Second Stage moves it’s Metamorphoses to Circle in the Square for a Broadway contract. A new play based on the myths of Ovid. Playwright and director Mary Zimmerman weaves a modern sensibility through many of Ovid’s classic tales — King Midas, Narcissus and his reflection, Orpheus and Euridice — to create Metamorphoses, a visually arresting [...]

Julie Taymor’s breathtaking staging of the Disney animated cartoon reinvents the possibilities of theater for a whole generation: not for her the literalness of Disney’s previous screen-to-stage adaptation, Beauty and the Beast. Instead, Taymor thrillingly reimagines the story of Simba the lion cub’s voyage to adulthood as a show of theatrical daring, in which the [...]

Victor Hugo’s classic novel of the French Revolution, chronicling the unjust persecution of Jean Valjean by police inspector Javert, has been spectacularly musicalized by French writer-composers Claude-Michel Schonberg and Alain Boublil and English lyricist Herbert Kretzmer, and brilliantly realized in Trevor Nunn and John Cairda’s landmark production. First produced at Britain’s Royal Shakespeare Company, “Les [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, who wrote the lyrics and music for Ragtime, had to audition to get the job. Along with several other songwriting teams, they wrote four songs “on spec” (on speculation, as an audition). Of all the teams who wrote songs for the show, producer Garth Drabinsky felt Ahrens [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Stephen Schwartz wrote a musical in college called Pippin Pippin. He was shopping it around to New York producers when he was hired instead to write a score for the already running Godspell. It wasn’t until a couple years later that Pippin Pippin was produced — with a whole new script (by [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: The musical Passion is based on the 1981 Italian film Passione d’Amore, which is based on the 1869 novel Fosca by Iginio Ugo Tarchetti (the English translation was retitled Passion). Passion was first intended to be a one-act musical, to be paired with another one-act musical about the body-building business (to be [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: In 1944, the young Leonard Bernstein collaborated with an unknown dancer and choreographer named Jerome Robbins on a ballet about three sailors on shore leave called Fancy Free. It was such a critical success, they turned to two friends who had never written anything but smart revue songs and sketches to create [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: When Oliver! opened, New York was in the midst of a protracted newspaper strike, so no one would have had the opportunity to read the rave notices had the seven New York newspapers allowed the publication of FIRSTNITE, which printed reviews by their drama critics. Another fun fact is that the Artful [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Before approaching Lerner and Loewe to write the score, the producers had offered it to practically every other writer of musicals - including Noel Coward, Cole Porter and Rodgers and Hammerstein. All turned them down. Hammerstein’s reason was that he felt that the original play, Shaw’s Pygmalion wasn’t a love story. My [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Miss Saigon almost didn’t open on Broadway. When producer Cameron Mackintosh brought the two London stars to New York, Lea Salonga, (Kim) and Jonathan Pryce (the Engineer), the Amerasian acting community launched an angry protest against Pryce. They complained that Pryce was not Asian but was playing an Eurasian character, and that [...]