Cocktail Party Fact: The original title was Away We Go and there are many stories about how just about everyone in the theater thought this was a flop out of town. The Variety review is still famous to this day. Faced with the homespun nature of the material, and used to seeing a bevy of [...]

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 [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: There’s a moment late in Act I when the mean, ugly old witch drinks a potion and turns into a beautiful young woman. On Broadway, this was accomplished by substituting a double for the witch just before the transformation, using pre-recorded dialogue. Then when the flashpot went off, the actress really playing [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: After its trial run, it took Jekyll & Hyde about 7 years to reach Broadway. And before its trial performance, RCA London put out a recording of the score’s first draft featuring Colm Wilkinson as Jekyll and Hyde.

Cocktail Party Fact: This story started out as a French play, which was adapted into a 1979 French film. The 1983 musical was based on the original play. There were two sequels to the film. And finally, the first film was remade as The Bird Cage with Robin Williams and Nathan Lane. There has been [...]

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: Original posters for the show are emblazed with the title, and the discreet initials M.C. behind them — a tribute to the star character of the show — Maria Callas.
Here’s The Plot: Inspired by a series of master classes the great diva conducted at Juilliard toward the end of her career, this [...]

Cocktail Party Fact: Dale Wasserman, the author of the book, was in Madrid doing a motion picture when he read a newspaper article that mistakenly said he was there to research a dramatic version of Don Quixote. Although he had no intention of doing this, he was intrigued and read the book. He finally decided [...]