Cocktail Party Fact: When the show was out of town, Gertrude Lawrence, in the role of Anna asked Rodgers and Hammerstein to write a song for her to sing with the children. Rodgers took out a song which they had cut out of an earlier show, South Pacific with the title “Suddenly Happy.” Hammerstein wrote [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: The original production of The Fantasticks has been running continuously since 1960: it is the longest running musical in the world. There have been over 10,000 productions of the show, including 500 foreign productions in 66 countries. There have been fifteen national touring companies. The original investors have now made a 10,000% [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Larry L. King (no relation to the talk show host) had written an article for Playboy about the real Chicken Ranch, a Texas brothel that had been operating since the 1880s until a do-gooder TV reporter caused a stink and got it shut down. Director Peter Masterson read it and showed it [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Les Miserables is not about the French Revolution as many people think. It actually centers on the student insurrection of 1832 in Paris, forty years after the French Revolution.

Cocktail Party Fact: The ending of the stage musical is not a happy one — much like the science fiction B-movies of the 50s that it parodies. But when the movie was shown to test audiences, they didn’t like the ending. So they went back and re-shot a new ending, in which our heroes live [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Composer and lyricist Jerry Herman never had to “work his way to the top.” The first theatre score he ever wrote was for the 1961 Broadway musical Milk and Honey, which ran 543 performances, a moderate hit. In 1964, he wrote his second score for Hello, Dolly!, with Carol Channing (and later [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: All the songs in the show that Frank writes — “The Hills of Tomorrow,” “Good Things Going,” and “Who Wants to Live in New York” — share the same melody, but they’re all in different styles so it’s not immediately noticeable.
Here’s the Plot: Merrily We Roll Along tells the story of Franklin [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Despite the mammoth original Broadway set (a reconstruction of an actual iron foundry), composer Stephen Sondheim has said he originally envisioned this show as a small chamber musical with very little set. More and more, that’s the way it’s being done now. The role of Mrs. Lovett was written especially for Angela [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Actors in the workshop production who did not do the show on Broadway included Kelsey Grammer (TV’s Frasier) as the Soldier, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Celeste 2, Brad Kane (the singing voice of Disney’s Aladdin) as Boy in the Water, and Christine Baranski (from TV’s Cybil) as Clarisse, the character later renamed [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: The song which character “Ricky Nelson” sings in Sticks and Bones — “Baby, When I Find You” — was written with lyrics by Rabe and music by Galt MacDermott who had recently written the score to Hair.