Cocktail Party Fact: Meredith Willson based the musical on his own experiences growing up in Mason City, Iowa. The patented patter type rythmic songs, which we think of as unique to this show were a staple on his radio program. He also actually did play piccolo in John Philip Sousa’s marching Band.

Cocktail Party Fact: Andrew Lloyd Webber and Trevor Nunn (who had directed Cats) began working on an early version of Aspects of Love in the early 1980s. Lloyd Webber decided at some point that the material was not appropriate for the story, so he stopped and turned his attention to the Phantom [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: When the movie version of The Sound of Music was released in Munich, Germany, the German distributor cut almost all the footage of the Nazis out of the last section of the film because they feared upsetting Nazi factions still active in Germany. Director Robert Wise caused a big [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: The Wiz, an all-black musical based on The Wizard Of Oz, was in such trouble in its out of town tryout that the producer fired the director, Gilbert Moses, and shut the show down in Baltimore. Geoffrey Holder, who had designed the costumes, took over as director in Detroit. But the show [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Originally, Bernstein, Laurents and Robbins had planned on writing a musical about a Jewish girl and a Catholic boy who fall in love and face the opposition of their two cultures, to be called East Side Story. But with the new teenage unrest and the image of the teenage street gangs in [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Working holds the record for the most songwriters working on a single book musical — SEVEN! Also, a number of members of the original Broadway cast went on to be successful actors: Bob Gunton (Peron in Broadway’s Evita and lots of films), Patti LuPone (Evita, Anything Goes, Les [...]

Active Years: 1632-1675
Position: One of the finest Dutch 17th-century painters
Career Highlights: View of Delft, c.1658 (Mauritshuis, The Hague); Girl with Yellow Turban, 1660-1665 (Mauritshuis, The Hague); Woman Holding a Balance, c.1664 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.); Allegory of the Art of Painting, c.1665-1672 (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemaeldagalreie, Vienna); The Letter, c.1666 [...]

Active Years: 1928-1987
Position: Warhol and the Pop Art movement are nearly synonymous. He revolutionized the way people perceive art by making viewers confront the fine line between “high art,” and all its refined traditions, and “low art,” historically associated with popular culture.
Career Highlights: Countless images that made direct reference to American mass [...]

Position: American painter and engraver, who was one of the main participants in the Aesthetic Movement in Europe.
Career Highlights: Arrangement in Grey and Black: Portrait of the Painter’s Mother, 1871 (Musee d’Orsay, Paris); Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, c. 1874 (Institute of Arts, Detroit); The Peacock Room, 1876-7 (Freer [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Hello Again describes a human chain of ten sexual encounters. It’s based on the famous Viennese play La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzler, which was also updated into a 1992 movie called Chain Of Desire