Successful Shows

It’s weird to think about what actually makes a show successful.

Is it the awards that it wins? There are shows that won the Tony Award for Best Musical and are still fairly unknown by the public like Contact, or Passion, and Raisin are probably some of the best examples.

If those shows make money, or at the very least recoups on Broadway is it deemed a success?

Is it the fact that it makes it to Broadway at all, which is the dream, right?

These questions have been asked time and time again, and answered in all forms. When it comes to a producer, I think the bottom line is if it makes its investment back, those are cold numbers. For a creative team, a Director, or a Composer, I feel that opening on Broadway is the ultimate goal. It goes down in the books. Regardless of how it performs, the reviews it receives, you were at one time, at least, a Broadway show.

In my opinion, being a theatre lover outside of the New York bubble, the life after Broadway is what i feel makes a show a success. That it what the general public consumes. Does it get more than one national tour, does it get produced by high schools, colleges, churches, and community theatres, how popular is the cast album, is there accessible merchandise? I think about Spring Awakening, and Seussical the Musical, and of course Les Miz. These shows have had smashing success outside of Broadway.

My years in high school, the musicals were The Pajama Game, The Music Man, Once Upon A Mattress, and Anything Goes. All 4 of those shows have extremely easy visibility, and almost any Joe Schmoe you stop on the street will have heard of those shows. I have already talk extensively about Mattress, and Anything Goes, but I also wanted to point out that Pajama Game, and The Music Man both won the Tony the year they were nominated (1955 & 1958 respectively)

Recently my vocal ensemble put on a losers show. We highlighted a lot of shows that are popular but may have lost some major awards. Once on This Island (lost to the Will Roger’s Follies in ‘91), Mamma Mia (lost to Thoroughly Modern Millie in ‘02)

and Barnum (lost to Evita in ‘80) were some of the bigger highlights of the show. It was a fun show to research on a production level. To see these great shows that held such admiration and memories but may not have gotten the time and accolades they deserved. It was nice to give these shows a little bit of love on stage, in as grand of a way as we could.

What’s a favorite of yours that you feel was robbed? Do you think “lesser-known” shows should get a bigger life after Broadway?

Another Openin': An Introduction

When I was 16 I was asked, and very aggressively suggested, to audition for the spring musical at my high school. I had been singing in the choir for several years, and my choir conductor needed tenors (and male bodies) to audition for the spring show.

That’s when the bug bit me. Yes, the performing bug, which… I’ll get into later, but this was a slowly growing tumor, as opposed to the zealous fever that comes with wanting to show-off in front of an audience.

I fell in love with theatre, and more importantly musical theatre, and I wanted to know more.

I was fairly small when my mom would introduce us to some of the Musical Theatre classics on film. I really only remember watching and loving West Side Story. I kind of remember watching some of the Rodgers and Hammerstein classics (Oklahoma, Carousel, Sound of Music, etc)


I even KIND of remember My Fair Lady, but I really remember West Side Story. It had to be the dancing. Also Russ Tamblyn…

I remember when I got cast in Once Upon a Mattress, and I wanted to find out more information about the show, this was back in the days before Google had the power it does now, and before Wikipedia, and LONG before IBDB.com, and I just wanted to know what I was getting myself into. 

I went to the local Tower Records, because exhaustive searches of Target, and Walmart were useless in trying to find ANY cast album, let alone one from 1959, and I eventually found it! Well, I thought I had found it and would later find out it was the revival cast album starring Sarah Jessica Parker. I was excited, though, because I knew who she was, and I heard of Jane Krakowski, who I thought was the mom in Malcolm in the middle (that would be Jane Kaczmarek).

I was CONVINCED that I had found the exact replica of what we were going to be performing, and listened to my little CD, and loved the music, and then got to my first rehearsal and found that almost EVERYTHING on the album was different then the script and score we were handed.

Distraught, I talked to my vocal director/choir conductor and she told me about the original cast album (starring the amazing Carol Burnett) and that it would be tough to find, and that she would burn a copy of it for me.

Chatting with her about theatre, performing, and show tunes was one of the highlights of performing in high school for me. Later, during my senior year of high school we did Anything Goes, and she once again was a wealth of knowledge about the 1962 production (which is what we would be performing), and the revival (starring Pattil LuPone) and would give me her opinions about things, and what she likes, and helped me foster my own opinions about things. 

The differences between those 2 revivals are vast as well, and also the television special with Ethel Merman and Bing Crosby that a friend of mine found as well. I remember going over to her house and watching it and pointing out the differences, and later obsessing all of those differences.

From then on, I started doing community theatre, and making friends who had the same passions. They would teach me, and we would discover new things together. It was always such a lovely time.

We would talk about themes of shows, then that would start a conversation about a composer, and then the Ingenue whose career was launched, and her body of work, and that choreographer... it would go on and on, and there was always something to talk about. Then and now, that knowledge gives me so much comfort.

Plus its just so fun to perform!

What about you? What introduced you to Musical Theatre?