Practical Cats, the musical first clawed its way to Broadway in 1982, following a run that began in the West End one year prior. It ran for 18 years, establishing itself as the fourth longest-running show in Broadway history before closing on September 10, 2000. Revisiting the musical 25 years after one's first exposure to it, this critic has to wonder why it ran so long to begin with, and why a revival was deemed necessary. This says nothing about the ensemble of talented singers and dancers who are starring in this production; they give exuberantly energetic performances, breathing whatever life they can into the material given to them. But the material itself is extremely limited and limiting.

The Eliot estate stated that only the original poems be used as text for the musical, so Cats consists of one song after another, introducing the cats as a group and as individuals. The score is loosely tied together by the cats informing the audience - through song, of course - that the Jellicles assemble once a year to make what they call "the Jellicle choice", in which one of their tribe is chosen to ascend to the Heaviside Layer and be born into a new life. This lack of narrative inspires almost no conflict or tension to drive the musical, which runs for two hours and 15 minutes, with an intermission. The only question the evening poses is which cat will be chosen, and, after Grizabella the Glamour Cat is introduced, the answer is very clear.

Along with providing the only tension of the evening, the character of Grizabella also inspires the most frustration with the musical, personifying in feline form the patriarchal themes of the production. Grizabella is one of only three female characters who perform their own songs throughout the night. One of the the two is Jennyanydots, The Old Gumbie Cat who, concerned with the mice's manners, teaches them how to play music and crochet. Played by the remarkable tap-dancing actress Eloise Kropp, the musical number is delightfully presented, but it is worth noting that Jennyanydots is only performing domestic, stereotypically feminine actions. The only other female cat, other than Grizabella, who even has the opportunity to sing, is Rumpleteazer, who performs with her male partner in crime, Mungojerrie.

With the exception of the group numbers, the male cats receive all of the other songs in the musical, including the worshipful Old Deuteronomy (Quintin Earl Darrington), the group's estimable leader, the proudly rebellious Rum Tum Tugger (Tyler Hanes, confidently sexual), Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat (an affable Jeremy Davis), Mr. Mistoffelees, the "original conjuring cat" (a delightful Ricky Ubeda) and the Mystery Cat Macavity (Daniel Gaymon, very sensual), who inspires the entire female ensemble to perform a writhing sexual dance number gyrating in pleasure at the thought of the elusive disappearing bad-boy feline.

And then there is Grizabella. A role made famous by the famous belting of Elaine Paige and Betty Buckley, Grizabella is a formerly beautiful cat now in a bedraggled state. When she enters the stage, tentatively approaching her fellow Jellicle cats, she is greeted with hisses of disgust as her peers back away from her. A song that describes her lamentable state posits, "And the postman sighed as he scratched his head/You really had thought she'd ought to be dead/And who would ever suppose that that/Was Grizabella, the Glamour Cat?" Apparently being less than beautiful is a tragedy equitable with death in the land of the Jellicles.

Performed by British pop star Leona Lewis, Grizabella is a dejected and forlorn feline. Dressed in a tight-fitting grey corset adorned with dirty, threadbare rags, Lewis' performance contains an undeniable element of slut-shaming, and she is scorned by her fellow cats until Old Deuteronomy chooses her to be reborn in the Heaviside Layer. She is only deserving of attention and affection when a man deems her to be so and provides her with the opportunity to be young and beautiful again.

Cats was, and will most likely again, be the first musical that many young children see. While this critic is reluctant to ever reflect on any negativity of exposing children to the arts, one wonders if Cats a positive choice.

The need for a stronger representation of women on Broadway is hardly a new discussion in the theatre industry, and strong female characters are an essential element of that discussion - something Cats does not provide. What kind of message will a six-year-old take away from a show in which all the women do is sew, steal and long for a past in which they were young and beautiful? With the return of Cats also comes the upcoming closings of the remarkable musicals Matilda the Musical and the Tony-winning and history-making Fun Home, which both feature spirited young girls who dare to defy established rules and roles that are placed upon them.

Cats marks the third musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber running on Broadway at the moment, the other two being The Phantom of the Opera and School of Rock, both productions that are sadly lacking in their portrayal of complex, let alone strong, female characters -- as did Webber's Phantom sequel, the misogynistic and slut-shaming Love Never Dies. One hopes that the upcoming season will introduce some new characters who represent a different - and new - kind of woman onstage.

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With An Outdated Message And Old-Fashioned Score, Cats Claws Its Way Back To Broadway

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Because Jellicles do and Jellicles can. At least, the male ones. Cats was the first Broadway musical seen by this critic. At the young age of seven, on a family trip to New York, she was first introduced to the Jellicles.

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After conquering Broadway, " Hamilton" will now try its hand at taking over the world - with upcoming productions in Chicago (this fall), L.A., San Francisco and London (in 2017). As it expands, Broadway's latest juggernaut can follow a trail blazed by " Cats."

Back in New York after 15 years, Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1982 musical has returned to a Broadway landscape that in many ways it helped created. The show not only launched the era of the British megamusical ("The Phantom of the Opera," "Les Miserables"), it more importantly cemented the model of a globe-conquering smash hit - a model refined by the likes of "Phantom," "Les Miz," "The Lion King," "Wicked" and now " Hamilton." Here's how it changed the game.
1. It prowled the globe - and became a New York City landmark at the same time.
" Cats " wasn't the first show with global ambitions - Broadway hits like "A Chorus Line" and "Evita" also branched out to other cities and countries. "I remember back in 1971, when Robert Stigwood was my manager, Robert sat me down and said, 'We have to get "Jesus Christ Superstar" around the world now, and we have to do it quickly,'" recalled Lloyd Webber, days before the new "Cats" opened on Broadway. "He said, 'People are going to pirate it, and there's nothing we can really do, so we must get out own productions up.'"

When "Superstar" went around the world in the 1970s, it wasn't staged in replica productions - but Hal Prince's production of "Evita," which ran almost four years on Broadway, did. Lloyd Webber said he kept that idea in mind as he and Cameron Mackintosh set about producing "Cats," first in London, then on Broadway, then everywhere else.

While all those replica stagings made their way around the world, in sit-down and touring productions, "Cats" became what was, at the time, the longest-running show on Broadway, with an 18-year lifespan that made the show a city landmark. All of that together lent "Cats" an unprecedented international profile, not only for global audiences in their home countries but for tourists visiting New York (or London) as well. These days, the same can be said for the longrunners that followed in its wake, from "Phantom" to "The Lion King" to "Wicked."
2. You don't have to be fluent in English to get it.
A major reason "Cats" works so well for international audiences: There's no language barrier. For theater purists, that's part of what they hate about the show- in their view, it's a dumbed-down spectacle about kitties. But whatever you think of it, this new production and its hardworking cast will remind you that "Cats" is, first and foremost, a dance musical, with only the barest of plots holding together a feline revue. Like a ballet or any other movement-centric performance, you don't need English to get the gist.

"Cats" was one of the first shows to truly exploit the global potential of that. Other Broadway musicals - in particular, universal crowdpleaser "Mamma Mia!" - followed suit.
3. It embraced its family appeal.
"Cats" is a well-established draw for family audiences - and as the Disney's uber-successful musicals ("The Lion King," "Aladdin") illustrate, that's a powerful demographic, capable of sustaining a show for years.

But the original production of "Cats" didn't get that family-friendly reputation right off the bat. "Broadway didn't have that sense of family audiences as a target demographic back then," said Nina Lannan, the executive producer of the revival and the general manager of the original production. "Not the way we talk about family audiences now. Nobody thought that way."

She estimated that the change happened following the ninth anniversary of "Cats" on Broadway. The production hosted a face-painting event in celebration, and the resulting TV ad, showing kids getting dolled up in feline makeup, turned the heads of parental ticketbuyers - and those all-ages crowds helped the show run another nine years. With that, Broadway had proof of the commercial power of appealing to young audiences.
4. That logo.
You know what it looks like. Yellow eyes with dancers inside them and a hand-scrawled title treatment against a black background, the logo has an iconic simplicity that gave "Cats" a internationally resonant brand identity akin to the Coke squiggle or the Nike swoosh.

That simplicity made a bare-bones ad relatively cheap to run on TV, where "Cats" advertised 52 weeks a year. "When we stopped advertising on television, there'd be a drop in business," recalled Philip J. Smith, the longtime executive (and current co-CEO) of the Shubert Organization, a major producer of both the Broadway original and the current revival. "It was amazing. The cat eyes were so fantastic, and you were dealing directly to a children's audience. 'Hey Mommy, I want to go see "Cats!"' they'd say."

Shows strive to establish that kind of instant recognition, and with good reason. After "The Phantom of the Opera" became synonymous with its broken-mirror lettering and half-mask image, Warner Bros.' largely reviled movie adaptation actually revitalized the Broadway show - in part because the studio's omnipresent ads for the film, using the same logo, doubled as advertising for the stage version.
5. Producers took control.
These days, it's de rigueur for a hit musical's original producers to have a strong hand in guiding the national and international rollout of a Broadway success. But in Smith's recollections, "Cats" started that trend.

Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Group meticulously parceled out production rights, Smith said. "They gave out the rights in sections as no one ever did before," Smith said. "People had done similar things, but nobody really took it down to a science like they did. They really and truly programmed the rights."

Lannan noted, "That was probably the first time a producer said, 'I'm in control of all that.'"

Now, of course, it's common. But "Cats" led the way.

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'Cats': 5 Ways the Smash Musical Changed Broadway

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After conquering Broadway, " Hamilton" will now try its hand at taking over the world - with upcoming productions in Chicago (this fall), L.A., San Francisco and London (in 2017). As it expands, Broadway's latest juggernaut can follow a trail blazed by " Cats."

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Jellicle Songs (Part 1) | Cats the Musical

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Patti LuPone Shares Her True Feelings About Madonna in the Broadway News Evita Movie

You don't want to miss this.

Two-time Tony Award winner (and recent nominee for War Paint) Patti LuPone swung by Watch What Happens Live after a recent performance at the Nederlander Theatre-and the actor was in truth-telling form.

Host Andy Cohen asked LuPone, who won her first Tony Award for her performance in the title role in Evita, what she thought of Madonna playing the role in the movie of the Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. "I was on the treadmill when MTV used to have videos, and I saw 'Buenos Aires,' and I thought it was a piece of sh*t," said LuPone. "Madonna is a movie killer. She's dead behind the eyes. She cannot act her way out of a paper bag. She should not be in film or onstage. She's a wonderful performer for what she does, but she is not an actress."

LuPone and Madonna have only met once before (previous to her comments on the talk show). "She was downstairs at the Mitzi Newhouse [at Lincoln Center] when I was upstairs doing Anything Goes at the Vivian Beaumont, and a press agent put a sign up that there was only one diva allowed in this theatre at a time.
LOVE BROADWAY? CHECK OUT THE NEW ARRIVALS AT THE PLAYBILL STORE!
"I did meet her after her opening-night party, and the only thing Madonna has ever said to me was 'I'm taller than you.'"

Cohen wanted to hear LuPone's thoughts on another movie musical: Les Misérables. LuPone originated the role of Fantine in the London production of the show.

"I only saw a little bit of it," said LuPone of the recent film version, "but I'm going to be honest: The only person that knows how to do musicals on camera is Rachel Bloom in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. She is the only one who understands how to go from dialogue to song so that it makes sense, and her camera department knows how to shoot these rather large production numbers. I didn't see Les Miz [onstage] after I left it. I'm too involved. But what I did see [of the film], I wondered why the hell they were doing close-ups of these people so that you were seeing the snot, you were seeing down their throat-you were not seeing the scene that perpetuated this emotion in this song.

"I don't know why people can assume they can do musicals or make movie musicals without ever having been involved in the process of making a musical," said LuPone. "So what I see on camera, that's the NBC ones, too, I can't believe that it looks like this."

Of her most recent onstage musical endeavor as cosmetics pioneer Helena Rubinstein, LuPone recounted former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's visit to the show.

"What I said to her was that every night when I sing a lyric 'A woman scales the wall climbs high above them all/I know what gates of hell they put her through,'" she said. "I always think of Hillary, and I told her that. I said I sing this about you every single night."

To purchase tickets to War Paint, . For discount tickets on select performances, !

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Patti LuPone Shares Her True Feelings About Madonna in the Evita Movie | Playbill

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Patti LuPone Shares Her True Feelings About Madonna in the Broadway News Evita Movie You don't want to miss this. Two-time Tony Award winner (and recent nominee for War Paint ) Patti LuPone swung by Watch What Happens Live after a recent performance at the Nederlander Theatre-and the actor was in truth-telling form.

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video flashback: patti lupone brings evita to the 1981 grammy awards

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Video Flashback: Patti LuPone Brings EVITA to the 1981 Grammy Awards

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Patti LuPone stole the Grammy's last night as she reprised her powerful 1981 performance of EVITA's 'Don't Cry For Me Argentina.' While you're hitting replay on last night's masterful performance, check out this vintage footage of Patti's original Grammy turn. The year may have changed, but that voice is still gloriously the same.

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Andrew Lloyd Webber Reveals Inspiration for Evita

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For many people across the world, the only thing they know about Argentina is what they learned from the film Evita, starring Madonna. The film was released in 1996 and was a musical interpretation of the life of Eva Perón, from her humble beginnings to her position as Argentina's First Lady. The film's main song is "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina". We take a look inside the origins of this dramatic and catchy tune.

"Don't Cry for Me Argentina" became something of an anthem when it was performed by Madonna in the 1996 musical film Evita. Chronicling the life and times of Argentina's favourite daughter, Eva Perón, Evita was a dramatisation of the real-life events that happened in Eva Perón's short but impactful life. From her humble beginnings in rural Argentina to moving to the capital of Buenos Aires to a pursue a career in entertainment and the arts, Evita went on to marry Juan Perón, who would become the president of Argentina, making Eva the country's First Lady. But she was much more than that. She was revered by the Argentine public because of how she championed workers' rights and the rights of the poor, and also of women. She died tragically of cancer at the young age of 33, and her body went on a mysterious odyssey for a number of years until it was returned to Argentina, where it now rests in Buenos Aires's famous Recoleta cemetery.

"Don't Cry for Me Argentina" is the film's hit song. Sung by Madonna, who famously campaigned for the role by sending the director a four page letter about why she should have the role, the song was originally written for a 1976 concept album called Evita, and was later performed as part of a theatre piece of the same name in 1978. A singer called Julie Covington originally performed the song, which was written by the don of musical theatre, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and his frequent collaborator, Tim Rice. The song book-ended the original theatre performance and was sung at both the beginning and the end to evoke the generosity of Evita's spirit in death by asking the public not to mourn her. Upon its release in 1976, the song went to number one in the UK, and went on to win the songwriting duo an Ivor Novello award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically. The Evita soundtrack took four months to record, and all of the parties involved recalled it as a nerve-wracking experience. Director Alan Parker called the first day of recording "Black Monday" because of the nerves of all the cast members. He elaborated on the day, saying, "All of us came from very different worlds-from popular music, from movies, and from musical theater-and so we were all very apprehensive." Antonio Banderas, who was cast as Che, said that the experience was "scary", and Madonna was "petrified". She said, "I had to sing 'Don't Cry For Me Argentina' in front of Andrew Lloyd Webber ... I was a complete mess and was sobbing afterward. I thought I had done a terrible job." However, it all seems to have been worth it, as the song is one of the most memorable parts of the film, if not one of the things that people from abroad associate most with Argentina.

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The Untold Story Behind the Song "Don't Cry For Me Argentina"

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For many people across the world, the only thing they know about Argentina is what they learned from the film Evita, starring Madonna. The film was released in 1996 and was a musical interpretation of the life of Eva Perón, from her humble beginnings to her position as Argentina's First Lady.

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Into the Woods' Original Baker and Baker's Wife Reunite to Bake Holiday Cookies | Playbill

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Chip Zien and Joanna Gleason played the Baker and the Baker's Wife in the original Broadway production of Into the Woods. The pair was feeling a bit festive and nostalgic, so they joined Playbill in the kitchen of Feinstein's/54 Below to whip up a delicious batch of holiday cookies.

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Ann Hould-Ward Talks Original "Into the Woods" Costume Designs

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Angela Lansbury introduces Stephen Sondheim's INTO THE WOODS on the 1988 Tony Awards. With: Phylicia Rashad, Joanna Gleason, Chip Zien.

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Into the Woods - Broadway, 1987 - Press Reel

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Schools throughout the country have made the musical "Into the Woods," now a Disney movie, a perennial favorite-to the point that, according to NPR, " it's currently the 3rd most popular high school show in the country." They usually perform a "junior version," though, one that that features Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and other fairy tale favorites, and ends at intermission to avoid the potentially controversial sex and death. Yet sex and death are at the heart of the show, not merely its second act, for a reason: Stephen Sondheim, a gay man working in theater in New York City, created the show in the eighties at the height of the AIDS epidemic.

The show explores the consequences of going after, and getting, what one wants. I wondered how Disney would handle its more sophisticated elements, the losses and the betrayals. Would the family-friendly studio present the junior version, heavy on the fairy tales and light on the consequences, or would it give its audiences the grim-not to say Grimm-version Sondheim intended?

After all, long before Disney turned them into ways to sell toys, fairy tales were cautionary tales, often told by older women to younger ones to teach them about the dangers of the world. The original Grimm Brothers versions are violent, even cruel, for a reason: They are intended to instruct in a visceral way, through fear. In "Into the Woods," Sondheim was merely matching his material to his times.

In the show's first half, we meet our heroes-Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack (of beanstalk fame), two princes, a witch, and a baker and his wife-all of whom have a wish, and a reason to journey into the unknown to get it. The characters are plucky, independent, and appealing; although they commit various sins in order to reach personal fulfillment, we root for them and want them to succeed. And they do. They get laid, get married, get pregnant, get rich. Yet, after the curtain rises on Act Two, they (and we) learn that unintended consequences descend even on those who don't deserve them.

The princes who secured the women of their dreams-Cinderella and Rapunzel, respectively-discover that marriage does not curtail the desire for more. The witch who got her youth and beauty back discover that they came at the expense of her powers. And the wife of the giant Jack killed returns, bellowing for blood. By the show's end, the community has been worse than decimated. Almost no one remains, and those who do must band together, seeking strength from each other, to survive and gain the courage necessary to raise the next generation.

Some critics object to the dark turn "Into the Woods" takes after intermission. Frank Rich, reviewing the show when it originally debuted for the New York Times, called it "painful, existential" and, though promising and in parts brilliant, ultimately "disappointing."

In Act II, everyone is jolted into the woods again-this time not to cope with the pubescent traumas symbolized by beanstalks and carnivorous wolves but with such adult catastrophes as unrequited passion, moral cowardice, smashed marriages and the deaths of loved ones.

Some institutions describe the show in straightforward terms as being "originally written in 1987 in response to the AIDS crisis." Other critics, like Slate's Dana Stevens, merely suggest that it reads "to many audience members as a metaphor for the AIDS crisis." Sondheim himself has demurred, parrying the question: "We never meant this to be specific. The trouble with fables is everyone looks for symbolism."

True-and a person as smart as Sondheim knows that fables are intentionally symbolic. If Cinderella were merely one girl, what relevance would her story have over centuries? But Sondheim has also been famously cagey about his personal life. As the New Yorker put it, "Sondheim has never wrestled explicitly with his sexuality or his upbringing. He avoided writing openly gay characters for most of his career." He specializes instead in metaphor and symbolism: his stab at romantic memoir is "Company," not "Angels in America," and his meditation on life as a tortured, solitary artist is "Sunday in the Park with George," not "Rent."

The parallels between "Into the Woods" and the wreckage of the gay community seem heartbreakingly clear; in some ways, the wreckage is even starker than in the explicitly AIDS-focused "Rent," Jonathan Larsen's 1994 rock opera about bohemians living with HIV in the East Village. "Wake up," snaps the Witch during Act Two of "Into the Woods." "People are dying all around us." Mothers lose children; children lose mothers. No romantic relationship remains intact. Those characters left alive at the end of the show are stunned, disbelieving, even traumatized by survivors' guilt, since they are no more deserving of life than those who are gone.

For all the in-your-faceness of "Rent"-later mocked with spite but also some accuracy in Team America World Police in the faux Broadway number " Everyone Has AIDS!"-"Into the Woods" is more honest about the devastating effects of the epidemic. Larson lets only one character die, allowing the rest of the ensemble their happily-ever-after. Sondheim's characters from "Into the Woods," by contrast, are shell-shocked by the end of Act Two and, instead of pursuing their pleasures separately, come together, out to form what would later be called an intentional or " chosen family."

You would be forgiven, however, for not seeing these parallels in the Disney version. Although the film is satisfying as a comedy, it falls apart as a tragedy, rushing through certain deaths and betrayals and negating others entirely. The Witch's line, "People are dying all around us," has been cut. A famous adultery sequence is reduced to a make-out session. In consequence, even during the show's most moving song, "No One Is Alone," there wasn't a wet eye in the house.

America in 2014 is a different place in regards to the AIDS crisis than it was in 1987. HIV is no longer a death sentence, at least not for those privileged and affluent enough to have access to drugs; it is now considered a chronic disease. Nor is the subject taboo. If directors want to stage a show directly about the epidemic, they can revive "The Normal Heart" (as HBO did this year) or commission something new. Perhaps Disney felt that it was no longer necessary to approach the subject obliquely. Or perhaps Disney went saccharine in its attempt to satisfy, rather than challenge, as broad an audience as possible.

Either way, the original "Into the Woods" captured the terror of that cultural moment-where people were indeed dying all around us-as well as any piece of pop culture. In bowdlerizing it, Disney cuts the show off from its history, and us from our own.
Ester Bloom is an editor of The Billfold whose work appears in Slate, Salon, Creative Non-Fiction magazine, New York Magazine's Vulture blog, Flavorwire, and the Toast, among numerous other publications. Follow her @shorterstory.

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Before Into The Woods Was A Disney Movie, It Was An AIDS Parable

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Schools throughout the country have made the musical "Into the Woods," now a Disney movie, a perennial favorite-to the point that, according to NPR, " it's currently the 3rd most popular high school show in the country."

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If you want to see the wellspring of the modern Disney fantasy machine, look no further than Stephen Sondheim's 1987 musical Into the Woods. It's a knotty bundle of fairy tales from Jack and the Beanstalk and Rapunzel to Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella that Sondheim and James Lapine wove together into a funny and fresh narrative.

This narrative begins with a Baker and his Wife who are cursed with infertility by their witch neighbor. They can only break the curse by gathering up four talismans that helpfully bring all the other characters into play: "The cow as white as milk / The cape as red as blood / The hair as yellow as corn / The slipper as pure as gold". The prologue includes an undertone as well, when the Baker adds, "I wish we had a child," the juxtaposition typical of Sondheim's best work, layered like so many fairy tales. Some 25 years ago, however, such layering was not the sort of thing that Disney's heroes and gamines sang about. But the play's reassessing of fairy tale tropes, its reinvigorating them with old Grimm's blood and thunder, looked forward to the spunky heroines and broad-chested prince-villains who later cropped up in everything from Beauty and the Beast to Frozen.

Now, Disney brings Sondheim's show to the screen. By now, Into the Woods the movie is reminiscent of previous live-action Disney fairy tales, from Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (2010) to Maleficent, comic bookish event films combining special effects magic and dour themes. Happily, the new film leaves the stage musical generally intact, with only a few Sondheim-approved snips. Indeed, as the Disney logo is obscured by crawling vines and branches of the mythical wood, Rob Marshall's' movie seems almost Tim Burton-esque, taking from his Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (a DreamWorks' project), the darkest way through Sondheim.

Into the Woods is a richer and more energetic musical than Sweeney Todd. True, most of the new film uses the familiar device of interlocking storylines, here about princesses and magic beans and a certain red-caped girl whose grandmother's been eaten by a wolf. But behind all that, Sondheim has crafted a sometimes glib but also intelligent examination of dreams and the dangers of their fulfillment. The mysterious woods are something of an all-purpose metaphorical zone where anything might happen, for better and worse. The repetition of "I wish" starts to sound foreboding, opening the door to risks that materialize the kingdom-wide devastation of the final act. Other sorts of risky wishes have to do with children: songs by Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford) and Jack (Daniel Huttlestone) reference pubescent curiosities in obvious manners that could leave some adults queasy.

But if Sondheim tends to lecture, Marshall likes to show off logistical skills. His Chicago was no masterpiece, but its flash-bang sensory assault fulfilled Bob Fosse's desire: "Razzle dazzle 'em / and they'll never catch wise". For Into the Woods, he pulls back on the style and zooms in on his performers and the music itself.

It's a smart choice, enhanced by the strong cast performing the film's lilting tunes and witty lyrics. As the hapless Baker and his smarter Wife, James Corden and Emily Blunt generate enough frustrated and loving comedy to power the film on their own. Blunt in particular makes clear the Wife's conflicting loyalties and deep yearnings, acting while singing (most everybody else does the normal thing and leaves the acting to the dialogue laced in between the big numbers). Johnny Depp's sly wolf and Anna Kendrick's plucky Cinderella are both variations on old tropes that are knowing without falling into the wink-wink category.

Into the Woods 's cast is also notable for what it doesn't include: a performer cast for being a star and not singing ability. It's a delight that the one seemingly out-of-place performer -- Chris Pine, as the self-important Prince chasing after an indecisive Cinderella -- turns out to have a Broadway-quality voice. You can easily imagine him belting out a Rodgers and Hammerstein curtain-dropper to the back row without a microphone. And his princely smarm ("I was raised to be charming, not sincere") is as potent as his voice. Meryl Steep's Witch enters big, blowing the door off the Baker's cabin and dutifully disappearing in a flurry of smoke and squealing rats. Similarly campy for most of the movie, Cinderella's stepsisters (Tammy Blanchard and Lucy Punch) end up suffering a gruesome punishment late in the film, in a scene that might leave parents questioning the movie's PG rating.

This bit of vengeful closure has little to do with Into the Woods' primary themes, including the distrust of appearances and the forging of makeshift families. While these are underlined in the film's dragging final act, they find an effective climax in another heart-stopping song, "No One is Alone", that helps push this often cynical exercise in fairy tale reverb into something approaching sincerity.

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The Woods Are Crawling With Metaphors in Sondheim's 'Into the Woods'

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If you want to see the wellspring of the modern Disney fantasy machine, look no further than Stephen Sondheim's 1987 musical Into the Woods. It's a knotty bundle of fairy tales from Jack and the Beanstalk and Rapunzel to Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella that Sondheim and James Lapine wove together into a funny and fresh narrative.

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The Hidden Meaning in Stephen Sondheim's Seth Rudetsky Into the Woods You Never Knew About

This week in the life of Seth Rudetsky, Seth shares more tales from Playbill Travel's Iceland cruise, including how Rob McClure met Sondheim and learned the lyrical secret in "Moments in the Woods."

Yay! I'm back in one of my favorite places; on the front porch of the Anchor Inn in Provincetown. If you've read Seth's Broadway Diary Volume 1-3, you know that almost all of my summer columns begin from that location. How do you read all them, you ask? Why, by ordering them right here.

Anyhoo, I'm here this week doing a show with Judy Kuhn tonight, Adam Pascal tomorrow, and Christine Ebersole Thursday/Friday, and then Christine and I hit Nantucket! Check out the lineup here.

At Judy's show tonight, we're going to bring up her Fun Home co-star Beth Malone (who just closed in Angels in America) so they can sing together! And last night we added a song to the show we're going to do again tonight; the Peregrine Theater Company, which is doing Hair this season in Provincetown, lent us some of their amazing singers who learned the backup to "Nobody's Side," a song from Chess Judy hasn't sung since the show closed 30 years ago. She was nervous doing it for the first time in front of people last night...so I added some fun pressure and did a Facebook Live video! Turns out, they were all amazing! (And I was the one who actually hit a wrong chord in the middle of the song. #karma) Watch it here...then come to the show tonight!

I got back from Playbill Travel's cruise in Iceland just a few days ago and realized I left a few stories out of my last column. First, I had pointed out (with empirical evidence) that the people of Iceland have endured severe harshness to survive in their climate and, boy, you can tell from casual conversation. When I got off the cruise, the cab driver asked me if I was going back later. I told him that my fabulous cruise was over. He nodded and commented, "Yep. Everything must end." I get it. Life is bleak.

I'd also love to share this craziness that happened on the ship:
July 6 was James' birthday, so his mom asked if the ship would bring him some birthday cake. She got four slices delivered to our room and we decided to wait until after the show to share them with everyone. So, around 11PM that night I left our room with a tray full of delicious cake slices for the performers on the cruise. One of the guys who works on the ship saw me in the hall and offered to carry the tray. I told him I was fine carrying it myself. He insisted and I realized he might get in trouble if his boss saw me walking down the hallway carrying a tray with him nearby so I gave it to him. I told him I was walking to the front lounge to join my friends and I walked a little ahead. I got to the lounge, turned around...and he was gone. And the tray was as well. I asked various people who worked on the ship to help and no one seemed to know who he was/where he went. It sounds like a scene from The Shining, but it was more like a scene from Laverne and Shirley without any laugh track. Or any laughs. He must have thought I was carrying a tray of my room service food that I didn't want so he took it from me...and kindly threw it all out. Happy Birthday?

Anyhoo, speaking of the cruise, I had Rob McClure come on my SiriusXM show, Seth Speaks. He had so many great stories about his career! He told us that show that changed his life was Sweeney Todd. He saw a regional production of it when he was a teenager and was completely blown away by it, especially the big reveal near the end of the show. He was so excited to think that there was an entire audience coming the next night who would experience the reveal together and he, therefore, decided he had to come back. He continued to do that for weeks. He loved the show but he especially loved watching the audience experience the show. He was there so much that the cast eventually got him a show jacket!

Years later, he was starring in Honeymoon In Vegas and came up on the onstage elevator for his (amazing) entrance, turned around and suddenly saw Sondheim himself sitting in the audience! He recognized him because Sondheim was wearing the exact same Sweeney Todd show jacket. #Falsehood. (That last part about the jacket is not true.) But Rob did indeed see him, freaked out internally... but kept going. After the show...Sondheim didn't come backstage. Rob was devastated...until he got an email from him! For rizzle!

Sondheim apologized for not being able to come backstage and wrote that Rob's opening number made Sondheim want to stay in that theatre forever. Amazing! Rob then wrote back a thank you email and mentioned in passing that he likes to write. Sondheim then wrote that he should come over to dinner and talk about writing! Can you imagine!?!?! During the dinner, Rob told Sondheim his favorite lyric was from "Moments in the Woods":
Must it all be either less or more?
Either plain or grand?
Is it always "or?"
Is it never "and?"
That's what woods are for
For those moments in the woods
Sondheim told him that he particularly liked the double meaning in the lyrics. Rob was like "...what?" And Sondheim told him he was referring to:
Is it always "or?"
Is it never "and?"
That's what woulds are for
For those moments in the woods

Rob then checked the score and told him that it's written as "woods." And Sondheim told him that was because "woods" is what the Baker's Wife is saying. But it was written so the audience could hear either one. Wowza! Who has the energy/intellect to write on so many different levels!?!?! #NotMe

Anyhoo, Rob is obsessed with lyrics as evidenced by this performance he did in his act on the cruise!

When Rob was first starting out, he won the "Rising Star" award at the Paper Mill Playhouse and decided to take a job in the box office with the naïve thought that someone on the creative team of a production would see him there and think, "He's got so much energy! We should hire that guy!" And, actually, that's basically what happened!

They were doing a production of I'm Not Rappaport that needed a non-Equity understudy and they offered it to Rob. Rob told them that the understudy position paid $200 a week but he was making $400 a week in the box office. He therefore asked if he could keep his box office job and understudy. They said yes! Near the end of the run, the late Roy Miller told him that the play was transferring to Broadway and the entire cast was going with it- including Rob, which meant that he'd get his Equity card!

Rob also told us that the other guys in the cast knew Ben Vereen, who played Midge in the play, missed singing so they would often visit his dressing room and sing a cappella arrangements of songs just so that he would join in on. At the end of the Broadway run, Ben told them that he was booked at Kutchers in the Catskills and wanted to know if they'd join him and do all those songs they did backstage. Suddenly, they had an act and actually started touring it!

When Ben first asked them to join, he told them that he could list their names separately or they could come up with a group name. Right at that moment, the assistant stage manager came around asking for people's wallets, jewelry, etc. that would be stored during the show. (If you don't know, you usually get a knock on your dressing room door before the show from the assistant stage manager who calls "Valuables!") Ben heard that and suddenly said, "That's it! Ben Vereen and The Valuables!" I told Rob they were lucky it wasn't wardrobe walking around before they did a wash or they would have been called "Ben Vereen and the Dance Belts."

All right, I'm gearing up for Adam Pascal's show. We're definitely going to do his amazing version of "Without You," which he sang in Disaster! ending in a high B! I wish there was a way we could add "Sky High," which we sang together. Here's a clip of both of those songs and more from when we were on The Today Show. Enjoy and then peace out!

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The Hidden Meaning in Stephen Sondheim's Into the Woods You Never Knew About | Playbill

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The Hidden Meaning in Stephen Sondheim's Seth Rudetsky Into the Woods You Never Knew About This week in the life of Seth Rudetsky, Seth shares more tales from Playbill Travel's Iceland cruise, including how Rob McClure met Sondheim and learned the lyrical secret in "Moments in the Woods." Yay!

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Playbill Vault: Original 'Little Red' Danielle Ferland Recalls Her Favorite Moments in Into the Woods | Playbill

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Danielle Ferland, the original Little Red Ridinghood in Into the Woods, sat down with Playbill to reminisce about her experience in the legendary 1987 Broadway production. She talks about what it was like working with creators Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, castmates Joanna Gleason and Bernadette Peters, and some of her favorite memories from the experience.

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Bernadette Peters and Original News Into the Woods Cast Recall Untold Stories, Backstage Memories and Standouts With Sondheim

In anticipation of the upcoming release of the long-awaited Disney screen adaptation of the Tony Award-winning musical Into the Woods, Playbill.com reached out to the cast of the original Broadway production, who shared their memories from rehearsals to performance, including the creation of "No One Is Alone," candid backstage stories and standout moments with Stephen Sondheim.

Into the Woods features a Tony-winning score by Sondheim and Tony-winning book by James Lapine, who staged the musical's 1987 Broadway premiere at the Martin Beck Theatre. Playbill.com caught up with members of the original cast including Bernadette Peters, Chip Zien, Joanna Gleason, Kim Crosby and Robert Westenberg and more, who shared stories about their personal experiences in that landmark production, which lives on thanks to a live taping of the original staging, which was broadcast on PBS' American Playhouse in 1991. It will be released on Blu-ray Dec. 2.

In addition to the tales of on-stage mishaps, backstage stories, last-minute rewrites and stories of Sondheim, the cast also shared memories of late cast member Tom Aldredge, who created the role of the Narrator/Mysterious Man.

Click through to go back Into the Woods:
Jeff Blumenkrantz, Understudy for Jack, Steward and Rapunzel's Prince
On-Stage/Rehearsal Memory:
During previews, there was a rehearsal where "The Last Midnight" was to be staged for the first time. Ben Wright was unavailable, so I was playing Jack. The choreographer, Lar Lubovitch, had worked out some specific, somewhat busy staging for Bernadette Peters' first stanza, and as he gave her this staging, she said something to the effect of, "What if I just stood still for this part of the song?" He said something to the effect of, "I'd like you to do my staging." And she said, "I just think keeping still would be a really powerful way to start this song," and he said, "I'd like to see my original staging."

Now, 22-year old me thought: A) She's absolutely right - why aren't you listening to her? B) That's Bernadette Peters you're not collaborating with!? and C) She's about to give you a proper diva torching. And that's exactly what didn't happen. What happened was: Bernadette proceeded to execute his staging without argument for the length of that rehearsal. Granted, the next time we revisited that song, there was completely new staging, but I'll never forget how gracefully and generously she handled it in the moment. What a pro.

Standout Moment with Sondheim:
During previews, Steve put a note on the callboard expressing his dissatisfaction with a certain couplet in the "Agony" reprise and requesting suggestions for an improved couplet. Fledgling songwriter that I was, I labored over those lines for days. But what was I thinking? It's Stephen Sondheim. It never gets any better than that!

Favorite Into the Woods lyric:
"If the end is right, it justifies the beans." Something you learned about yourself, or as an actor in the production:
I'd say that being in Into the Woods at the tender age of 22 definitely spoiled me. It's exquisitely written, it was filled with a cast of the most exceptional players, and it's a piece that entertains but also has something to say. That's what I've wanted/expected/hoped for from every subsequent theatre experience...

Remembering Tom Aldredge:
What a classy, classy guy, not to mention kind and super-talented. It's funny, I picture Tom always lying on his back on the floor. He was dealing with back pain issues during that run, and that position was the most comfortable for him...

Maureen Davis, Sleeping Beauty

On-Stage/Rehearsal Memory:
One night, Little Red ( Danielle Ferland) broke her foot ice skating; Snow White (Jean Kelly) was already onstage for a vacationing Rapunzel ( Pamela Winslow), so I needed to not only play the stunt witch for Bernadette but ALSO Little Red! The hair/make-up people as well as dressers stood by for my quick changes, and in one scene I had 30 seconds to change my voice/hair/costume (head to toe). I went directly from the witch transformation to a scene with Jack (Ben Wright), got my laugh, and exited stage left to whispers of "brava diva" from my hair guy, Dale.

One more memory... One of the special effects broke and we had to stop the show to fix it. Dick Cavett was the narrator and he started to tap dance and take questions from the audience. It was priceless.

Rehearsal Memory:
In rehearsals, Paul Ford always had theme songs for us as we walked in. Mine was always a Menudo song... OMG. It's still funny to me today. Paul Gemignani always said "Hey, Ugly" since I was Bernadette "as" the ugly witch four minutes a night. Too funny.

Standout Moment with Sondheim:
Sondheim was napping in the aisles in the balcony. I went up to watch scenes I was not in. I tripped over him and said, "Oh, I'm so sorry. Mr. Sondheim, I'm your Sleeping Beauty," to which he replied, "I'm sure you are." Favorite Into the Woods lyric:
There was a jazz waltz cut in previews called "Boom Crunch" that I thought was especially clever. Much of that song became "Last Midnight," but I think the song that always touched me the most was "No One Is Alone." I don't think I can pick just one lyric - they are all pretty amazing.

Something you learned about yourself, or as an actor in the production:
OMG - to think that someone thought I was talented enough or worthy enough to be on Broadway. But truly, the show had so many life-lesson messages... Most notably that event though everything you wish for comes with a price, take that chance and wish for it anyway.

Remembering Tom Aldredge:
I so very much loved Tom. He always made sure I understood there were no small parts, only small actors (and at 5'2" he loved that joke). We shared fruit cups and fatherly chats at the diner across from the Martin Beck Theatre. And when I did get to go on as a lead character, Tom was my head cheerleader! Amazing man.
Danielle Ferland, Little Red Riding Hood
Growing up in the business, I loved the freedom of being a child actor and how blissfully unaware I was of all of the politics. I look back on that time, at how innocent I was, with nostalgia. As I got older, I became more aware of all of the extraneous things that get in my way of being in the moment, doing my thing and having fun and I miss that.

Something you learned about yourself, or as an actor in the production:
Trust your instincts!!!! I definitely overthink and second guess myself when I'm working. During Woods I learned so much by just watching other amazing performers, like Joanna Gleason, Chip Zien and Bernadette Peters, and soaking it all in. When I trust myself, listen to other actors and shoot from the hip, it is very often the best choice.
Colleen Fitzpatrick, Understudy for Florinda, Lucinda and The Baker's Wife
On-Stage/Rehearsal Memory:
I was awestruck with the breadth and definitive talent in the show down to every cast member, including the understudies. You had to be on your game every day or find your game and pronto! From the moment of the first downbeat.

Favorite Into the Woods lyric:
My favorite lyric and also, memory of Tom Aldredge (I had the privilege of also working with him in Passion) was: If I wasn't on, I would get as close to the stage as I could in the stage right wing and watch him and Chip Zien sing "No More." A profound lyric made even more meaningful sung and acted with the deep humanity plus the personal connection between Chip and Tom. Breathtaking. It changed me and I will never forget it.

Joy Franz, Cinderella's Stepmother

On-Stage/Rehearsal Memory:
My rehearsal moment was when we were at The Old Globe and Steve Sondheim had just written "No One Is Alone" and Kim Crosby was sitting on the edge of the stage just sight reading the song, tears burst out of my eyes! To me, it's one of the most spiritual and uplifting songs!

Something you learned about yourself, or as an actor in the production:
I learned always come back a day early from vacations because you never know when you might have to go on for another role!

Remembering Tom Aldredge:
Tom Aldredge was so supportive and encouraging when, at the last moment, I had to go on for The Witch! He was awesome to me!

Joanna Gleason, The Baker's Wife

Something you learned about yourself, or as an actor in the production:
That show paralleled a complicated time in my life, where it was all about "and" versus "or"... And each time I took the journey through the show, different themes within it resonated with greater weight. By the end of my run, I had a perspective on life, on my life, that I may not have ever found without it.

Remembering Tom Aldredge:
Each night as we would take our opening tableau places, Tom Aldredge would say, "Go get 'em baby." He was a calming, wise, funny, lovely man.
Philip Hoffman, The Steward
On-Stage/Rehearsal Memory:
I remember in rehearsal James Lapine, Anne Hould-Ward (costume design), Bernadette Peters and at least one other person got into a huddle to solve some problem or other. I wasn't part of it, of course, but I felt this really positive energy coming off of them. A "creative pleasure" at working out a solution together. That picture of the collaborative nature of theatre-especially musical theatre-has stuck with me ever since.

Standout Moment with Sondheim:
That we recorded the production for PBS was also a great treat. I still have people telling me they watched it over and over as kids. (Then they point accusingly and say, "You killed Jack's mother!") During the taping, Stephen Sondheim complimented my work. I think my heart actually stopped. I mumbled something, incoherently, but I don't remember what. I thought, what does one say? "Oh, you're pretty good yourself?" To Stephen Sondheim?!

Jean Louisa Kelly, Snow White

On-Stage/Rehearsal Memory:
A big memory for me was the night Danielle Ferland fell on the stairs up to the dressing rooms after the show. She and I were buddies and I understudied her role, Little Red. We used to race up the stairs every night after curtain - being 15 and 16 years old, just kids. She slipped and fell one night, bruising her hip badly. She was out for a week, and that night I remember sitting with big eyes on the stoop, as she was being tended to by the medic, and Bob Westenberg walked by eyeing me, "So, it's your big moment, kid, huh?" or something to that effect, with a twinkle and a smirk. I did go on for her for a week - terrifying!

I also remember all the time spent in the dressing rooms with the understudies, playing cards, listening to the grown-ups talk, absorbing it all. They were hilarious and kind. I would work out during the first act and then get into make-up and costume during the second act to go onstage at the end.

Favorite Into the Woods lyric:
"Careful the spell you cast, not just on children
Sometimes the spell may last past what you can see and turn against you
Careful the tale you tell, that is the spell
Children will listen." Something you learned about yourself, or as an actor in the production:
I was so young, only 15, when I did the show. Though I did have a principal part, going onstage every night, the bigger lesson I was learning was how to be helpful to the production while at the same time staying true to myself as a performer. Danielle and I were very different, and I had to play Little Red in a way that matched my personality, but wasn't disruptive to the show when I stepped in. I guess that's a lesson I'm still learning - how to be a worker among workers and at the same time honor my own voice.

Remembering Tom Aldredge:
Tom was crusty, authentic and a true professional. I worked with him on a movie about 10 years later and he was the same way.

Kay McClelland Naugle, Florinda

On-Stage/Rehearsal Memories:
At one point in rehearsal, if not in performance, I think I remember several actors (Joy Franz? Chuck Wagner?) were given little pieces of prosthetic goo to slap on their faces as if parts of Rapunzel had splashed on them after the giant smushed her...

The unstoppable spinning piece of hill (sometimes stuck in the spin cycle).
All sitting in the theatre mooing to see whose "moo" could be used for the voice of Milky White... Really disappointed I didn't get that...
When most of us for the first time heard "No More" in rehearsal, I remember tears on almost everyone's faces.

Something you learned about yourself, or as an actor in the production:
That could also be the lesson I've taken with me since then, such a simple thing and so often forgotten, the impact we have with every move we make.

Remembering Tom Aldredge:
As for the great Tom Aldredge... I still have the t-shirt he gave us after one of the numbers had been cut. It's black and in white letters it says, "2nd midnight gone!" I'm extremely proud to have been part of such a wonderful production.

Lauren Mitchell, Lucinda

On-Stage/Rehearsal Memory:
So many great moments that are probably just too inside to share, really, but I will confess that Kay McClelland and I loved to make Paul Gemignani laugh, and in the Act I finale, we may (or may not) have taken advantage of being "blind" with canes to call attention to our antics.

Something you learned about yourself, or as an actor in the production:
Prior to Into the Woods, I had not originated a role on Broadway. I started with the show at the Old Globe in San Diego, and found the entire process from Old Globe to workshop to Broadway fascinating; how the script and score developed, how all of the production elements came together, and how sometimes getting the seemingly smallest details right often had great impact. James Lapine was tireless and exacting in his attention to all of these things, as was Steve Sondheim with respect to keeping at a song or moment, or "moment" until it was absolutely right, and not being precious about material when it wasn't. To be able to experience the development of the show from the beginning was an incredible experience, and I do think the seeds of what I do now were sown in Into The Woods. Remembering Tom Aldredge:
A dear, kind, decent and good man. We were all out to dinner, don't remember now if it was between shows, or during 10 out of 12's, I think the latter, and we were all talking about our parents, childhoods, etc., and I expressed my (at the time) ambivalence about having children of my own. He urged me to reconcile my ambivalence and to have children. He told me that he and his wonderful wife (the great Theoni V. Aldredge) had a marvelous life, but not having children was the one regret he had. That stayed with me. My daughter is in college now, and she made her own theatrical debut as The Witch in 6th grade. That was something!

Bernadette Peters, The Witch

On-Stage/Rehearsal Memory:
The memory that stands out the most for me is when our choreographer, Lars Lubovitch, tied me up so that I would get the feeling of being hunched over in a croney position to play the haggard witch.

So every morning I'd come in to rehearsal and Lars would tie me up and there would go Bernadette, rolling around the rehearsal room, until one day, he said, "You got it... No need for the ropes anymore!" That was a happy day!

Remembering Tom Aldredge:
Tom Aldredge was a wonderfully talented, generous performer and man. He added to our whole experience. All of us, I believe, missed him at the reunion, BUT we started the show with his voice, saying, "Once Upon A Time!!"

Kim Crosby Westenberg, Cinderella

On-Stage/Rehearsal Memory:
So many memories, as you can imagine, but Dick Cavett was (for a time) playing the Narrator. There were technical glitches on some rare occasions that would require the curtain be brought down in order to correct them. There was one time during Cavett's run when such a thing occurred. Rather than leave the audience members to wait out the delay in the dark, Mr. Cavett stepped out in front of the curtain and entertained them for a good 15 minutes! He was truly in his element having hosted his own show for so many years and JUST the guy you needed in a situation like that! By the time the show resumed, the audience was in a grand mood and was witness to something very rare. Also, falling in love with my husband during the course of the run holds a special place in my heart...

Favorite Into the Woods lyric:
One of my favorite lyrics (and one of my more challenging tongue-twisters) was:
"Quick, little birds,
flick through the ashes.
Pick and peck, but swiftly,
sift through the ashes,
into the pot!"

Something you learned about yourself, or as an actor in the production:
Well, I had never had the good fortune to be in as long a run of a show as Into the Woods, and to keep the show fresh eight times a week was daunting at first. I learned so much from working with this cast. I was, particularly, impressed observing Barbara Bryne at work in this production. I asked her to share some things she found helpful in her vast experience. She was always so consistent in her portrayal, and her interpretation forever NEW. She said she endeavored to change just one thing every single show. Be it a line reading, an action, a reaction... anything that would give her something to look forward to every performance. It was some brilliant advice, because in doing so, it very often prompted a subtle change in others' responses, too. I've used her advice ever since! Remembering Tom Aldredge:
I adored Tom Aldredge. My fondest memory would always be of the twinkle in his eyes. He managed to be gruff AND sweet at the same time, and always a consummate pro! I miss him so much, and we all did (especially) this past week at the Into the Woods Reunion. Hearing his voice saying, "Once Upon a Time..." at the start of the concert sent the audience into a frenzy, and brought me to tears...

Robert Westenberg, Cinderella's Prince/The Wolf

On-Stage/Rehearsal Memory:
During the Tony voting period, between the nominations and the ceremony, I was given a new pair of shoes for the Prince which had extremely thick and spongy soles, very comfy. However, I didn't have time to rehearse any of my physical moves with them before the show. On my first entrance as the Prince, when I came bounding onstage and leapt off the platform, I got so much lift that I lost my center and starting tipping forward in the air. I fell flat on my face and slid across the stage, scraping my hands and tearing a hole in the knee of my pants. It actually got a laugh. It hurt like hell, but of course I had to act like it was intentional and continue with the scene. I felt like a complete idiot.

Something you learned about yourself, or as an actor in the production:
After doing the show for two years, you learn that acting is an ever-evolving process. There is no arrival. There is no finished product. There is only the moment onstage and being alive and awake to everything around you. I was still making discoveries in the final week. Remembering Tom Aldredge:
Tom and Chip and I had adjacent dressing rooms for two years, eight shows a week. After every show, we would pretend to be an audience member who had just seen the performance and was unimpressed with the other actor's work. However, the rule was that you couldn't say anything overtly negative about that person's work, but you also had to say the truth. The comments ranged from statements like, "You were really on that stage tonight, buddy," to "Wow, that was like nothing I've ever seen before," and "That was so incredibly brave." Tom always topped us. He was brilliant. I loved him like a brother.

Chuck Wagner, Rapunzel's Prince

On-Stage/Rehearsal Memory:
This is from the original run in San Diego. Ellen Foley was The Witch and Kay McClelland was Rapunzel. In the moment where the witch has her beauty restored and is confronted by the Rapunzel family she tries a spell and it doesn't work, so we check ourselves and turn to go. Well, the stage effects at the Old Globe are more old school than on Broadway and with the end of act one approaching, a trap door was unlocked earlier than planned in preparation for the beanstalk. The sting of the spell happened, we looked and were fine, we shrugged... and as we turned to go Kay practically disappeared. The trap had given way and she nearly plunged into the basement! I was lucky to have held on to her enough to stop her descent but she did get some serious bruises. That never happened again!

Something you learned about yourself, or as an actor in the production:
I was a new father when we were first in the woods. My wife Susan was very pregnant during the San Diego run and my son Stewart was a real Broadway baby. All of the show's messages hit home deeply, and it strengthened my love of fairy tales and of musical theatre. James Lapine taught me to play simply and honestly and to work hard at the craft. Working with such a talented ensemble was a joy! I am still learning from the show, and I'm happy the movie will bring it to millions more! Truly, no one is alone, and the show helps to strengthen community and family like all great fairy tales!

Ben Wright, Jack

On-Stage/Rehearsal Memory:
I remember James (Lapine) asking me if I could do a standing backflip at the end of "Giants in the Sky." I said, "No, but maybe I could throw this bag of gold in the air and catch it on the last beat." The rest is history.

Standout Moment with Sondheim:
September 3, 1989, Into the Woods closed on Broadway. The Martin Beck Theatre was sold-out, standing room only, in fact. Steve, Jim, the producers and many of the original cast were there. The curtain came down and everyone joined together onstage. The curtain rose one last time and Steve was ushered downstage center. We thought a curtain speech was at hand; instead, he said this (I paraphrase): "Today is a special day for obvious reasons, but what you might not know is today is also quite special because it's someone's 20th birthday." And with that he pulled me downstage center with him and began singing "Happy Birthday" to me with the cast/crew and audience joining in. If you've ever had 1,400 people on their feet singing "Happy Birthday" to you at the same time, then you know exactly how I felt - blessed. Steve didn't have to do that. He could've soaked-up the limelight for himself; instead, he shifted the focus to me. Pure class. I love that guy.

Favorite Into the Woods lyric:
"We disappoint, we leave a mess, we die, but we don't. We disappoint in turn, I guess. Forget, though, we won't. Like father, like son."

Something you learned about yourself, or as an actor in the production:
I learned that sometimes in life, you just get lucky.

Chip Zien, The Baker

On-Stage Memory:
Sitting on a log with Tom Aldredge and singing the simple harmony of "like father like son" - a quiet moment when the audience slips away and it's just you and a wonderful fellow actor, sharing an intimate affection and the pure joy of live theatre.

Rehearsal Memory:
Looking back, I think I want to say that the fact that I was rehearsing at all, that James Lapine stuck with me through thick and thin, through readings, workshops, San Diego, more workshops and finally Broadway, through the tension of previews on Broadway... was an enormous gift. These were all terrific roles, prized roles, and I feel eternally grateful for the opportunity.

Standout Moment with Sondheim:
So many moments ("in the woods")... However, one of the best was sitting in a bar with Steve in Dallas after a benefit at SMU regaling him with unrepeatable backstage ITW stories of bad actor behavior and watching him become hysterically delighted and convulsed with laughter. Favorite Into the Woods lyric:
Again, so many. But: "...No more giants, waging war. Can't we just pursue our lives, with our children and our wives..."

Something you learned about yourself, or as an actor in the production:
Two things. It's really important to take care of yourself and stay healthy when you're in a Broadway show and it's really important to have a wonderful, feisty, magical partner onstage like my dear friend Joanna Gleason, who challenged and inspired me and made me a better actor.

Remembering Tom Aldredge:
Maybe that first answer responds to the question about Tom. Tom was a calming presence, an extremely kind man, a wise elder when we were all going crazy, and warmed up in his dressing vocalizing and over pronouncing for reasons only known to him... "I JUST KILLED THE CAT! I JUST KILLED THE CAT!"

A Look Back at Into the Woods on Broadway and Beyond

77 PHOTOS

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Bernadette Peters and Original Into the Woods Cast Recall Untold Stories, Backstage Memories and Standouts With Sondheim | Playbill

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Bernadette Peters and Original News Into the Woods Cast Recall Untold Stories, Backstage Memories and Standouts With Sondheim In anticipation of the upcoming release of the long-awaited Disney screen adaptation of the Tony Award-winning musical Into the Woods, Playbill.com reached out to the cast of the original Broadway production, who shared their memories from rehearsals to performance, including the creation of "No One Is Alone," candid backstage stories and standout moments with Stephen Sondheim.

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For the past year or so, a certain segment of the population-musical-theatre fans who were children in the eighties and thought they were too good for Andrew Lloyd Webber-has experienced a punishing range of emotions about the new movie "Into the Woods," based on the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical of the same name. The emotions include anxiety, rage, anticipation, possessiveness, nostalgia, suspicion, denial, and dread. More than once, I've heard the show's own lyrics used to explain how "Into the Woods" devotees feel about the adaptation. "Excited and scared," as Little Red Riding Hood has it.

As a member of this small but fervent demographic, I'd like to explain why we've been so tense. Part of it is that "Into the Woods" is easy to get wrong. The musical weaves together fairy-tale figures like Cinderella, Jack (of the beanstalk), Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, Rapunzel and the witch, and more than one handsome prince. Two new characters, a baker and his wife who've been cursed with barrenness, help to tie everything together. By the end of Act I, everyone's wishes have come true: Cinderella gets her prince, Jack gets the giant's harp, the baker and his wife get a child, and so on. In Act II, it all falls to pieces. A second giant goes on a killing spree. The princes cheat. The couple resorts to blaming and bickering. The characters question their original wishes and what they stole and whom they sold out to fulfill them. Nobody quite lives happily ever after.

In other words, it's the antidote to Disney. So how could Disney possibly adapt the show without betraying its dark spirit? That was the question lingering over the buildup to the movie, stoked by dribs and drabs of paranoia-inducing detail. In a Talk of the Town piece by Larissa MacFarquhar in June, Sondheim himself seemed to confirm purists' worst fears, telling a group of drama teachers that Disney had in fact bowdlerized some plot elements: "You will find in the movie that Rapunzel does not get killed, and the prince does not sleep with the baker's wife." (Only one of those things turned out to be true.) Disney's tagline seemed unnervingly apt: "Be careful what you wish for."

More than plot, what's tricky about "Into the Woods" is tone. Lapine's book tacks between farce and tragedy, winking at the absurdities of the original tales (How the heck does Little Red Riding Hood climb out of the wolf's belly intact?) and then guiding their characters through calamity and heartache. Sondheim's score is a puzzle-master's trove of overlapping motifs, internal rhymes, wordplay ("We've no time to sit and dither / while her withers wither with her"), and psychological nuance. Few musical-theatre soliloquies are as elegant as "On the Steps of the Palace," Cinderella's deconstruction of the moment she decides to leave behind the shoe:

You think, what do you want?
You think, make a decision.
Why not stay and be caught?
You think, well, it's a thought,
What would be his response?
But then what if he knew
Who you were when you know
That you're not what he thinks
That he wants?

And then what if you are?

When the musical opened on Broadway, in 1987, parents would occasionally yank their young children out of the theatre in shock during the second act, thinking, They killed Rapunzel? I was too young to go (though, to my mother's credit, she brought me to see Sondheim's "Passion" a few years later), but fortunately Lapine's note-perfect production was preserved by "American Playhouse." The moment I first saw Bernadette Peters singing "Last Midnight" on PBS, circa fifth grade, was a formative one. It wasn't just that she looked like a fabulous goth diva or her peculiar, warbly way of delivering punch lines. It was Sondheim's articulation of the witch's alienation and moral skepticism that was so riveting. Also, her hair.

I certainly didn't comprehend all the musical's resonances, among them the communal solidarity during the AIDS crisis, which at the time was stomping around the theatre world like an angry giant. (Sondheim has downplayed the AIDS connection, but it's unavoidable.) Still, the show was a psychological bait and switch, a gateway to adolescence and its complicated truths. Act I had magic beans. Act II had disillusionment, responsibility, and loss. You got from one to the other through the woods, as good a metaphor as any for the big brutal world. Even the shifts in tone were a lesson: amid despair, a dry one-liner ("I was raised to be charming, not sincere"); after an act of courage, ethical revisionism. What I learned from "Into the Woods," most of all, was ambivalence. It's in every song, undermining prepackaged morals. ("Isn't it nice to know a lot?" Little Red sings to herself. "And a little bit not.") No one in musical theatre does ambivalence like Sondheim, and usually no one tells you what it is until after you've experienced it. Cinderella's hemming and hawing on the palace steps is worlds away from "A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes," from Disney's cartoon version. What if your heart doesn't have a goddam clue?

It's appropriate, then, that ambivalence is the overriding feeling I've had about the movie, even after seeing a screening a few weeks ago. Rob Marshall's version, I'm happy to report, is faithful enough to please most diehards, without sacrificing the concrete magic that movies can offer. For the most part, the plot changes seem wise. (Come on, guys, relax about the Mysterious Man.) Meryl Streep is excellent; duh. It's wordier and weirder than other movie musicals, as it should be. If anything, it was jarring to see the show's ambiguities translated so literally to a big holiday film, where they don't seem to belong-or maybe I was just seeing the musical's flaws for the first time. Is the second-act massacre really deserved? I kept wondering, as I watched, how this could possibly be marketed to children, but then I reminded myself that I was ten when I saw "Into the Woods" on PBS. So now I'm worried less about the movie than about how the rest of the world will receive it-the selfishness of aficionados, who want their special thing all to themselves. Someday, the generation that learned about moral relativism from "Wicked" will feel the same way. I'll tell them something that I learned from the witch: sometimes the things you most wish for are not to be touched.

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For the past year or so, a certain segment of the population-musical-theatre fans who were children in the eighties and thought they were too good for Andrew Lloyd Webber-has experienced a punishing range of emotions about the new movie "Into the Woods," based on the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical of the same name.

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INTO THE WOODS Conversation Piece - Stephen Sondheim on the "Bean Theme"

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Finishing the Hat - Sunday In The Park With George

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Celebrate 35 Years of Photo Features Sunday in the Park With George With Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Pulitzer Prize-winning musical opened at the Booth Theatre May 2, 1984.

Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Sunday in the Park with George opened at the Booth Theatre May 2, 1984. The production, starring Tony Award winners Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters, played 35 previews and 604 performances before closing on October 13, 1985. The musical was nominated for 10 Tony Awards, including Best Actor and Actress nominations for Patinkin and Peters.

Sunday in the Park with George tells the story of painter Georges Seurat in the months leading up to the completion of his most famous painting, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. Consumed by his need to "finish the hat," Seurat alienates the French bourgeoisie, spurns his fellow artists, and neglects his lover Dot, not realizing that his actions will reverberate over the next 100 years.
Flip through photos of the production below:

Look Back at Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters in the Original Broadway Production of Sunday in the Park

Look Back at Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters in the Original Broadway Production of Sunday in the Park

15 PHOTOS

The musical features music and lyrics by Sondheim with a book and direction by Lapine. Rounding out the creative team were Tony Straiges (scenic design), Patricia Zipprodt and Ann Hould-Ward (costume design), Richard Nelson (lighting design), and Tom Morse (sound design).

Sunday in the Park with George was most recently revived at the Hudson Theatre in 2017, playing a limited engagement from February 11 through April 23.

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Celebrate 35 Years of Sunday in the Park With George With Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters | Playbill

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Celebrate 35 Years of Photo Features Sunday in the Park With George With Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Pulitzer Prize-winning musical opened at the Booth Theatre May 2, 1984. Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Sunday in the Park with George opened at the Booth Theatre May 2, 1984.

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EVITA 1980 Broadway Play Patti LuPone Mandy Patinkin Don't Cry For Me Argentina

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This was a tough column to write.

Because where do you start with a legend like Bernadette Peters?

We're talking about a two-time Tony-winner, seven-time nominee, who's starred in some 16 Broadway shows and been in more films and TV shows than I can list in about eight pages.

With a resume a mile long in TV, films and stage, you know Peters from something - whether its her masterful interpretation of Stephen Sondheim works, classic movies like "The Jerk" and "Annie," and hit shows like "Mozart in the Jungle," (brilliant) "The Good Fight," "Smash," "Ugly Betty," "Grey's Anatomy," "Will & Grace," the list goes on... and on.

Oh, and she's also a New York Times bestselling children's author who donates the profits to a charity she started with her late friend, Mary Tyler Moore.

In reminiscing about her career with me, she mentions people like George Burns, Johnny Carson, Sid Cesar, Steve Martin, Dean Martin, Bob Hope.

She told me about a party at Gregory Peck's house where she met Frank Sinatra...

I mean... #Icon.

Born Bernadette Lazzara in 1948 in Queens, her mother picked the stage name "Peters," after her dad's name, when she was just a little kid. Her IMDB goes back to when she a tiny kid on "Name That Tune."

Peters, 71 - she clearly drinks from the fountain of youth - will sing some of her favorite songs for us at New Bedford's Zeiterion March 30. If you love Broadway, you can't miss out on this.

The interview is so good - from her interaction with George Burns to her recent African safari - I have to jump right in.

Daley: You just starred on "Hello Dolly" on Broadway. What was that like?

Peters: Oh, it was great. Such a beautifully constructed show. I saw Carol Channing the last time she did it, and I was blown away by her, but I didn't realize how extraordinarily beautiful the show was until I was working on it.

Daley: You came in after Bette Midler.

Peters: She had said so me, "You should come in after me," and I went, "I don't think so."

Daley: [laughs] Right.

Peters: After you it's anti-climatic. [laughs] [But] I read the original Thornton Wilder book, and the script, and thought you know, I see what this means to me, so I'll do what it means to me.

Daley: I loved "Mozart in Jungle."

Peters: Yeah, we didn't get a season 5; we stopped at 4 because a whole new regime came in. It would've been nice to do one more season and wrap it all up. I loved working with Malcolm McDowell.

Daley: I tried to look through your resume, and it's just - wow. What stands out to you?

Peters: I've been really lucky. I've had a lot of great shows. "Gypsy" (the musical) was a great show, I loved doing that. I worked with George Burns; I did one of the Gracie sketches with him.

Daley: That must've been amazing.

Peters: It was a thrill. He said, "Listen kid, don't try to be funny. Gracie was a great tragedian actress."

Daley: [laughs]

Peters: At one point, I'm doing this sketch, and I see his eyes relax, like "Oh, OK, this is good" and I knew I was home free. [laughs]

Daley: [laughs] So stage, TV, film - what's your favorite medium?

Peters: You know, it's wherever the writing is the best. That's where I'll go. It can be stage, film anywhere. Writing is the most important.

Daley: What drew you to acting when you were young? I know you started at age 5.

Peters: My mother said I sang in front of the television, which I probably did, because I loved music. Then I found myself on television but I didn't know it was television because it was all live in those days. I just knew I went somewhere, and I was fantasizing, and these big machines were crossing in front of me. I tell you, it's a great career. It's a great release. A wonderful way to express yourself and be creative.

Daley: It seems like your mom knew you had talent from a very young age - I mean, changing your name, setting you up for a great career.

Peters: She did, and I have to thank her. She really put me on the road.

Daley: You've also written kids books. The profits go to your charity Broadway Barks.

Peters: That's right, that goes to helping animal in shelters. I sell CDs on the road, that goes to animals in shelters.

Daley: What got you so passionate about animals?

Peters: I've always loved animals since I was a little girl. My father used to bring in birds with broken wings; he loved animals. I just had this passion.

One day I went to a kill shelter to see what was going on and we saw beautiful pedigree dogs, mixed dogs, just beautiful. They were fine dogs, just homeless. I knew they needed help and I enlisted my friend Mary Tyler Moore to start [the charity] with me.

Daley: Do you have dogs now?

Peters: Two. One for each hand. Charlie and Rosalie.

Daley [laughs] And how did you know Mary Tyler Moore?

Peters: I worked with her on a movie for television, "The Last Best Year," and we became friends right away. We just connected. I just adored her.

Daley: You were in "The Jerk" with Steve Martin.

Peters: That was a great movie. Carl [Reiner] and Steve, I used to travel with them in the car, and they used to write the scenes in the car that day on the way to work.

Daley: Wow. And you travel a lot.

Peters: I do, I just took two vacations back-to-back which I never do. I went to Sicily, and then I went to Africa on safari. Then I went to Rwanda to see the gorillas. These gorgeous gentle giants. If the babies are curious, the babies may want to touch you but if a silverback is sitting there, they won't let you interact with the babies.

On safari, I walk into a park, and out comes an elephant. Or lions. Lying out on the Serengeti in the sun. I love animals and it's so peaceful on safari. You're in this Jeep, and you see giraffes, and you turn off the motor, and you hear nothing. They're just walking around quietly, eating leaves and you're in Heaven. You're in God's country.

Daley: You did voice work on "Animaniacs." I loved that show as a kid.

Peters: It was so much fun. I hadn't done voice before that, and people are just fans of "Animaniacs." Rita and Runt.

Daley: Yes! [laughs] Have you ever done anything where you just can't believe this is happening?

Peters: When I think back, I worked with Bob Hope, George Burns, Dean Martin. I was on Johnny Carson, and Merv Griffin.

Daley: Wow.

Peters: Oh, I met Sinatra at a party.

Daley: What? That's incredible.

Peters: I met Frank Sinatra at Gregory Peck's house. Now I'm thinking: how did I meet Gregory Peck? I don't remember how that happened. But they were lovely people.

Daley: That's incredible. Paul McCartney called you up once during a radio interview.

Peters: [laughs] Yeah, how did that happen? We both were doing an interview? Somehow I spoke to him. How did you find that? I forgot about that.

Daley: [laughs.] Anything you want to add?

Peters: No, I'm just wondering how you got that piece about Paul McCartney.

Interview has been edited and condensed.

Lauren Daley is a freelance writer and Spotlight music columnist. Contact her at ldaley33@gmail.com. Follow her at https://www.facebook.com/daley.writer She tweets @laurendaley1.

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Is there anything Bernadette Peters hasn't done?

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This was a tough column to write.Because where do you start with a legend like Bernadette Peters?We're talking about a two-time Tony-winner, seven-time nominee, who's starred in some 16 Broadway shows and been in more films and TV shows than I can list in about eight pages.With a resume a mile long in TV, films and stage, you know Peters from something - whether its her masterful interpretation of Stephen Sondheim works, classic movies like "The Jerk" and

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Bernadette Peters turns 70 this week. Her name is synonymous with American musical theatre-and the moniker "young and cute forever." How did that happen? And has she ever really gotten the respect she deserves? We take a romp through 1970s Los Angeles, '80s New York, and the brain of a '90s pre-teen to find out how Bernadette Peters became a woman not afraid to take up a lot of space.
Written by Victoria Myers

February 27 th, 2018

In December of 1976, a twenty-eight year old Bernadette Peters sat at a vanity in a pink silk robe with a mass of strawberry blonde hair piled on top of her head. Her body is turned away from the mirror and she stares out beyond the darkness into the firmament. Barely moving, she never bothers to wipe away the tears making a path to the floor. She is singing Stephen Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns."

It would be another 34 years before she would perform "Send in the Clowns" in its original context, when at age 62 she would play Desiree Armfeldt in the Broadway revival of A Little Night Music. By 1976, she had already received two Tony nominations, and would go on to receive three more nominations and two wins for Best Leading Actress in a Musical for Song and Dance in 1986 and Annie Get Your Gun in 1999. She'd also appear in a number of television shows and films, winning the Golden Globe for Best Actress in a Musical or Comedy in 1981 for Pennies in Heaven. And in 1995, at age 47, she became the youngest person ever entered into the Theatre Hall of Fame. She had founded a charity, Broadway Barks, to help find homes for animals in shelters. It was during the next two decades that she would acquire the two monikers that would most define her public persona. One: as the premiere interpreter of the work of Stephen Sondheim. Two: as eternally youthful and adorable, perpetually with an air of innocence, a precocious child in the body of 1920s vamp. In early 2005, when Peters was 57 years old, Linda Stasi, writing in The New York Post about a Happy Days reunion show, opened with the following: "With the possible exception of Bernadette Peters, not everyone stays young and cute forever." It's a pithy line, and one that encapsulated the box Peters had been put in for her entire adult life, even while being considered the premier interpreter of the work of contemporary musical theatre's most sophisticated, most lauded, most game-changing composer.

I first discovered Bernadette Peters when I was an 11-year-old who often skipped school to spend my days in my room with the television turned to TVLand. For a brief period in 1996, TVLand would air syndicated episodes of The Sonny & Cher Show. It was my favorite program. This particular episode was the 1976 Christmas special. Sonny and Cher were divorced, and to an 11-year-old who was raised on old movie musicals and I Love Lucy, trying to solve problems by putting on a variety show seemed like a very logical thing to do. For this episode, a man named Captain Kangaroo and a woman named Bernadette Peters were the special guest stars. The two main sketches that Peters appeared in were "Sonny's Pizza," where she played a bass drum player who had lost her marching band and then morphed into The Ghost of Pizza Yet to Come in a dream sequence; and as an aspiring actress who is one of four lonely people in a hotel restaurant on Christmas Eve (She had the line, "I guess if I'm going to be a big star, I have to give up some things"). But the most compelling moment of the episode was Peters' performance of " Send in the Clowns," which aired with a pre-recorded insert of her dancing around with clowns and singing Cole Porter's "Be a Clown." It sounds absurd. It was absurd. It was also wonderful. To me, sitting on my bed in Ohio, she wasn't just singing, but evoking an entire landscape-the loneliness of success, the toughness needed to survive, the strangeness of being able to observe life and live it, the split between the public and the private self, the end of Sonny and Cher's marriage, and some other mysterious thing that she did not want anyone to know. I had never seen anything like it. To me, it was so perfect that it was over a year before I figured out that "Send in the Clown" was, in fact, not written expressly for this purpose nor was it written by Sonny and Cher. It made such an impression that two and a half years later, in the spring of 1999 when I was thirteen, I opened my Playbill at the Broadway revival of Annie Get Your Gun, and thought, "Oh, it's the woman from Sonny and Cher."

Annie Get Your Gun was Peters' 11th Broadway show, and the first in six years after the unsuccessful run of The Goodbye Girl. Born in Queens with the name Bernadette Lazzara, and an actress since she was three and a half, Peters first started to gain attention in 1966 with the Off-Off Broadway production of Dames at Sea at Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village. Dames at Sea was billed as a pastiche of 1930s movie musicals, and Peters' played Ruby, a girl who arrives from the Midwest via bus, and in one day becomes a Broadway star. By 1968, Dames at Sea had expanded into a two-act musical and transferred to the Bouwerie Lane Theatre Off-Broadway. In the interim, Peters made her Off-Broadway debut in The Penny Friend, a musical about a girl who thinks she's Cinderella, but is actually unconscious and then dies; made her Broadway debut in Johnny No-Trump, a play by Mary Mercier, which closed after one performance, and where she played "a very grown-up 15-year-old;" the Off-Broadway production of Curley McDimple, a spoof of Shirley Temple movies; and on Broadway in George M, which won her a Theatre World Award.

At the time, Peters, barely out of her teens, still lived at home with her parents in Ozone Park in a blue and white bedroom with theatre posters on the walls, that she had shared with her older sister until her sister moved out. She liked jewelry and astrology, and, like most women that age, was still getting over insecurities about her appearance. She liked being alone and later would describe herself as an introvert. She was debating moving into the city and getting her own apartment.

Her parents were traditional, rooted in their Italian heritage, and Catholic (her father used to encourage her to go to church, until he finally gave up since, even though Peters believed in God, she had no interest in organized religion), but her mother had put Bernadette on the path to show business as a small child. She worked some, but never enough to reach the level of child stardom. She was an outgoing but serious child who didn't like to be told to smile. She wasn't much interested in childhood and had been in a hurry for it to be over. She later said, "I wouldn't want to be a child again. When you're a child, you have thoughts, but nobody listens to you. Nobody has any respect for you."

In his New York Times review of Dames at Sea, Clive Barnes, who liked the show, declared Bernadette Peters the star and said she was "adorable." In a profile of her that ran in the Times roughly a month later, she was described as a "kewpie doll" with a mention of her chubby thighs, and the writer, with a wink, called her shape "voluptuous."

The trend of acknowledging her talent and abilities, but linking them to her physical appearance and describing them through the lens of her adorability and innocence would continue into the next decade and beyond. Her follow up to Dames at Sea was the Broadway adaptation of Fellini's La Strada, which was supposed to be more play with music than musical, and more Brechtian than classic theatre, but ended up being more failure than success. Peters played Gelsomina, who is sold to a circus performer, falls in love and travels around the country with him. He starts to beat her and, in the end, she dies. During the first rehearsal, the director, Alan Schneider, screened the original film for the entire cast, and the then 21-year-old Peters sat in the back row and laughed when, in the film, Gelsomina's mother tells her that everything will be fine. She already had ideas about the character. She told The New York Times, "People say Gelsomina's crazy. She's not crazy. She's honest, untouched. She's people before they start covering up their emotions. She's pure." Clive Barnes called the character "a little waif" and Peters "birdlike and croaky," but that in a better show she would have become a star overnight. He doesn't elaborate on what made her performance so remarkable other than she looked right and sounded right and the director used her kooky mannerisms and corny modulations well. Barnes also highly praised her for her next show, On the Town, where she played Hildy, whose big number "I Can Cook Too" is a comic semi-seduction, but again, the praise was limited to a description of her as a childlike and enchanting creature. Meanwhile, Walter Kerr found all the women in the show hysterical and interchangeable. The part earned her her first Tony nomination.

In the early 1970s, Peters, who had moved out of her parents' house and into Manhattan, was already becoming disenchanted with New York and Broadway. Dames at Sea was made into a TV movie, which she'd wanted to do, but got replaced by someone more famous. "You have to remember that if you should get a hit on Broadway, your selling power is still small," she told After Dark in 1974. She started to do some TV including The Carol Burnett Show. Burnett had seen in her in Dames at Sea, and was so impressed by her comedic abilities that she made her an offer to appear as a guest on her upcoming TV show. For years after, Peters would continually credit Burnett with helping her more than anyone else. The experience with La Strada had been disappointing and she didn't see the point in "hang[ing] around New York, and do another show that, when I went into it, the music wasn't as good as it should have been but they said they were going to fix it and they never did, and the script they said they were going to fix and they still haven't." She wanted to do work that she could be proud of, even if other people might not like it. She knew people thought she was wrong for On the Town, but she did it anyway. At the opening party Mayor Lindsay tried to look down her dress, and she tried not to notice him doing it. She headed West and did some more TV and a movie where she played a prostitute in 1926, but was still looking at theatre projects, including a new musical by Jerry Herman that was having trouble finding a female lead.

In Mack and Mabel, she played silent film star Mabel Norman, who was influential to the development of the screwball comedy and who died at 37. The musical was troubled, although Peters was reviewed favorably. Again, she would be described as a "little waif" and "wide eyed." Again, she'd earn a Tony nomination for the role. At 26, it would be her last stage appearance for nearly a decade, and the last of her early career roles where she embodied women who died before they ever got a chance to become old.

By the mid-1970s, Peters had permanently relocated to Los Angeles and spent the formative years of her mid-twenties to almost mid-thirties on the West Coast. Los Angeles in the 70s was, like almost every other remembered place at almost every other remembered time, the best and the worst. It was post-Charles Manson and post-Golden Age. Joan Didion was writing about it. Eve Babitz was writing about it. All in the Family and The Jeffersons were on TV, and so were Happy Days and Little House on the Prairie. Jane Fonda went to Vietnam in 1972 and opened a workout studio in 1979. There were a lot of parties, a lot of drinking, and a lot of drugs. Barbra Streisand's A Star is Born was released in 1976; Judy Garland had died in 1969.

Peters said she liked living on the West Coast. She had gotten her driver's license after failing the test twice in the same day, and liked being able to get herself places and liked driving wherever she wanted in her red 1974 Toyota. She worked a lot, but no one knew exactly what to do with her. Not only could she sing and dance, which people kept telling her would limit the way people in Hollywood saw her, but the "in" look for women at the time was tall and rail-thin with long, straight hair, which was another thing people kept telling her, remarking that there was probably a reason why she said "no" to the cake that was always offered at the end of interviews over lunch-and by the way, did she know that she looked like someone from another era and that her speaking voice was unusual? Yes, sure she liked doing period things, and yes, she felt she understood the style, but she also felt like someone who was modern and alive now, since, you know, she actually was; and her voice was her voice, and if people didn't like it, too bad, what else is there to say; and, I mean, do you really want to talk about cake?

She was described as maybe not quite fitting into the Hollywood scene, since she didn't smoke and didn't do drugs and was a vegetarian and didn't like parties, and definitely didn't like them if she was asked to perform at them, which she never ever did except for one time, because it was hard to say no after an elderly Groucho Marx had sung. Some people thought she was a little too serious and tried a little too hard and laughed a little too much at her own jokes, which sometimes people thought weren't funny and/or were too corny, but she found them funny so she told them and laughed at them anyway.

She lived above the Sunset Strip with a miniature poodle named Rocco. She was still interested in astrology and started meditating. Still not a member of an organized religion and still believing in God, she had a spiritual awakening in '74 that she told The New York Sunday News was "swift, and an awakening to a better life," and that's all she cared to share about that. She realized that if she was going to perform, it needed to be about something greater than herself. She told TV Guide in 1976, "To me, an actor is, first and last, somebody with one big responsibility: to lift spirits, to always be this sort of shining light," and that during Dames at Sea she had "started wondering why I was on stage at all. I thought it was because I loved it. No, I realized I was there to give something to people-to give from the gut." The TV Guide writer was one of those who thought she laughed too much at her own corny jokes and wondered if she could really play a contemporary, liberal, activist in the new television show All's Fair.

In 1976 she appeared in two big projects: Mel Brooks' Silent Movie and All's Fair from creator Norman Lear, who, when asked if she really looked the part, responded with, "That's in your eyes, not mine. I saw a skilled comedienne with the range to play probably any style, and period." Some people thought she was great and some people thought she was too abrasive and came on too strong. The series only lasted one season, but she got a Golden Globe nomination. She also got more attention from the press, which was a challenge for someone who was private and didn't like to publicly talk about her personal life or her beliefs. She told the writer from The New York Sunday News that she was fairly liberal but, "No-I don't want to discuss Nixon or Watergate. Something personal happened to me regarding Nixon, and I don't want to discuss it. Don't get me wrong, I never met the man." Honest to God, I have no idea what that means, but I highly suspect that might be exactly the point.

She did more variety shows on television and traveled around with a nightclub act. She was mostly billed as a comic actress: kooky, zany, but still with the innocent waif moniker that had traveled with her from New York, and now with the added of baggage of "girl from another era." Comedy is, of course, hard, and she was good at it. Her performances were marked with bold, surprising, idiosyncratic choices. Lucille Ball once said about herself that she wasn't funny, she was brave, and that if the audience was ever even slightly worried that she might get hurt, they wouldn't laugh. What Lucy knew-and I mean she really knew-is that being a waif, with it's implied definition of helplessness, and being funny, are mutually exclusive concepts. Peters appeared with Ball and Carol Burnett and Eydie Gorme on The Dinah Shore Show in an episode dedicated to funny women and what it was really like for women in Hollywood. They discussed being taken seriously for their work and not their looks, not being boxed in, sacrifices, being an ambitious woman (while never using the word ambition), and balancing work and family life. Peters, 31 at the time and the only one who had never been married and still not in control of her career, found herself at the receiving end of a lot of advice. Ball, who was approaching 70 and knew better than anybody, seems to be stifling the urge to say what she knew she couldn't reveal on national television-how hard it really all was and is-that the world never had and never would be calibrated to support the choices of unique, talented, ambitious women. The year was 1979 and Peters was doing her concert act, which would be filmed for TV, and had a starring role in The Jerk with Steve Martin.

Peters met Martin in 1977, and a few months later they began dating. He was, at the time, the most successful stand-up comedian in the country. In early 1982, he'd tell Rolling Stone that what first attracted him to her was that she was independent, that they could talk about show business. Neither of them ever particularly discussed their relationship publically, but they worked together. In 1978, she opened for him at the Riviera in Las Vegas, and he wrote the female lead in The Jerk, his first movie, with her in mind. The Jerk opened to poor reviews but became an enormous success, and is now considered one of the best comedies of all time. They made one other movie together: 1981's Pennies from Heaven, which exploded the concept of the movie musical. The movie did horribly at the box office, but some critics found it exquisite (it is). Peters won a Golden Globe for her work in the film, and under a different set of circumstances, probably, deservedly, would have gotten an Oscar nomination.

Pennies from Heaven is both thrilling and uncomfortable to watch. The movie is set in the 1930s and uses the popular music from the time to represent what the characters wish they could say and what they wish their lives were like. "Don't you wish life could be like the songs?" says Arthur, played by Steve Martin. Towards the end of the movie, there is a scene where Arthur and Eileen, played by Peters, go to the movies and dissolve into dancing to " Let's Face the Music and Dance," the number made famous by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Follow the Fleet. In Follow the Fleet the dance is a show-within-a-show number, with no context, without moving the plot forward. In Pennies from Heaven, Martin and Peters dance in an imitation of Fred and Ginger until a chorus of men appear and suddenly their dancing canes grow and grow and grow until they become the bars of a jail cell.

She came back to the New York stage in 1982 in an Off-Broadway play at Manhattan Theatre Club directed by Lynne Meadow and written by Sybille Pearson. In Sally and Marsha she played a South Dakota housewife who has just moved to New York City. It was billed as feminist odd-couple. Her salary was just $210 a week, meaning she was losing money, but she wanted to do the play, and so do the play she did. Frank Rich considered Peters the best thing about the production. In his New York Times review, he said he thought she used her physicality ("big eyes" "kewpie-doll voice") well, and as an actress was in "top form these days," finding strength underneath the cuteness. Her part was described as the perfect role for her-"an indomitable waif adrift in the big city."

New York in the '80s was big, big, big and fast, fast, fast. It was the uber-rich, the rise of the yuppie, and starving artists. It was lunch at the Four Seasons. It was the AIDS epidemic. It was Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis and Tama Janowitz. Times Square was still a mess. Everyone was trying to get somewhere, get something. It was the beginning of the end, which is what people always say, and also the beginning of another beginning.

By the start of the '80s, Peters had already started to see the holes in the public perception of her, remarking to Esquire in 1982, "There are many different perceptions of me, as far as the public is concerned. I realized recently that people live in different time slots." She would continue to work in LA and do concerts, but starting in the mid-80s she'd begin another phase in career, the one that would forever establish her as a Broadway star. In the first half of the decade, she released two albums, including one with her painted as a Vargas girl on the cover, had two films out simultaneously (the aforementioned Pennies from Heaven and Heartbeeps), and hosted Saturday Night Live, where she sang song about masturbation. Her mother died in 1982. She broke up with Steve Martin. Writers started to comment that it really was quite difficult to get her to talk about anything personal, although she did start to reveal ambivalence towards the things she was supposed to want versus what she actually wanted. At the beginning of 1982 she was reading Cinderella Complex and told Esquire, "Sometimes I think marriage is what I want, and sometimes I think it's just a convention." A few years later, she'd begin to speak about how she was just learning to appreciate and be herself, just learning to be okay with success and ambition and free herself of what she thought all of those things meant. She told The Daily News, "I always had this thing in my mind-when you're a woman and you're a success, you're a ball breaker, you're terrible. I guess I sold myself this bill of goods, but I'm changing. It's OK for a woman to be aggressive and successful." In 1986 she told The New York Post, "I think I equated success with something not good. Losing yourself. Not being a real and good person. Something scared me about it. Then I realized I could be what I want." "Did this change happen with or before Sunday in the Park with George?," the writer asked. It was before Sunday. She had lived a life, she wasn't remade by Stephen Sondheim-if you are looking for a Pygmalion story, you might want to go elsewhere.

In 1983, at the age of 35, she joined a workshop production of a new musical by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine about Georges Seurat called Sunday in the Park with George. She played Seurat's model and mistress Dot, and later, in the second act, his daughter. The musical had its Off-Broadway premiere at Playwrights Horizons, and it then moved to Broadway. Peters was reluctant to do the Broadway production since she felt Dot's journey got lost as the first act progressed. According to Sondheim biographer Meryle Secrest, Sondheim and Lapine originally interpreted this as vanity on her part until they realized that her point was essential to the story. The show would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama (at the time it was only the sixth musical to ever win the Pulitzer) and Peters got a Tony nomination for her work. In a Daily News interview in conjunction with the Broadway show, she was described as a blend of "sexy siren" and "child who painted herself up in front of mommy's makeup mirror." In Frank Rich's review she's called "radiant" and "wonderful" and that's it. It would be Peters who, in the end, would walk away with the title of premiere interpreter of Sondheim's work.

She won her first Tony Award in 1986 for Andrew Lloyd Webber's Song and Dance, which opened in the fall of 1985. She told the Chicago Tribune that, to her, Song and Dance, "tells the story of the evolution of a woman. She realizes she shouldn't live her life by what other people think. She learns she can't be defined by other people." Yes, that was something she related to.

She was back in the New York theatre whirl. She was honored by Mayor Koch who said, "No one works harder or makes it look easier or prettier." Andy Warhol, in his diary, recorded her getting groped by one of his friends at a party thrown by Joseph Papp. She did more film and television, including the film adaption of Tama Janowitz' Slaves of New York where she said of her role, "People regarded the character as "a victim, but I thought of her as someone unconscious. She seemed to be me eight years ago, someone who didn't really appreciate herself enough. She was in a fog. She didn't know her strength." She would start remarking that she may not be tough, but she was a strong person. She did her second Sondheim show in 1987, where she portrayed The Witch in Into the Woods.

She wouldn't appear in another Sondheim show for over twenty years, and The Witch in Into the Woods would be the last-and one of only two-Sondheim roles that she would originate. But she started performing his songs in her concerts, and dedicated the entire second act of her 1996 Carnegie Hall debut to his music. The concert was recorded and released as an album, Sondheim, Etc., and a subsequent version of the concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London was filmed and released on DVD. Stephen Holden, in The New York Times, wrote of the Carnegie Hall concert, "The chemistry between the voice of the wise child and the lyrics of Broadway's ultimate sophisticate filled the hall with a profoundly bittersweet feeling of lessons learned on roads long traveled." She had worked hard at her job for over three decades and had fought for her accomplishments, and at 46, it all congealed around the same language that had been used to describe her since she was 18. It also ensured her place in Broadway history books.

By 1999, her position as a Broadway star was firmly established, and the her return to the stage at 51 in Annie Get Your Gun was greeted with both excitement and cynicism by people who thought she was wrong for the part and that the source material wouldn't hold up (the book of the show underwent major changes for the revival). The reviews were not good, although Peters' performance was praised, even if some continued to think she wasn't right for the role. Ben Brantley referred to her "oversize little-girl voice" and her "bruisable, fragile quality" that made it hard to believe that she could withstand anything tough or sexual. Brantley thought the lyrics "a doll I can carry" described Peters perfectly. Despite the mixed reviews, people came to see the show for her and she won her second Tony Award.

As a thirteen year old, I knew none of this. All I knew was that Bernadette Peters as Annie Oakley was the best live performance I'd ever seen in my life, ever. In the same way that I'd been so captivated by her performance of "Send in the Clowns" on Sonny and Cher, watching her on stage became a formative experience. It was the first musical that I'd seen where the female lead was the protagonist and not just the woman with the most lines, which still amounted to less than the male lead who was actually the lead. Annie Get Your Gun was her show. I didn't see anything fragile or doll-like. I saw someone who could be funnier, sing louder, and take up more space than anyone else on stage. Bernadette Peters might be small in size, but to me, she was someone who got to be very, very big in all the ways that mattered.

I begged my mother to let me see the show again, but was only permitted the cast recording and a souvenir program. When I got home from the New York trip, I set about finding out everything I could about Bernadette Peters, keeping articles I'd find in newspapers and magazines in a green, alphabetized accordion folder. I tracked down as many of her movies and cast recordings as I could, including her Sondheim, Etc. CD, along with the DVD of Bernadette Peters in Concert. Sondheim, Etc. became the album that, more than any other, defined my adolescence. It was in my ears on a daily basis and traveled with me around the world. By that time, I had figured out that Sondheim had written "Send in the Clowns," I knew West Side Story and Gypsy and had seen Forum-and used "Comedy Tonight" as the opening number for mine and my friend's third grade masterpiece, O.J. Simpson Trial: The Musical!-but almost all of his songs on her album were new to me. I didn't know their contexts, the characters who sang them, or what had supposedly happened the moment before. All I knew was what I heard Bernadette Peters singing about and the stories I made up in my head to go with them-in other words, the window through which I looked out and saw the world of the song belonged to her, not to him. And her performances of the songs were layered and urgent. She packed the expansiveness of a novel into a three-minute song. It didn't occur to me to ever label her as innocent or childlike or cute-even at thirteen I knew that calling an adult woman any of those things was degrading-as that simply wasn't what I heard or saw. Rather than the songs being funneled through, as Stephen Holden said in his New York Times review, a "preternaturally wise and loving child" with "radiant adorability," I saw songs funneled through confidence and knowledge and ambition and anger and conflict and individuality.

I finally saw Peters perform a live concert in 2002. The concert was at Radio City Music Hall and in conjunction with the album "Bernadette Peters Loves Rodgers and Hammerstein." It was one of two concerts I went to in high school (the other was a Cher concert), and when I got home, I devoted eight pages in my journal to chronicling everything I could remember about the night, which I said was one of the best of my life. The headline for Stephen Holden's review was "A Princess Sings Inside a Fairytale." I didn't read his review at the time-I was sixteen and in the final stage of not caring what anyone else thought.

Roughly six months later, when she appeared as Mama Rose in the 2003 Broadway revival of Gypsy, I knew that people thought she had a type and Mama Rose wasn't it. The revival was an uphill battle between the naysayers and the economic climate on Broadway. Peters got a Tony nomination, but lost the award. The revival closed earlier than expected. By that time, the trap of what other people thought of her was so firmly laid, there was no escaping. She wouldn't appear on Broadway again until 2010, when she'd play Desiree in A Little Night Music and, once again, sing "Send in the Clowns."

Re-watching her 1976 performance now I see no marks of childishness. For all of the number's absurdity, it is not without sophistication. The stillness, the lack of self-consciousness, the way she never seems to ask anyone for approval. To me, then and now, this is the opposite of being a waif. I revisited a number of her older performances and practically all of them are free of those characteristics. I remember discovering Mack and Mabel as a pre-teen and loving her songs because her voice was different; it lacked the sound of trying to appeal to as many people as possible with as little offense as possible. A reviewer of the Mack and Mabel album described Peters as having "an ingenious way with words," and she did, and continues to-her deliveries always have an element of someone who understands language from the inside out. In her concert and television performances from the 1970s and early 80s, she is at times zany and then calm and then angry, with movements that almost explode, but are incredibly precise. The comic precision is there in The Jerk. In Pennies from Heaven (not only my favorite of her films, but one of my favorites of all time) and Sunday in the Park with George, her performances are full of unexpected moments and originality. When I watch Bernadette Peters in Concert, the same DVD that lived by my TV in middle and high school, I still see so much of what I saw then: confidence, humor, drive, ability. And what I see now, that I don't think I would have been able to name back then, is a model for a woman singing with moral authority, not by covering herself up, but by being comfortable in her own uniqueness-a leader for slightly weird girls with strong personalities who were never going to be happy pretending to be smaller than they were. She was her own remarkable person.

Of course, who Bernadette Peters actually is remains somewhat unknown. Thinking back on how hard I tried, as a pre-teen, to learn about her, I really never found out very much about who she was as a person. Her stance of not wanting to discuss her life was staunch and only increased with time and age. She didn't want to talk about her mother; she didn't want to talk about her relationships; she didn't want to talk about the death of her husband, Michael Wittenberg, who she married in 1996 and who died nine years later. She would talk about the work, but only in a circumspect fashion. She put little effort into defining herself through anything other than what could be seen on stage or on screen.

I saw her in concert again in 2006 at Avery Fisher Hall, in A Little Night Music in 2010, and Follies in 2011, and it was somewhere in there that I began to feel frustrated not by the lack of revelation, but by the lack of definition. "Why don't you tell them they need to treat you as a serious person," I thought to myself. "Make them treat you like the accomplished person you are!" I was still young enough to think these were things individuals could control and that part of success was people listening to you.

This past summer, a number of Eve Babitz's books on life in Hollywood were reissued. One of them was Sex and Rage, which was originally published in 1979, the same year as The Jerk, the same year Lucille Ball rolled her eyes, and the same year Peters was doing concerts where her performances could bounce back and forth between extreme stillness and an almost violent energy. In Sex and Rage, the protagonist, an it-girl named Jacaranda, refers to the fabulous in-crowd as "the barge," and in one of the novel's most famous passages, reflects that girls like her, the young and cute, "the ones who were brought aboard to amuse the barge," disappeared through the only two acceptable ways out: dying young or being forced out by an STD. Any other means of escape, through self-invention or self-actualization, are not permitted-it's the one thing that truly upsets the barge. And maybe this is something Bernadette Peters learned early: how people put women in a box and want them to stay there, and act the way that type of woman is supposed to act and look the way that type of woman is supposed to look and say the things that type of woman is supposed to say. And people have never liked it when women break out of those boxes and break the rules that have been set up for them, because it forces people change the stories they've been telling not only about those individual women, but the stories they tell about themselves.

Peters can act, she can sing, she can dance. She can deliver comedy and drama. Her hair was always too big, her skin too pale, and her body too small and too big at the same time. Bernadette Peters is never not going to take up space. She vibrates with uniqueness. And perhaps it was her uniqueness that made her so hard to capture. In lack of any accurate language, and out of fear of any woman who refuses to remain one easily definable thing, people tried to contain the complexity and contradictions of her performances and her person by labeling them that of a precocious child, as young and cute forever.

Bernadette Peters will be 70 this week. She is currently starring in Amazon's Mozart in the Jungle, where she plays the President of the fictional New York Symphony, and once again on Broadway in Hello, Dolly!. I saw Hello, Dolly! a few weeks ago, and when it got to the end of the title song, everyone was on their feet clapping. When I sat back down I felt a strange mixture of both being very happy and very sad. Because, beyond everyone standing for the performance, and everyone standing for Peters, I also think they were standing for something else, something that was maybe labeled "young" and "innocent" instead of another word: hope. Maybe it was hope that people saw time and time again when they watched Bernadette Peters perform. Not hope that her characters or songs would have a happy ending, but hope that being unique and being your own person could win out in the end; that you could be many things at once; that you could always hang onto all the things that made you you. When asked to give advice to young performers, Peters always answers with, "You've got to be yourself." It is the easiest thing, and so often as we get older-as it is the best and worst of times, as it is the beginning of the end and the beginning of a new beginning, as you jump off the barge or get pushed off of it-it is the hardest thing. But maybe there is still hope that as the dancing men's canes turn into the bars of a jail cell, that you too can keep your head up and your shoulders back and look through the bars as your own remarkable person.

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Bernadette Peters: Young and Cute, Forever and Never

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Bernadette Peters turns 70 this week. Her name is synonymous with American musical theatre-and the moniker "young and cute forever." How did that happen? And has she ever really gotten the respect she deserves?

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The official website of Bernadette Peters - star of stage and screen.

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SUNDAY IN THE PARK, An Analysis by Scott Miller

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Return to New Line Theatre's homepage Return to New Line's Sunday webpage

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Sunday in the Park with George - We Do Not Belong Together

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Sunday in the Park with George, 1984 Tony Awards

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"ART IS HARMONY. Harmony is the analogy of contrasting and similar elements of tone, color, and line."

- GEORGES SEURAT

The winner of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for drama, Sunday in the Park with George is perhaps composer Stephen Sondheim's most acclaimed score. It is also perhaps the most ambitious of his career - highly original in its inspirations and structure. The creation of Sunday marks a brave new period in Sondheim's decades-long career.
A new collaboration sparks
Sunday in the Park with George was the first musical that composer Sondheim created with book writer (and original director) James Lapine. Sondheim told his new collaborator that he wanted to team up with him to create a musical that would explore "theme and variations" (the same structure that inspired A Little Night Music). Sondheim showed Lapine the French magazine Bizarre. Sondheim recalls, "One issue was devoted entirely to a couple hundred pages of every conceivable variation of the Mona Lisa ... both visually and verbally." Elaborating from that suggestion, Lapine brought up French impressionist Georges Seurat and his painting Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte.

"We realized that painting was the setting of a play," Sondheim says of the duo's first impressions, as recounted in Craig Zadan's oral history Sondheim & Co. "All the people in that painting ... when you start speculating on why none of them are looking at each other, and maybe there's a reason for that. Maybe someone was having an affair with another one, or one was related to someone else." But Lapine made what would be the key observation. Sondheim recalls: "Jim said, 'Of course the main character's missing. [...] The artist.'"

Sondheim and Lapine instantly knew they had the idea for a musical. Yet the story of artist Georges Seurat and the people in his painting ultimately only became the first act. The structure that Lapine created with Sondheim - which jumps a century ahead in time for the second act - is one of the most intricate for any Sondheim work. Early on, the creators knew they needed to connect two acts that would share few characters and almost no plot. "I thought one way to tie the two acts together would be to make - this is a word I learned from Milton Babbitt, and I loved it - architectonic similarities," Sondheim says. "In Into the Woods, which has a similar structure, there's a story - there's a real plot that goes on - which is a result of the first act. But in Sunday, the second act is an entirely separate entity - it's another ship - so the way to link them together, it seemed to me, was to make it some kind of parallel structure." Each act's opening song - "Sunday in the Park with George" and "It's Hot Up Here" - is the most obvious parallel; both are about being posed uncomfortably by an artist. But the songs "Color and Light," "Finishing the Hat," and even some of the characters each have a mirror image in the second act.

The dazzling intricacy of these parallels would be nothing without the intense passions that drive each of the characters, an emotionality that Sondheim credits in part to Lapine. Working with Lapine added to Sondheim's work, in Sondheim's own words, "a current of vulnerability, of longing, [...] a measure of compassion."
Seurat and Sondheim
Seurat's biography immediately moved Sondheim, who was drawn in by Seurat's meteoric path; Seurat finished his most famous painting at the age of 26, and then died unexpectedly at the age of 31. Sondheim also found Seurat's secrets tantalizing. "Here was this marvelous, mysterious genius who died of some strange disease, probably a rare form of meningitis," Sondheim says. "He led a double life - on the one hand, almost every night he'd stroll over to his mother's house for dinner ... yet only a few weeks before he died, she discovered he'd kept a mistress and had had a baby by her."

Sondheim also reached beyond the biographical, and found ways to draw inspiration from Seurat's aesthetic in the composition of the music itself. Initially, his impulse was to mirror Seurat's pointillist method in the rhythm of the music. "I looked at the painting," Sondheim remembers in an interview with scholar Mark Eden Horowitz. "You know everybody thinks Seurat painted in dots - he didn't, they're dabs. If you look at the strokes closely in the painting, he could only have applied them fairly slowly and meticulously. [...] But, I thought, on the stage you can convey that - this is called taking liberties - by having him applying dots fairly rapidly and rhythmically."

Sondheim found deeper ways to draw inspiration from the artist's work; Sondheim was struck by the way Seurat used pure colors to give life and vibrancy to his work. "Seurat never mixed a color with a color that wasn't next to it on the color wheel," Sondheim explains. "So he would never mix yellow with blue; he would mix yellow with yellow-orange, or he would mix blue with blue-violet. [...] Because the idea was to let the eye mix the colors. If the painter mixes the colors then the eye doesn't get a chance to, does it?"

Sondheim decided that Seurat's method of mixing colors would be reflected in his method of choosing and combining keys in the score. Initially, he thought he might contrast keys that were only a half-step apart, an idea he quickly discarded as too restrictive. But he found a way to incorporate that idea through major and minor keys. Sondheim says, "If you listen to the alternation - which becomes very important in the score - [...] the alternation between a major third and a minor third, if you juxtapose them, is exactly like juxtaposing yellow with yellow-orange, or red with red-orange."

While what is happening at a musical level has theoretical inspirations, Sondheim's desired effect was not a trick, but a new way to evoke emotion in a listener. Sondheim says, "I really believe that in 'Move On' when that alternation occurs - that little major/ minor alternation - that the ear blends those two things and it comes out to be this unsettled, but very poignant chord." Drawing inspiration from Seurat's methods brought fresh vibrancy to Sondheim's work as well.
Sondheim on the songs of Sunday
"Color and Light"

"If there is any song in the score that exemplifies the change in my writing when I began my collaboration with James Lapine, it would be 'Color and Light.' The flow between spoken and sung monologue, the elliptical heightened language, the stream-of-consciousness fantasies, the abrupt climatic use of unaccompanied dialogue, these are all musical extensions of hallmarks in Lapine's playwriting, particularly his early days."

"Finishing the Hat"

"As befits the creative act, 'Finishing the Hat' is a stream-of-consciousness lyric. There is no complete sentence until the last stanza; each of the preceding stanzas is a subordinate clause. [...] A little incoherence seemed appropriate in the case of an artist struggling to reconcile his personal life with his professional one."

"Sunday"

"Once during the writing of each show, I cry at a notion, a word, a chord, a melodic idea, and accompaniment figure. In this show, it was the word 'Forever' in 'Sunday.' [...] I still cry when I think about it. But then I cry at Animal Planet. Often."

- CHARLES HAUGLAND

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Living in the Canvas: The Creation of Sunday in the Park with George

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"ART IS HARMONY. Harmony is the analogy of contrasting and similar elements of tone, color, and line." - GEORGES SEURAT The winner of the 1985 Pulitzer Prize for drama, Sunday in the Park with George is perhaps composer Stephen Sondheim's most acclaimed score.

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How Sondheim and Lapine Made a Masterpiece with Special Features Sunday in the Park With George

Looking back at how the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical was written and how it revolutionized musical theatre.

"When I first hear a song sung, I'm worried that I'm going to be embarrassed by what I wrote," said Stephen Sondheim while Sunday in the Park with George was in previews. "So I try to postpone the moment." The quote is endearing, and more than a little absurd, coming from the patron saint of musical theatre-but in early 1984, Sondheim hadn't quite hit apotheosis. His previous musical, Merrily We Roll Along, had closed on Broadway after a 16-performance run.

Then salvation came-in the form of a Pointillist masterpiece. In June 1982, Sondheim began a tentative collaboration with James Lapine, a young Off-Broadway playwright. In search of a subject, they began rifling through photographs and paintings, one of which was Georges Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.

The 1884 painting looked like a stage set, Lapine observed, but was missing the main character. "Who?" asked Sondheim. "The artist," said Lapine. He laid tracing paper over La Grande Jatte and drew a constellation of arrows, each one pointing to an anonymous figure on the riverbank. "Mother?" he wrote. "Mistress? Butler?" It was like an existential game of Clue, a whodunit in which the answer was Georges Seurat.

But who was Seurat? In their research, Sondheim and Lapine were able to gather a few crumbs about the notoriously secretive painter: Seurat worked at night, kept mum unless asked about his experiments with color, and had apparently gone to great lengths to prevent his mother from learning of the existence of his mistress Madeleine Knobloch, a model who appears in Seurat's Young Woman Powdering Herself and bore him two children (both died in infancy). "When you have a character like that," said Sondheim, "you can fill him out in any way you want."

Sondheim delayed filling him in for as long as possible. To evoke the "rhythmic verve" of Seurat's technique, he decided to write a shimmering, "Brittenesque" score; for a time, he toyed with the idea of assigning every white piano key a color on Seurat's palette and "juxtaposing them the way he did in his painting, using the black keys to modify them the way Seurat used black and white." Lapine wrote a draft of the first act, including potential song cues ("The dogs sing here"), as well as a series of made-to-order monologues so that Sondheim could "raid" them for lyric ideas. By the time actors gathered for a reading of the first act, Sondheim had only completed the opening chords of the score. "I was really dubious," Lapine recalled. "I thought, Why isn't he writing? "

Bernadette Peters agreed to play Dot on the basis of one song and 30 pages of the first act; when rehearsals began for the Off-Broadway workshop in the summer of 1983, no music had been written for the second act. Curiously, this happened to be Sondheim's ideal writing process. "I really don't want to write the score until the show is cast and in rehearsal," he once said. "Then I wouldn't make any mistakes. Silly as it sounds, it's true, because by then you know the qualities of the people that you're writing for."

On Sunday, he had his wish-and once the actors adjusted to it, their time at Playwrights Horizons took on a Scheherazade sense of wonder. In one version of the show, all the figures in the painting got solos. Another draft featured a lengthy detour to the 1950s, with a child actor playing the pre-Chromolume George. "This is a show that Steve and James were writing as we were doing it," recalled Peters. "Every day we'd wait to see if a song would appear. I remember how exciting it was when 'Finishing the Hat' came in." By that point, Sunday had already begun performances, and the creators were making nightly curtain speeches acknowledging the play's unfinished nature.

One afternoon, Sondheim told Mandy Patinkin that he'd written a new song for George. In search of an open piano, they left Playwrights Horizons and crossed the street to the basement of the West Bank Café. Sondheim sat down at the piano and began to play. "He was very nervous," Patinkin said. "When he finished playing it and singing it, he went from a dry shirt to just sopping wet underarms, right in the chest bones-just drenched. He was worried about something. And we were in tears, all of us." Patinkin performed "Finishing the Hat" that night, using his sketchpad as a crib sheet.

The song has haunted artists ever since-and not just those who make musicals. As a teenager, Stephen Colbert read the lyrics of "Finishing the Hat" aloud to his mother "to try to explain why I wanted to be an artist." Joss Whedon, the man behind pop-culture juggernauts like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Avengers, has said of the song, "That's my experience of being an artist: what I would say, but better than I could ever say it."

"It's one of the few songs that actually captures what it's like to have a blank page and then put something down-the rush of it, the burden of it, and what it costs people," says Jeanine Tesori. The Tony Award-winning composer of Fun Home, Violet, and Caroline, or Change was an intern at Playwrights Horizons during the original Sunday workshop. "It was the first thing I did after graduating from school," she says. "My job was to get on the M49 bus and bring new songs by hand to [music director] Paul Gemignani; I would sit there with the manila envelope on my lap. And I never looked."

Instead, Tesori gelled lights, went on coffee runs, and watched as, bit by bit, a masterpiece came into being. (Even after Sunday transferred to Broadway, the score kept changing; "Lesson #8" was smuggled into the show three days before the critics came.) For Tesori, Sunday in the Park with George was "seminal. I saw it 13 times, through all the changes, and it really did make me think, Maybe there is a place in this industry for me."

The notion of reviving the show at City Center occurred to her in the spring of 2015, when she began working with Jake Gyllenhaal on the Encores! Off-Center production of Little Shop of Horrors. Tesori had coaxed Gyllenhaal to star in his first musical by delivering a potted plant to his dressing room during the Broadway run of Constellations. The plant was strewn with bloody Barbie-doll parts, and a note tucked into the soil read, "JUST DO IT."

"I thought he would say no," Tesori says, "but it turns out that he really loves to sing." During their first Little Shop session, Tesori was struck by the fact that Gyllenhaal's "attention to detail, and his desire to work endlessly, matched mine. We could sit with the score and go for three hours." (As Dot says of George, "He could look forever.") One day, over kale salad and the sheet music for "Mushnik and Son," Tesori mentioned Sunday in the Park with George. "I said, 'That would be a great role for you someday.' Then it just came together in his schedule that we could do it at City Center."

The benefit concerts marked Tesori's first project in her role as City Center's artistic advisor. Sunday in the Park with George is being performed with Michael Starobin's original orchestrations, but the concerts differ from the original production in one crucial sense: the audience has evolved. The Broadway production opened May 2, 1984, and although it received a few positive reviews-as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama-the show was mostly met with bewilderment and hostility. Preview audiences walked out in droves, the Daily Newswrote that the musical "doesn't bear looking at or listening to for very long," and the second act was so polarizing that The Wall Street Journal suggested it be scrapped altogether. (Sondheim's response: "Without the second half, the show's a stunt.")

The New York Times' Frank Rich was virtually alone in giving the show a rave. "Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine demand that an audience radically change its whole way of looking at the Broadway musical," he wrote. With Sunday, and the more commercially-minded Into the Woods, they did just that. The musicals are like two yolks from the same sublime egg: in both shows, each song rises from the harmonic ashes of the preceding song; the second acts complicate, contradict, and devour the lessons of the first; and Bernadette Peters materializes as a ghost just in time for the 11 o'clock number. These formal innovations, so galling to contemporary critics, feel inevitable today.

Perhaps that's because a generation of theatregoers came of age watching Sunday and Woods. Both musicals were preserved on videotape, and in the 1980s and 1990s, countless children followed the trail of breadcrumbs from Woods to Sunday. A startlingly wide range of artists grew up loving the show: Difficult People creator Julie Klausner began obsessively re-watching the Sunday videotape at age nine, and it became Josh Groban's "all-time favorite musical" at age ten. Today, six-year-olds sing "Finishing the Hat" and post their performances on YouTube.

"There's so much there that you can take in as a kid," said Groban recently-and it's true. To children, Sunday in the Park with George isn't a lofty, inaccessible art piece that "feels icy to the touch," as New Yorkmagazine claimed in 1984. It's the story of a boy who loves to draw and a girl who is learning to read. As Sondheim waggishly put it, the plot of Sunday is simple: "Boy loves girl. Boy loves art. Boy loses girl. Boy gets both girl and art 100 years later."
Matt Weinstock writes for the publications at New York City Center.

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How Sondheim and Lapine Made a Masterpiece with Sunday in the Park With George | Playbill

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How Sondheim and Lapine Made a Masterpiece with Special Features Sunday in the Park With George Looking back at how the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical was written and how it revolutionized musical theatre. "When I first hear a song sung, I'm worried that I'm going to be embarrassed by what I wrote," said Stephen Sondheim while Sunday in the Park with George was in previews.

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Sunday in the Park with George SLIME TUTORIAL* (1986 Original Cast at the Booth Theatre)

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Sondheim teaches 'My Friends' from Sweeney Todd

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Performing Sweeney Todd: Advice from Stephen Sondheim | ENO

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Musical Harold Prince Best Scenic Design

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Sweeney Todd Original 1979 Broadway Musical Commercial

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Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a 1979 musical thriller with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and libretto by Hugh Wheeler. The musical is based on the 1973 play Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street by Christopher Bond.

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Sweeney Todd - Interview with Stephen Sondheim

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Angela Lansbury discusses "Sweeney Todd" - EMMYTVLEGENDS.ORG

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A Little Priest - Angela Lansbury & Len Cariou (July 2005)

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When I was about 15 years old, I checked the original LP record album of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street out of the public library in town. I was intrigued by the gruesome cover, complete with caricatures of a maniacal barber and his razor dripping blood and a sunken-eyed woman, armed with a rolling pin and a penchant for cooking human flesh. Of course I was intrigued. That picture alone has done its fair share of piquing the interests of many young, curious theatre enthusiasts.

I took the album home and told a friend about it (before I had listened to it). The friend, who had always been in love with old-fashioned musicals of the Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hammerstein vein, told me " Sweeney Todd? That's an awful, painful musical that you are going to hate!" They informed me I would be wasting my time listening to what he had decided was "creaks and groans and a lot of annoying accents." Since he and I had always shared such similar tastes, I didn't bother to listen to Sweeney Todd, returning it to the library feeling disappointed that a show with such exciting artwork could be so awful. How naïve a fifteen-year-old boy can be when listening to his friends.

Two years later, my high school drama teacher Ms. Brunner reintroduced Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street to my world, insisting that if I loved musical theatre, I NEEDED to hear this show. She knew I loved Into the Woods, and she tried to help me see the two had a lot in common. I had assured her that I had been told I would hate it and, in my teenage arrogance, tried very hard to dismiss the fact that she knew me and my musical tastes a hell of a lot better than I knew myself. Fortunately for me, she was dogged in her determination to get me to listen to the show. She made me two cassette copies of Sweeney Todd and suggested I take them home and listen to them at my leisure. Begrudgingly, I agreed, but was insistent that it wouldn't change my mind about this show I had never listened to.

A few weeks later, however, I was true to my word and on a rainy Sunday, I curled up with a blanket and put the first cassette in my little SONY boom box, and pressed "play". I must admit, the first minute or so made me wonder "What in the Hell was she thinking?" the creaking groans of a pipe organ playing sounded like ghastly church music. My friend had to be right. Then "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd" came on and, although the melody didn't capture my ear at first, the lyrics did. This was lyric perfection that even exceeded by three favorite musicals Carousel, Finian's Rainbow and Into the Woods. Sweeney Todd was dark, menacing, and even spooky, but the lyrics were illustrating things in ways I hadn't been aware that musical theatre was capable of. Urgency, unrest, contempt, and scorn were finally given their due. An honest portrayal of humanity, instead of a candy-coated one, was captured in this glorious score.

I listened on, wondering just how dark this show was. Was it a musical theatre horror story? In some ways, it was, but it was much more than that. I suddenly emerged from my teenage naiveté and began to hear the underlying social messages and the rich detail of character development in Sweeney Todd. What is more, it had the audacity to find humor in the darkest of places: cannibalism ("A Little Priest" and "God That's Good") and poverty ("The Worst Pies in London"). Until then, I don't think I understood that there was such a thing as black comedy, nor did I ever contemplate and understand that comedy could address social wrongs with a more scathing indictment than the prose and poetry of revolutionary rhetoric. Sweeney Todd, I believe, has been the benchmark of maturity for many musical theatre enthusiasts to understand that the art form can achieve a lot more above and beyond simple storytelling.

So, my friend steered me wrong. It turns out that Sweeney Todd was NOT the "awful, painful, musical" that I was "Going to hate". My drama teacher steered me right, and instead, it opened my eyes to a whole new purpose for and level of musical theatre, ushering in my deeper appreciations for composers and lyricists like Stephen Sondheim, William Finn, and Kander and Ebb who explored the darkness as well as the light in our world. Whenever I feel the urge to either embrace or dismiss a musical by the art work on its cast album, or make judgments on one person's vague opinions of the piece, I remember my dear friend who told me I would hate Sweeney Todd and try to forgive him this transgression and open my own mind a little further to the possibilities.

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Sweeney Todd: The Awful, Painful Musical That You Are Going to Hate?

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When I was about 15 years old, I checked the original LP record album of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street out of the public library in town.

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Angela Lansbury celebrates 37 years of Sweeney Todd In New Legends of Broadway Video

With its premiere at the Uris on March 1, 1979, tomorrow marks 39 years of Stephen Sondheim's masterpiece, Sweeney Todd. The show was thrillingly delicious and kept hungry theatergoers satisfied for 557 performances.

Watch Angela Lansbury discuss the genesis of Sweeney Todd in our #LegendsOfBroadway video below.

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Angela Lansbury celebrates 37 years of Sweeney Todd In New Legends of Broadway Video | The Official Masterworks Broadway Site

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With its premiere at the Uris on March 1, 1979, tomorrow marks 39 years of Stephen Sondheim's masterpiece, Sweeney Todd. The show was thrillingly delicious and kept hungry theatergoers satisfied for 557 performances. Watch Angela Lansbury discuss the genesis of Sweeney Todd in our #LegendsOfBroadway video below.

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Sondheim.com - Putting it together since 1994.

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Based on the Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night, this musical with a book by Hugh Wheeler, concerns three mismatched couples. Desiree Armfeldt, an actress, is seeing Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm who is married to Charlotte Malcolm. Frederik Egerman, Desiree's past lover, is married to the still-virginal Anne, who is half his age.

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It is one of his sweetest, most popular musicals. But, Stephen Sondheim tells Mel Gussow, A Little Night Music was never meant to charm.

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Look Back at the Original Broadway Production of Archival Photos A Little Night Music

The Stephen Sondheim musical opened at the Shubert Theatre February 25, 1973.

A Little Night Music originally opened at Broadway's Shubert Theatre on February 25, 1973, with a cast that included Glynis Johns as Desiree, Len Cariou as Fredrik, and Hermione Gingold as Madame Armfeldt. The show garnered five 1973 Tony Awards, including one for Best Musical. The Sondheim score features one of the composer's best-known tunes, "Send in the Clowns," as well as "Every Day a Little Death," "The Miller's Son," and "A Weekend in the Country".
Look back at the original production below:

Look Back at the Original Broadway Production of A Little Night Music

Look Back at the Original Broadway Production of A Little Night Music

15 PHOTOS

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Look Back at the Original Broadway Production of A Little Night Music | Playbill

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Look Back at the Original Broadway Production of Archival Photos A Little Night Music The Stephen Sondheim musical opened at the Shubert Theatre February 25, 1973. A Little Night Music originally opened at Broadway's Shubert Theatre on February 25, 1973, with a cast that included Glynis Johns as Desiree, Len Cariou as Fredrik, and Hermione Gingold as Madame Armfeldt.

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A Little Night Music Original 1973 Broadway Cast "Send in the Clowns"

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(Not) Getting Married Today - Company OBC, 1970

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The Ladies Who Lunch - Stereo - Elaine Stritch - Company Original Cast Recording

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Bobby is now Bobbie.

Stephen Sondheim has given his blessing for a new staging of his classic musical, Company, this time with a gender-swapped lead role.

Sondheim's 1970 musical about a 35-year old New York bachelor surrounded by all of his coupled off friends is a theater classic, winning six Tonys, including Best Musical, when it first premiered on Broadway.

In the decades since, the show has been revived multiple times, including a 2006 production starring Raul Esparza and another star-studded concert version with Neil Patrick Harris as Bobby in 2011.

Now, theater director Marianne Elliott ( War Horse, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) is helming the production with a female Bobby.

"If you've got somebody as distinguished and inventive and good as Marianne Elliott, and she says, 'I would love to do "Company" with a female central character.'... What is there to lose?" Sondheim told the L.A. Times. "It can only make the play either interesting or, if you dislike it... dislikable... but still. I'm fumfering here, but the point is: That's what keeps the theaters alive. So I'm always open."

Elliott added that 35-year old women today are starting to think about settling down at that age: "They are thinking about the body clock and they think: 'Should they be with someone permanent?'"

Bobbie will be played by award-winning actress Rosalie Craig who starred in Tori Amos' musical The Light Princess in 2013 and played the role of Marta in a 2011 production of Company at the Crucible Theater in England.

Changing Bobby's gender also requires revising the musical's book, written by George Furth. According to Playbill the number "Have I Got a Girl for You," is now "Have I Got a Guy for You," and April the airline stewardess is now Andy.

In 2013 the New York Times reported that the Roundabout Theater Company was working on a version of Company where Bobby would be a gay man with commitment issues and multiple boyfriends. There was even a reading of the production with Alan Cumming reading for Joanne who sings the show-stopping number "The Ladies Who Lunch."

The female-led revival of Company is scheduled to open next year in London, and here's hoping that it will eventually make a transfer to the Great White Way.

@chrisreindeer

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Stephen Sondheim Weighs In On A Female Bobby In "Company"

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Bobby is now Bobbie. Stephen Sondheim has given his blessing for a new staging of his classic musical, Company, this time with a gender-swapped lead role. Sondheim's 1970 musical about a 35-year old New York bachelor surrounded by all of his coupled off friends is a theater classic, winning six Tonys, including Best Musical, when it first premiered on Broadway.

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PBS Great Performances, Stephen Sondheim's Company-Not Getting Married Today

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Company, Original Cast in Concert - Musical Numbers - Stephen Sondheim - Elaine Stritch 1993

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'82 Tonys--Dreamgirls "And I'm Telling You"

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And, with all due respect to our new star, there's plenty more to cheer. If Miss Holliday's Act I solo is one of the most powerful theatrical coups to be found in a Broadway musical since Ethel Merman sang ''Everything's Coming Up Roses'' at the end of Act I of ''Gypsy,'' so ''Dreamgirls'' is the same kind of breakthrough for musical stagecraft that ''Gypsy'' was.

In ''Gypsy,'' the director-choreographer Jerome Robbins and his collaborators made the most persuasive case to date (1959) that a musical could be an organic entity - in which book, score and staging merged into a single, unflagging dramatic force. Mr. Bennett has long been Mr. Robbins's Broadway heir apparent, as he has demonstrated in two previous ''Gypsy''-like backstage musicals, ''Follies'' (which he staged with Harold Prince) and ''A Chorus Line.'' But last night the torch was passed, firmly, unquestionably, once and for all. Working with an unusually gifted new composer, Henry Krieger, and a clever librettist, the playwright Tom Eyen - as well as with a wholly powerhouse cast and design team -Mr. Bennett has fashioned a show that strikes with the speed and heat of lightning.

He has done so in a most imaginative way. ''Dreamgirls'' is full of plot, and yet it has virtually no spoken scenes. It takes place in roughly 20 locations, from Harlem to Hollywood, but it has not one realistic set. It is a show that seems to dance from beginning to end, yet in fact has next to no dance numbers.

How is this magic wrought? ''Dreamgirls'' is a musical with almost 40 numbers, and virtually everything, from record-contract negotiations to lovers' quarrels, is sung. More crucially, Mr. Krieger has created an individual musical voice for every major player and interweaves them all at will: in one cathartic backstage confrontation (''It's All Over''), the clashing of seven characters is realized entirely in musical terms.

What's more, the score's method is reinforced visually by Robin Wagner's set. Mr. Wagner has designed a few mobile, abstract scenic elements -aluminum towers and bridges - and keeps them moving to form an almost infinite number of configurations. Like the show's voices, the set pieces - gloriously abetted by Tharon Musser's lighting and Theoni V. Aldredge's costumes - keep coming together and falling apart to create explosive variations on a theme.

Linking everything together is Mr. Bennett. He keeps ''Dreamgirls'' in constant motion - in every conceivable direction - to perfect his special brand of cinematic stage effects (montage, dissolve, wipe). As if to acknowledge his historical debt to Mr. Robbins, he almost pointedly recreates moments from ''Gypsy'' before soaring onward in his own original way.

Some of his images are chilling. In Act I, an exchange of payola money between two men blossoms into a surreal panorama of mass corruption that finally rises, like a vision out of hell, clear to the roof of the theater. Throughout the show, Mr. Bennett uses shadows and klieg lights, background and foreground action, spotlighted figures and eerie silhouettes, to maintain the constant tension between the dark and bright sides of his dreamgirls' glittery dreams.

And in that tension is the emotional clout of the show. Like its predecessors among backstage musicals, ''Dreamgirls'' is about the price of success. Some of that price is familiar: broken love affairs, broken families, broken lives. But by telling the story of black entertainers who make it in white America, this musical's creators have dug into a bigger, more resonant drama of cultural assimilation. As the Dreams blunt the raw anger of their music to meet the homogenizing demands of the marketplace, we see the high toll of guilt and self-hatred that is inflicted on those who sell their artistic souls to the highest bidder. If ''dreams'' is the most recurrent word in the show, then ''freedom'' is the second, for the Dreams escape their ghetto roots only to discover that they are far from free.

This upsetting theme is woven into the evening's very fabric. Mr. Krieger gives the Dreams songs that perfectly capture the rhythm-andblues music of the 50's, and then replays them throughout the evening to dramatize (and satirize) the ever-changing, ever-more-emasculated refining of the Motown sound. (Indeed, the Dreams' signature number is used to clock their personal and esthetic progression much as ''Let Me Entertain You'' was used in ''Gypsy.'') Mr. Eyen has supplied ironic, double-edge lyrics (notably in a song called ''Cadillac Car''), and Harold Wheeler's subtle, understated orchestrations are sensitive to every delicate nuance of the Dreams' advance through recent pop-music history.

Perhaps inevitably the cast's two standouts are those who play characters who do not sell out and who suffer a more redemptive form of anguish: Miss Holliday's Effie and Cleavant Derricks, as a James Brown-like star whose career collapses as new musical fashions pass him by. Like Miss Holliday, Mr. Derricks is a charismatic singer, who conveys wounding, heartfelt innocence. When, in Act II, he rebels against his slick new Johnny Mathis-esque image by reverting to his old, untamed Apollo shenanigans during a fancy engagement, he gives ''Dreamgirls'' one of its most crushing and yet heroic solo turns. But everyone is superb: Mr. Harney's Machiavellian manager, Sheryl Lee Ralph's Diana Ross-like lead Dream, Loretta Devine and Deborah Burrell as her backups, Obba Babatunde as a conflicted songwriter and Vondie Curtis-Hall as a too-honest agent.

Is ''Dreamgirls'' a great musical? Well, one could quarrel with a few lapses of clarity, some minor sags, the overpat and frantic plot resolutions of Act II. But Mr. Bennett and Miss Holliday have staked their claim to greatness. And if the rest of ''Dreamgirls'' isn't always quite up to their incredible level, I'm willing to suspend judgment until I've sampled the evidence another four or five times. Crossing Over DREAMGIRLS, book and lyrics by Tom Eyen; music by Henry Krieger; directed and choreo- graphed by Michael Bennett; co-choreographer, Michael Peters; scenic design, Robin Wagner; costume design, Theoni V. Aldredge; lighting design, Tharon Musser; sound design, Otts Munderloh; musical supervision and orchestrations by Harold Wheeler; musical director, Yolanda Segovia; vocal arrangements, Cleavant Derricks. Presented by Michael Bennett, Bob Avian, Geffen Records and the Shubert Organization. At the Imperial Theater, 249 West 45th Street. The Stepp Sisters Deborah Burrell, Vanessa Bell, Tenita Jordan and Brenda Pressley Charlene .............................Cheryl Alexander Joanne ....................................Linda Lloyd Marty ..............................Vondie Curtis-Hall Curtis Taylor Jr. ..........................Ben Harney Deena Jones ..........................Sheryl Lee Ralph The M.C. and Mr. Morgan .................Larry Stewart Tiny Joe Dixon and Jerry .....................Joe Lynn Lorrell Robinson .......................Loretta Devine C.C. White .............................Obba Babatunde Effie Melody White ..................Jennifer Holliday Little Albert and the Tru-Tones Wellington Perkins, Charles Bernard, Jamie Patterson, Charles Randolph-Wright and Wey- man Thompson James Thunder Early .................Cleavant Derricks Edna Burke ...............................Sheila Ellis The James Early Band Charles Bernard, Jamie Patterson, Wellington Perkins, Scott Plank, Charles Randolph-Wright and Weyman Thompson Wayne ...................................Tony Franklin Dave and the Sweethearts Paul Binotto, Candy Darling and Stephanie Eley Frank .....................................David Thome Michelle Morris .......................Deborah Burrell The Five Tuxedos Charles Bernard, Jamie Patterson, Charles Randolph-Wright, Larry Stewart and Weyman Thompson Les Style Cheryl Alexander, Tenita Jordan, Linda Lloyd and Brenda Pressley Film Executives Paul Binotto, Scott Plank and Weyman Thomp- son A nnouncers, Fans, Reporters, Stagehands, Party Guests and Photographers Cheryl Alexander, Phylicia Ayers-Allen, Va- nessa Bell, Charles Bernard, Paul Binotto, Candy Darling, Ronald Dunham, Stephanie Eley, Sheila Ellis, Tenia Jordan, Linda Lloyd, Joe Lynn, Frank Mastrocola, Jamie Patterson, Wellington Perkins, Scott Plank, Brenda P ressley, David Thome, Charles Randolph-Wright, Larry Stewart and Weyman Thompson

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STAGE: 'DREAMGIRLS,' MICHAEL BENNET'S NEW MUSICAL, OPENS

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And, with all due respect to our new star, there's plenty more to cheer. If Miss Holliday's Act I solo is one of the most powerful theatrical coups to be found in a Broadway musical since Ethel Merman sang ''Everything's Coming Up Roses'' at the end of Act I of ''Gypsy,'' so ''Dreamgirls'' is the same kind of breakthrough for musical stagecraft that ''Gypsy'' was.

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20 Black Musicals That Livened Up Broadway

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Black News, Opinions, Politics and Culture.

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The Wizard of Oz is, as the saying goes, as American as apple pie. Every year at least, I'd crowd around a screen with family to watch Dorothy's teleportation from sepia-seeped Kansas to technicolor Oz, a tradition that I imagine many American families share. However, my family shared another tradition that many others did not. We would also grab popcorn and sing along to our favorite songs in , the Wizard of Oz's pro-Black stage-turned-film adaptation. Very few films have ever influenced my sense of what is and what could be as this simple subversion, and after watching NBC's live televised revival the reason why has become clear to me: , especially the film version that I am most familiar with, is a masterpiece of Afrofuturism, science-fiction and fantasy, salvation and humanism; and it reflects the best of what the Black collective consciousness can create.

Afrofuturism is a slippery concept. Generally, most science-fiction works written by, featuring, or focused on Black people are included in the umbrella. However, as a cultural signifier afrofuturism is something more than just futurism or science-fiction with a palette swap; a one-for-one re-casting of the original along racial lines with no added context. Afrofuturism is a cultural movement of resistance-because imagining future and alternate worlds with Black peoples is both a literary, artistic, musical, and historical revolutionary act-mostly focused on the alternate worlds of science-fiction and fantasy. Imagining Black cultures and peoples who live in fictional worlds beyond our own and imagining ourselves in them is the spirit at the core of Afrofuturism.

Contrary to what popular culture seems to think, is itself also not just a palette swap of The Wizard of Oz . Any re-casting of an all-white work, regardless of whether the script or setting changes, is in itself a political statement that changes the dynamic of how the work is consumed and digested. In case, the animating spirit is rebellion, and that rebellious nature subverts and repurposes via alchemy the messages of the original film and its namesake book into something both about the Black future and the Black past.

The discussion about what subverts and creates starts with the material of the first source. L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is thoroughly a fantasy novel, although the film version tries to tone down some of those leanings. The world of Oz and Munchkinland, with its flying monkeys, talking animals, wizards, witches, self-aware flowers, and evil trees is undeniably fantasy, and it gets explored in such depth through Baum's and later Ruth Plumly Thompson's sequels that it can aptly be described as epic fantasy, a world rivaling that of Narnia or Middle Earth. However, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz also blurs the line between fantasy and science-fiction, envisioning a quasi-steampunk world of animate machines and robotic Tin Men, balloons, and technology masquerading as magic.

film takes themes from the stage version and builds on them to create a blended fantasy and sci-fi world that is at once evocative of the Black urban condition. Here, Oz is a fictionalized New York and the film's Munchkinland is Harlem through an urban fantasy lens, tagged with graffiti and bounded by presumably busy highways. The Wicked Witch of the East (here, the Parks Department Commissioner) is a stand-in for white governance. This world is even more overtly steampunk than the original's, featuring a polluted, industrialized city world where factory labor is enslavement. Evillene, the Wicked Witch of the West of this story, runs a totalitarian slave state that is both representative of the Black past and comparable to some of the great future dystopian settings in fiction memory. This setting is where the spirit of Afrofuturism truly flourishes and transforms.

The plot of is also a deeply Afrofuturistic spin on the original. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is perhaps enduring American fantasy novel, and Dorothy's epic journey home occupies an important corner of the American mythos, reflecting and warping several themes of Americana. The film version of the The Wizard of Oz is a little bit about individualism and the ideas of white privilege and destiny at its source. Dorothy, an altogether unqualified conqueror, conquers Oz nonetheless through her spirit and determination, along the way committing several accidental murders, becoming a savior, and leading a band of misfits on a journey of self-discovery. This is not intended to be a cynical reading of a classic, but a notice that it helped create a strong tradition of endearing white heroes whose main qualification seems to be their grit.

These themes are amplified, enriched, and further subverted in . Scarecrow, first Hinton Battle's stage version and then Michael Jackson's colorful film version, becomes a play on Black hopelessness and oppression while embracing a history of Black showmanship and music. The Tin Man is a story of Black emotion and the Cowardly Lion under Ted Ross' show-stopping portrayal becomes a commentary on Black masculinity. And through it all, Dorothy's story is transformed from that of a somewhat flat and unlikely gentile conquering heroine to a complex person who struggles with her own identity and fate while helping throw off a symbolic form of slavery. This is Afrofuturism at its core: taking the bones of an imaginary world built on exclusion and breathing into them the spirit of Black struggle and identity.

The Wizard of Oz is also a little bit about atheism and humanism. This is the strongest theme in the original, which endeavors to destroy the deus ex machina , both from a literary and social commentary perspective. The titular wizard is proven to be a fraud, an insecure man using a campaign of propaganda and inexplicable machine superiority to create in himself a God, and his unveiling is a symbol for modern religious (or anti-religious) awakening. The revelation that Dorothy herself maintained the power to shape the world and to go home all along reverses the god-human complex and proclaims her power as an ordinary person. This is an early humanistic sentiment, or at least one that breaks with the Western idea of a singular divine external God that must be reached via some conduit. It is clear that this portion of The Wizard of Oz at least is subversive and that the film version is almost a Trojan Horse embedded in the same old rote god-loving Americana that audiences cherished more and more as time progressed.

To me, the strongest part of is how it takes that humanistic message and imbues it with a spirit of Black salvation and even gospel that complement the message instead of overpowering it. That's no small task: it's hard to pull off a statement questioning the legitimacy of divinities while also applying the Black divine tradition to humanism. The revelation that the Power was always in Dorothy and was something to be claimed by self-determination and the building of a new Oz as a Black wonderland through collective work-these are profoundly pro-Black and Afrofuturistic statements. While most of my reflection here is about 1978 film version of , the theatre versions and the recent NBC The Wiz Live! versions bring out the gospel and salvation aspects most clearly. That message of self-determination and of building better worlds reflects the meta-political message of making and the one that grounds Afrofuturism: if we ain't in it, build a world where we are.

This reflection was given the clarity needed to write it by The Wiz Live! I recognized it as an old friend and began to wonder why-aside from basic nostalgia for the 1978 version I loved-it moved my spirit and made me feel it so deeply. I realized that helped give me the keys to create, in the way that I imagine The Wizard of Oz sparked the imaginations of children for the greater part of a century. While I didn't have the language then, what is clear now is that is a revolutionary statement using Afrofuturism as its font-face. And today, as the subgenre and the literary and arts revolution that it represents finally begin to move from the corner to the main street, it is most necessary to honor it as a forerunner and also as a sign of what we can achieve in these media in the future.

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The Wizard of Oz is, as the saying goes, as American as apple pie. Every year at least, I'd crowd around a screen with family to watch Dorothy's teleportation from sepia-seeped Kansas to technicolor Oz, a tradition that I imagine many American families share. However, my family shared another tradition that many others did not.