Tony Bennett, the American jazz singer, passed away late last week. He was 96, just two days shy of his birthday. A devotee to the Great American Songbook, Bennett was, perhaps, the last exponent of the mid-twentieth century crooner style of singing. Among his signature songs was, I Left My Heart in San Francisco. As styles changed with the rise of rock and roll, Bennett launched a spectacular comeback in the 1980s, …
During his seventeen year partnership with lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II, Richard Rodgers did more than write memorable tunes. The team of Rodgers and Hammerstein was concerned with a new, more sophisticated kind of American theater in which music furthered the plot and revealed the character and setting. For weeks, before any writing took place, they would immerse themselves in the dramatic details of the play. Often, their works explored settings which Broadway …
Angela Lansbury, the legendary star of film, stage, and television, passed away last Tuesday. She would have turned 97 on October 16. Beginning in the 1940s, the Irish-British-American actress earned acclaim on the silver screen with prominent roles in films which included Gaslight (1944), National Velvet (1944), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), and The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Between 1984 and 2003, she starred in the popular CBS television series, Murder, She Wrote. Lansbury’s …
George Gershwin’s delirious foxtrot, Sweet and Lowdown, was written for the 1925 musical, Tip-Toes. With lyrics by Ira Gershwin, the farcical comedy centers around a three-member vaudeville act which, through duplicity, attempts to snare a wealthy millionaire. The melody exemplifies the high-flying euphoria of the Roaring Twenties, with jazz and blues harmonies and exuberant, tumbling rhythms. George Gershwin’s 1926 performance is preserved on piano roll: The song, That Certain Feeling, was also written for Tip-Toes. It’s …
Cy Coleman (1929-2004) was a jazz pianist and one of the great composers of the American musical theater. His Broadway musicals included Sweet Charity (1966), Barnum (1980), City of Angels (1989), and The Will Rogers Follies (1991). One of Coleman’s most enduring songs is The Colors of My Life from the circus-themed Barnum, based on the life of the brash nineteenth century showman, P.T. Barnum. The song, with lyrics by Michael Stewart, comes from a tender moment in the show’s …
Stephen Sondheim, one of the giants of the American musical theater, has passed away at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. He was 91. Sondheim was the composer and lyricist for musicals including: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), and Into the Woods (1987). …
Stephen Sondheim once called the “bench scene” from the first act of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1945 musical, Carousel, “the singular most important moment in the evolution of contemporary musicals.” Indeed, this extraordinary 12-minute-long love scene, anticipated in earlier Hammerstein works such as Show Boat (1927) and Oklahoma! (1943), set the stage for the late twentieth century Broadway of Sondheim. According to the scholar Thomas Hischak, the scene “is considered the most completely integrated piece of music-drama in the American …