1950s
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The Pajama Game (1954)
(Pajama? Pyjama? Whatever…) This is a musical from Three Million Years BC – er, 1954. I have the 2006 revival recording with new songs. You know how I sometimes grumble about revivals over-egging the pudding by updating the orchestrations? It doesn’t happen here that I can tell. Brilliantly, this show has a female lead called… Continue reading
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Saturday Night (1955)
This was Sondheim’s first music-and-lyrics show that was intended to be performed (as opposed to the four assignments he got from his mentor Oscar Hammerstein). But unfortunately, 1954 was a bad year for producers dying, and so this show only came to life over forty years later in concert performances. It often sounds old. In… Continue reading
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Simply Heavenly (1957)
OK, so as you can see from the above, this was written by Langston Hughes (an actual poet, it’s based on his own work) with music by David Martin. It had a brief but successful run in New York in 1957 but flopped in London, and was revived in the “off-West End” in 2003. I… Continue reading
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West Side Story (1957)
Anyone who knows me will know that I’m hopelessly biased in favour of this show. Ooooh, there are so many good things about it. But let me open with an anecdote, which some of you have heard before. When I was a kid there was a British TV show called “Record Breakers” hosted by the… Continue reading
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Wonderful Town (1953)
Anyone with a long-ish memory for GHM writeups might be forgiven for asking a pertinent question here: surely you reviewed this already, Gil, or something very like it? This show has music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and it’s about New York. Did I like this show better when… Continue reading
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