These days, the biographical jukebox musical is so ubiquitous that it has become something of a cliché. At any given moment, Broadway has a few shows built around the lives and songbooks of famous figures, such as MJ, Buena Vista Social Club and Just in Time. Some of these shows are great, and many are great fun. Others struggle to resonate at all. This brings us, perhaps surprisingly, to an earlier example of the form.
Opening on Broadway today, 10 April, 1968, George M! tells the story of George M. Cohan, the legendary performer, writer and producer once known as “The Man Who Owned Broadway.” Long before the term “jukebox musical” entered the theatrical lexicon, George M! assembled a narrative around Cohan’s life using the songs that had already secured his place in show business history.
Joel Grey as George M. Cohan in George M! (Photo credit: Robert A. Wilson)
With a book by Michael Stewart, John Pascal and Francine Pascal, and a score drawn from Cohan’s own work, with revisions by his daughter, Mary Cohan, the musical traces its subject’s journey from his roots in vaudeville with his family to his days as one of Broadway’s defining figures. Along the way, audiences are treated to enduring standards such as “Give My Regards to Broadway” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” songs that have long since transcended the shows for which they were written.
On paper, this is the kind of material that should guarantee success. And in some ways, it did. George M! ran for 433 performances, suggesting a level of popular appeal even though the critics remained unconvinced. Writing for The New York Times, Clive Barnes, for example, dismissed the show as ‘a scrappy, ill-prepared, mediocrely written account,’ the kind of verdict that has defined the show’s reputation ever since.
The issue seems to lie less in the subject matter than in its structure. Unlike the most successful examples of the biographical musical, George M! offeres relatively little insight into the man at its centre. Its book has often been criticised for feeling underdeveloped, leaving the songs to do much of the heavy lifting. While the songs are undeniably strong, their presence alone is not quite enough to sustain a fully satisfying piece of theatre.
Joel Grey, Bernadette Peters, Jerry Dodge and Betty Ann Grove in George M! (Photo credit: Robert A. Wilson)
That said, there was much to admire in the original production. Joe Layton’s direction and choreography brought a sense of polish and energy to the staging, earning him a Tony Award for his choreography. Joel Grey, in the title role, received a Tony nomination for his performance, capturing something of Cohan’s theatrical drive. The production also featured Bernadette Peters, for whom it proved to be a stepping stone en route to a remarkable career.
The musical’s afterlife has been modest. A 1970 television adaptation, broadcast by NBC, presented the material in a hybrid format, part performance and part retrospective, with performers reflecting on Cohan’s life between the musical numbers. It’s an approach that, in its own way, acknowledges the central tension of the piece: the sense that the story itself never quite finds the shape it needs.
All of this raises one inevitable question: what is the purpose of a show like George M!?
Joel Grey, Harvey Evans and Scotty Salmon in George M! (Photo credit: Friedman-Abeles)
As a piece of theatre, its worth is debatable. As a celebration of a figure in American musical theatre history, however, it has undeniable value. If the show feels like an extended reminder of Cohan’s importance, that may be because Cohan himself has, in some ways, faded from the cultural foreground. His influence is immense, but his work is not always directly encountered by contemporary audiences.
Perhaps, then, the real subject of this Forgotten Musicals Friday is not the musical itself, but the man at its centre. George M! may be a show you can take or leave. George M. Cohan, on the other hand, is not so easy to set aside.
Musical theatre makes its way into our personal lives in the strangest ways. For example, I have an imaginary pet dog, a Yorkshire Terrier called Gypsy, which is named after the eponymous Golden Age classic (and my personal favourite), by Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim. What’s a musical theatre quirk that’s made its way into your life? I know that I have more readers at Musical Cyberspace than responders, so I’m not really expecting an answer. I just want to send this cosmic question out into the void – but if it finds you, I’d love to hear what you have to say.
Tana June, one of the canine stars of Broadway’s most recent revival of Gypsy
Every now and then, a social media trend catches my eye. One that I spotted this week showcases pop singers’ first, blow-up, biggest and latest songs, which I thought was a neat way to map someone’s career in four beats. So, I thought, why not apply it to musical theatre for a series of Saturday Lists here at Musical Cyberspace? For this week’s edition, I thought it would be great to showcase Robert Lopez, the double EGOT recipient who moves seamlessly between scrappy musical satires, blockbuster Broadway hits and animated films for Disney Animation. For the purposes of this column, I’m honing in on Lopez’s work for Broadway – with a nod to his work on film.
Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez at the Oscars
First – Avenue Q (2003)
Some people make debuts. With Avenue Q, Lopez delivered a statement of intent. It was, in fact, revisiting this show for a lecture I gave this week that led me to choose Lopez for this week’s column. Avenue Q, which Lopez created with Jeff Marx and Jeff Whitty, is an irreverent show that takes the Sesame Street formula and repurposes it to explore adult life lessons about the meaning of life, racism, pornography, coming out and – of course – schadenfreude. Told through the journey of the perfectly-named recent BA graduate, Princeton, the show sees three human actors interacting with about a dozen puppets as Princeton tries to find his purpose, navigating a romance with the sweet Kate Monster along the way. It’s a deceptively simple show, structurally tight in a way that rewards revisiting the material. It goes without saying that, given its satirical approach, some of the jokes don’t land today the way they did in 2003, but it is such a perfect mirror of the world as it was back then that it’s no wonder the show wrested the Tony Awards for Best Musical, Best Book and Best Score from Wicked. The puppet conceit was a great gimmick, but the show backed it up with a script and score that precisely tracks the anxieties of early adulthood, with songs that land as both parody and genuine character work. Lopez certainly didn’t arrive on Broadway quietly. He landed with a show that announced a distinctive voice that defined his approach as a theatre-maker.
Stephanie D’Abruzzo as Kate and John Tartaglia as Princeton in Avenue Q
Blow-up – The Book of Mormon (2011)
If Avenue Q launched Lopez’s Broadway career, The Book of Mormon catapulted him into the stratosphere. In between the two shows, he had helped create Finding Nemo – The Musical for Disney’s Animal Kingdom, while also writing songs for several television shows, and The Book of Mormon is a clear pivot into the most successful part of his career to date. Co-written with Trey Parker and Matt Stone, this is where Lopez’s craft met scale. The score is meticulously constructed so that its clever pastiche turns what might just be a joke into dramaturgy. Every musical reference adds to the story, guiding the audience into the kind of subversion that had made Parker and Stone’s South Park a hit. Telling the tale of two Mormon missionaries, Elders Price and Cunningham, as they go on a mission to Uganda, this show wasn’t just successful, but dominated the Broadway season in which it made its bow. Commercially and culturally, this was the moment when Lopez moved from being a promising musical theatre voice to a definitive one. The Book of Mormon won nine of its 14 Tony Award nominations, including two for Lopez and his collaborators for their book and score. A decade after its arrival on Broadway, the team collaborated with the show’s New York cast to review its intent, comic elements and staging in response to a letter written by black actors from both the original and current casts about the lens through which The Book of Mormon was seen after the murder of George Floyd and the way that the Black Lives Matter movement changed the world that emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic. This is one of the reasons it is still playing today, currently the tenth-longest-running show in Broadway history.
Andrew Rannells leads the original Broadway cast of The Book of Mormon
Biggest – Frozen (2013)
I said we’d make a detour into Lopez’s film work, and this is where we’re going to do it. The Book of Mormon made Lopez big on Broadway, but Frozen made him big everywhere else. Written with Kristen Anderson-Lopez, the song score for this smash hit achieved something rare: songs that functioned thematically within the film and that also escaped it entirely. “Let It Go,” in particular, saw Lopez’s songwriting operating at a global and cross-generational level. It was heard in cinemas, classrooms and at concerts – all at once. It was more than just success. It was complete and utter saturation, a true pop culture phenomenon. I used to teach next door to a French classroom and often overheard strains of “Libérée, Délivrée” for a couple of years after the film was released. The tale of Elsa, who accidentally traps her kingdom in eternal winter with her icy powers, and her sister, Anna, who sets out on a journey to save her, resonated with people around the world, who also sang along to “Do You Want to Build a Snowman?,” “For the First Time in Forever” and “Love Is an Open Door.” Truth be told, I avoided watching it for a long time, partly because it was so popular, but even I was won over in the end. I guess I was just a “Fixer Upper.”
Elsa, voiced by Idina Menzel, embraces her power in “Let It Go” in Frozen
Latest – Frozen (2018)
It’s sad, but true. When it comes to his work on Broadway, Frozen is still the most recent entry on Lopez’s résumé. Recently, he has leaned more heavily into film and television, which means his Broadway timeline is currently paused. The stage adaptation of Frozen was first mentioned in 2014, without any specific timeline attached. A year later, active work was being done on the adaptation and in 2016, a 2018 Broadway opening was announced. Lopez and Anderson-Lopez tripled the scope of the film score, contributing to its deeper characterisation and altered plot points, including the reimagining of the trolls as the Hidden Folk and the loss of Marshmallow, the giant snow monster who guards Elsa’s palace. While it was on the road to becoming an ironclad hit, Frozen was a casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic and did not reopen afterwards, ending its run after 825 performances. The West End production that had been delayed by that same devastating world event opened in 2021 and ran for three years. It was filmed and released on Disney+ last year, meaning that audiences can return to see it on stage as often as they like.
Caissie Levy brings Else to life on stage in the Broadway production of Frozen
The Next Right Thing?
Lopez’s trajectory as a Broadway songsmith is unusually clear. He debuted with an articulate voice that he scaled up to industry dominance, and then expanded to a global cultural reach. Since Frozen, he’s written songs for Frozen 2, Wandavision and Agatha All Along and had a rare misfire with Up Here. Up next is the next instalment of the Frozen franchise, which is due to be released at the end of next year. While I’m sure that will be a great success, I still can’t wait to see a new musical theatre score from Lopez to see what else he has to add to his Broadway legacy.
Some musicals fade into history because they failed to capture the imagination of their contemporary audiences. Others can’t make their mark because they’re ahead of their time. Lady in the Dark is neither. It was a huge hit, critically and commercially, and it was absolutely in step with the times. Even so, it is a show that feels strangely distant in today’s musical theatre landscape, even as we remember and celebrate other great successes of the 1940s like Oklahoma!, On the Town and Kiss Me, Kate.
Opening on Broadway in 1941, Lady in the Dark ran for 462 performances, recouping an investment that was considerable for the time. It helped establish the practice of advance sales on Broadway, and it is said to be the first musical to sell standing room only tickets at every performance. Critics hailed it as a major achievement, with Brooks Atkinson declaring in his review for The New York Times that ‘the American stage may as well take a bow this morning.’ By any measure, this was a show that mattered. Even so, it is rarely revived today. It occupies an odd position in the musical theatre canon: it is historically significant and musically rich, yet curiously absent from the mainstream repertoire.
Gertrude Lawrence as Liza Elliott in “The Circus Dream” with Danny Kaye, as the Ringmaster and Victor Mature as Randy Curtis in the original production of Lady in the Dark on Broadway.
Part of what makes Lady in the Dark so distinctive is that it was never intended to be a traditional musical comedy. Moss Hart, who wrote the book, originally conceived it as a straight play, drawing on his own experiences with psychoanalysis. What changed everything was his decision to incorporate music into the show, not for decoration or mere entertainment, but something essential to its structure. Along with Kurt Weill and Ira Gershwin, Hart set out to create a musical in which the score would contribute to the psychological and dramatic weight of the story. As he himself put it, the songs would not be ‘melodious but useless addenda,’ but key elements of the show’s architecture. The result was what Hart called a musical play.
At its centre is Liza Elliott, a successful but emotionally paralysed fashion magazine editor, portrayed in the original production by Gertrude Lawrence. The narrative unfolded in two distinct modes: the sober, clinical realism of Liza’s sessions with her analyst and the extravagant dream sequences that give voice to her unconscious. In these sequences, Moss’s erudite dramatic scenes gave way to Weill and Gershwin’s glorious score. Rather than scattering songs throughout the narrative, the musical material is concentrated into extended sequences, each with its own musical language, which Weill described as ‘three little one-act operas’. Weill’s music and orchestrations heighten the sense of psychological dislocation that Liza experiences in “The Glamour Dream,” “The Wedding Dream” and “The Circus Dream,” each of which contrasts the surrounding drama as starkly as the shift from sepia into Technicolor in The Wizard of Oz. Unusual choices, such as the use of instruments like the Hammond organ, create an aural world that feels both theatrical and dreamlike. Even the staging reflected the vision of the real world dissolving into a psychological one, with multiple revolving stages allowing scenes to dissolve into one another without interruption, something that gave the production an almost cinematic fluidity.
Maria Friedman as Liza Elliott in the 1997National Theatre in London
At the heart of the show lies a single musical motif that builds into the stunning ballad, “My Ship.” Introduced as a fragment of a childhood memory, the song functions as the key to Liza’s psychological journey. It shifts and reappears throughout the show, sometimes distorted and always incomplete, until it finally resolves in a fourth “Childhood Dream” as she confronts the emotional root of her anxiety. In this sense, the score doesn’t simply accompany the story; it is the story.
Looking back from today, it is easy to see how Lady in the Dark was a precursor to the concept musical, a work in which every element of the production is unified by a central idea rather than driven by conventional plot mechanics. Long before such terminology existed, Hart, Weill and Gershwin were already exploring what musical theatre might become when freed from the expectations of form.
And yet, for all its innovation, the show has not endured as one might expect.
Part of the challenge lies in its very ambition. Lady in the Dark demands a level of integration between performance, design and musical interpretation that can be difficult to achieve in a way that feels compelling and authentic. Its psychological framework, rooted in mid-century Freudian theory, can also feel distant to contemporary audiences, even as its core themes, such as identity, insecurity and the pressure to conform, remain strikingly relevant.
But perhaps there is another reason.
The show sits in a space that musical theatre has always found difficult to sustain: somewhere between play and musical, between realism and fantasy, between enlightenment and entertainment. It resists easy categorisation, and in doing so, it asks more of its audience than many shows are willing to. Simultaneously, the feminist movement has shifted the way modern-day audiences expect stories like Lady in the Dark to play out. In some ways, Liza Elliot walked so that Miranda Priestly could run.
“The Glamour Dream,” with Victoria Clark as Liza Elliott in a gown by Zac Posen, in the 2019 New York City Center presentation (Photo credit: Richard Termine)
On the anniversary of Kurt Weill’s death in 1950, Lady in the Dark is a reminder of what this formidable musician brought to musical theatre: a refusal to accept its limitations and the determination to expand what it could do. His career was cut short by a heart attack at the age of just fifty, but in works like this, we see the scale of what he was reaching for. Perhaps Lady in the Dark is not so much forgotten as waiting for the right moment, and the right artists, to take up his vision, and Hart’s and Gershwin’s, and find a way to make it speak to us in the 21st century, much as the New York City Centre Encores! and Royal National Theatre presentations did in the 1990s. After all, we had a small taste of what this show can be when Victoria Clark played Liza at New York City Center in 2019 – so why shouldn’t we dream a little more?
Musical theatre, as we know it today, is a fabulous hybrid form, one that grew out of many traditions rather than springing fully formed from a single moment. And yet, we tend to fall into the habit of simplifying Broadway’s origin story, partly because it’s so rich and complex, which ironically makes it all the more interesting! In many retellings of Broadway’s history, the 1866 premiere of The Black Crook has been held up as the first musical, comedy, or at least the first recognisably modern one. However, most contemporary scholars agree that this label doesn’t really hold. Earlier shows had already blended music and story, and stylistically, The Black Crook was more a patchwork of existing forms than a clean leap into the future, with little deliberate intention guiding its creation. Nonetheless, its impact was real. Its success helped establish a new culture of theatre-going on Broadway, one that bridged elite audiences who looked to Europe for cultural validation and the more worldly crowds who embraced popular entertainment in districts like the Bowery. So if The Black Crook wasn’t the sole birthplace of the Broadway musical, what else shaped the form we recognise today? This week’s Saturday List looks back at five theatrical traditions that did more to establish the conventions of the Broadway musical than The Black Crook did, even if traces of all of them can be found in that famously unwieldy nineteenth-century spectacle.
An illustration of the final scene of The Black Crook
5. The Ballad Opera
If the Broadway musical has a basic engine, it’s this: dialogue gives way to song, which then returns us to the scene, a rhythm so familiar that we barely notice it or understand how difficult it can be to achieve well. That structure comes straight from ballad opera. Ballad operas were comic plays peppered with popular tunes, reset to new, often satirical lyrics. The most famous example remains The Beggar’s Opera, although Flora, or Hob in the Well just beat it to the American stage. The tone of many of our favourite musicals also found its first expression here, though the use of irony, the inclusion of social commentary, and the employment of a knowing wink at the audience. Crucially, ballad opera paved the way for early American musicals, which were essentially comic operas, which included original scores. Their influence didn’t vanish with the eighteenth century. You can hear it clearly in The Threepenny Opera, and later still in the work of Kander and Ebb, particularly Cabaret and Chicago, where popular musical styles are weaponised to critique the world they depict.
William Hogarth’s 1728 painting of a scene from The Beggar’s Opera
4. The Extravaganza
Before Broadway learned restraint, it learned spectacle. Extravaganzas emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, blending music, dance, burlesque and visual effects to create an elaborate evening of entertainment. Pretty much almost anything could be labelled an extravaganza, provided it dazzled the audience. Although French fairy spectacles helped shape the form, the American version quickly took on a flavour of its own. By 1855, shows like Pocahontas, a burlesque that was later picked up by blackface minstrel troupes, pointed the way forward. Burlesque extravaganzas like this one spoofed everything at once: history, literary classics, public figures political events. Another frequent inclusion in extravaganzas a transformation scene, in which the scenic design of the stage changed before the audience’s eyes. That expectation of this kind of miraculous transformation never really went away. From Boris Aronson’s jaw-dropping designs for Follies to the automated marvels of the megamusical era, extravaganza trained audiences to hope for this kind of coup de théâtre, a moment where theatre reminds us of its own magic.
The spectacular designs of megamusicals like Cats find deep inspiration in the extravaganzas of the 1800s.
3. Pantomime
Pantomime often began with contemporary characters who were magically transformed, frequently by a fairy, into stock commedia dell’arte figures, complete with masks and stylised movement. Around them existed a second set of performers, actors who spoke and sang normally, grounding the fantasy in something more recognisably real. Originally only forming part of a more extended programme, the plots of pantomimes were usually borrowed from nursery rhymes or fairy tales, although fidelity to source material was never the point. Pantomime existed to showcase the performers’ talents, including comic turns, singing, dancing and impersonation. Big-budget productions added scenic tricks and stage transformations that left audiences gasping, incorporating the influence of extravaganzas and burlesque. Full-length pantomimes followed. In 1868, Humpty Dumpty, ran for 483 performances, surpassing the popularity of The Black Crook. From there, the leap to Babes in Toyland, and eventually to Broadway’s modern family spectacles, from Beauty and the Beast onwards, feels remarkably small.
George Washington Lafayette Fox the eponymous egg in HUMPTY DUMPTY
2. Minstel Shows
There is no way around this: minstrel shows were racist and demeaning. Blackface performance is inseparable from their legacy. As such, minstrelsy occupies an uncomfortable but crucial place in musical theatre history. Minstrel shows were the first form of musical theatre that was entirely American-born. Black and white performers both performed in minstrel shows, which were supported by audiences of all races. Structurally, they were surprisingly sophisticated. The three-part format, including the introductory minstrel line with its stock characters, the variety acts that made up the olio, and the one-act musical burlesque that was presented as the afterpiece introduced patterns of musical storytelling that would endure for decades. Minstrelsy’s popularity faded as audiences demanded more aesthetically refined entertainment, although its influence lingered into the twentieth century, particularly in smaller towns, before cinema finally sealed its fate. Its legacy is troubling, but its structural imprint on American musical theatre is undeniable.
The Scottsboro Boys was a musical that used the minstrel show form to comment on racism in the United States of America. Here, Jared Joseph plays Mr Bones, Ron Holgate plays The Interlocutor and JC Montgomery plays Mr Tambo. (Photo credit: Henry DiRocco)
1. Variety
In muiscal theatre terms, variety paved the road to vaudeville. Early variety entertainment was scandalous. It thrived in saloons where so-called “respectable women” were forbidden to set foot and waiter-girls served drinks – and more – to their gentelmen patrons. Although police raids were frequent, this discouraged neither the saloons’ owners nor their patrons. Over time, variety evolved, shedding its shadier reputation and sharpening its entertainment value. Major musical stars like Lillian Russell turned up on variety bills, lending prestige to what had once been considered disreputable. Variety’s emphasis on star turns, pacing and audience pleasure fed directly into vaudeville, which would dominate American popular entertainment in the years following The Black Crook. The influence on musical theatre was enormous. Variety and vaudeville trained audiences to expect momentum, clarity and personality, qualities that Broadway musicals would increasingly prize as they moved into the twentieth century.
American actress and singer, Lillian Russell
Rethinking the Broadway Musical’s Origin Story
Revisiting these forms reminds us that the Broadway musical didn’t emerge overnight. It was built from many ingredients. Some were joyous and others, troubling. All were influential. The Black Crook may still mark a turning point, but it was never the whole story. The more interesting question might be this: which of today’s theatrical forms – immersive theatre, jukebox musicals, digital hybrids – will still be shaping musical theatre a century from now? History suggests that the answer may surprise us.
Some musicals are forgotten because they failed. Others are forgotten because time quietly moved on without them. Applause falls squarely into the latter category, which makes it one of the more curious entries in our Forgotten Musicals Friday canon. When it opened on Broadway in 1970, Applause was an undeniable success. It ran for 896 performances, won the Tony Award for Best Musical, and picked up three further awards from ten nominations. By any reasonable metric, it should be remembered today alongside other popular shows of its era. And yet, more than fifty years on, Applause has all but disappeared. It’s seldom discussed, largely absent from contemporary musical theatre conversations.
Lauren Bacall was the star at the centre of APPLAUSE on Broadway.
Based on Mary Orr’s 1946 short story, “The Wisdom of Eve,” Applause sits in an unusual adaptation limbo. While most audiences associate the story with the iconic 1950 film All About Eve, the stage rights initially extended only to the original short story. 20th Century Fox was unwilling to grant permission to adapt the movie’s screenplay, and by the time they eventually relented, the musical was already deep in development. The result was a compromise: a show rooted more firmly in the literary source than the cinematic brand, with only one late addition serving as a direct nod to the film in the number “Fasten Your Seat Belts,” which is built around its most famous line.
From a contemporary vantage point, the creative team behind Applause reads like a dream. The book was written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the legendary collaborators who helped create On the Town and Wonderful Town. Music and lyrics came from Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, whose Bye Bye Birdie had been heralded as a triumph. In hindsight, though, there may be a clue here as to why Applause never quite became a show for the ages. While Strouse and Adams enjoyed considerable success, their work as a team has not lingered in the repertoire in quite the same way as the creations of their contemporaries.
The musical itself is, in many ways, an entertaining and well-crafted piece of work. At its centre is Margo Channing, a great starring role brought vividly to life by Lauren Bacall in the original Broadway production. When she left the production, she was replaced by Anne Baxter, the actress who had played Eve Harrington in All About Eve, a serendipitous piece of theatrical symmetry. Penny Fuller took on the role of Eve on stage, while Len Cariou played Margo’s lover, Bill Sampson.
There are genuinely strong numbers in the score. “Welcome to the Theatre” and “But Alive” give Margo ample opportunity to command the stage, while the latter also introduces one of the show’s most historically significant characters: Duane Fox, Margo’s sharp-witted gay hair stylist, played by Lee Roy Reams. Duane takes Margo to a gay club in the first act, and his presence represents a notable moment of gay representation for the time: smart, savvy and unapologetically himself.
Strangely, some of the show’s most famous elements feel oddly underused. “Fasten Your Seat Belts,” despite its iconic lineage, underwhelms as a bitty number punctuating Margo’s drunken breakdown at her party late in Act I. It feels like a throwaway rather than a key musical moment in the show. More curious still is the title song. “Applause,” which went on to become the show’s biggest hit, is sung not by Margo or even Eve, but by a supporting character, Bonnie, played by Bonnie Franklin. The number was so dynamically staged that it became the production’s showcase moment at the Tony Awards, even though Bacall was granted a brief excerpt of “Welcome to the Theatre” to remind audiences who the star of the show was.
Lauren Bacall kicks up her heels in the original – and only – Broadway production of Applause.
So why didn’t Applause endure?
Part of the answer lies in shifting sensibilities. The show’s conclusion hinges on Margo’s decision to step away from her career and embrace domestic fulfilment, articulated in the song “Something Greater.” In today’s terms, the idea that true fulfilment lies in ‘being to your man what a woman should be’ lands uncomfortably. While the show’s narrative exposes the shallowness and cruelty of the theatrical world in which Margo has carved out her career, it doesn’t allow Margo to redefine herself on her own terms. Instead, she simply moves from one externally defined role to another, a resolution that reads less like transcendence and more like defeat.
There’s also the question of tone. Applause is one of the great melodramatic gaslighting stories of the twentieth century, but as a musical, it plays more like a romantic dramedy than a sharply incisive satire. It gestures toward critique without fully committing to it, leaving audiences entertained but perhaps unsure of what the show ultimately wants to say.
After Broadway, Applause remained closely associated with Bacall, whose presence seemed integral to the show’s success. She opened the show in London, where it was less popular, and later starred in a 1973 television adaptation opposite Larry Hagman as Bill Sampson. The musical has never returned to Broadway in a full revival, though New York City Center’s Encores! mounted a staged concert version in 2008, with Christine Ebersole taking on the role of Margo.
Would Applause work today as a major Broadway revival? I’m not convinced it would fly without a substantial rethinking of its ending. And yet, its success, its contradictions and its uneasy place between satire and sentiment make it fascinating to revisit. In the end, Applause isn’t forgotten because it failed, but because it belongs so precisely to its time that we’re not quite sure how to welcome it back today.
Hot takes are all over the Internet these days – and hot takes on musicals are no exception. Often, they’re pretty tame. In the Heights is a better musical than Hamilton? That’s pretty low-hanging fruit. Much better are Sweaty Oracle-level hot takes, which are often interspersed in his scalding Broadway tea posts. A lot of the time, I think, “Facts.” All in all, my hot takes aren’t likely to be as earth-shattering – but then again, I suppose that musical theatre hot takes aren’t hot currency in the bigger scheme of things. Nonetheless, here’s my attempt at a few.
The original cast of Follies (Photo credit: Martha Swope)
The remixed Kritzerland reissue of the original Broadway cast recording of Follies makes it the best recording of the show; although it’s not as complete as other recordings, there’s no beating that original cast.
Legally Blonde deserved a nomination in the Best Musical category at the 61st Tony Awards.
David Yazbek is underappreciated as a contemporary musical theatre composer-lyricist.
Michael John LaChiusa is underrated as a contemporary musical theatre composer-lyricist.
Individual moments in The Colour Purple outshine the musical as a whole.
Maria Friedman and Michael Ball in The Woman in White (Photo credit: Paul Kolnik)
The Woman in White makes complete sense as a musical when you realise that it’s Andrew Lloyd Webber channelling Benjamin Britten.
Aida would have made a great rock opera, but it’s a mediocre book musical.
Cats has the same plot as A Chorus Line; criticising one but not the other is just, as the hip folk say, basic. (A Chorus Line will always be the greater of the two, but even so….)
My Fair Lady lost its social impact when it became a musical theatre piece. Lerner and Loewe transformed it into a love story, and that’s all the better for My Fair Lady.
The original Merrily We Roll Along didn’t fail because it was misunderstood by the audience; it failed because it was misunderstood by Harold Prince.
The Wild Party deserved to win Best Musical at the 54th Tony Awards, and one of the other three nomination spots in the category should have gone to Marie Christine.
Audra McDonald as Rose in Gypsy (Photo credit: Julieta Cervantes)
Jamie Lloyd’s re-interpretation of Sunset Boulevard won Nicole Scherzinger her Tony Award; Audra McDonald’s re-interpretation of Rose should have won her the Tony Award.
If we treat the Golden Age like a museum, it will soon become a morgue.
Rigorous craft matters more than conceptual novelty, but first-class theatricality can make a musical work in spite of itself.
Musicals should challenge audiences, but not punish them; opacity presented as rigorous craft is just as bad as something that has the depth of a teaspoon.
None of these are hills I’ll die on. All right, all right, some of them are. But generally they’re more like things I’d happily argue over a cocktail, halfway through an interval or three posts deep in a group chat that’s gone off the rails. Sure, some of them kind of contradict each other, and some of them probably contradict things I’ve written elsewhere too. Sounds about right….
At any rate, if there’s a throughline to be found here, it’s not contrarianism for its own sake. It’s a belief that musical theatre is worth thinking about. Hot takes are fun, but the most fun thing about them is that they often can make you think about something more interesting than the heat itself.
Feel free to disagree with anything I’ve said here today. In fact, I hope you do – and I hope you feel free to share your hot takes too. Musical theatre is far healthier when we keep it real, preferably with specificity, curiosity and a show tune blasting in the background.
In the four decades since Merrily We Roll Along flopped on Broadway, effectively bringing Stephen Sondheim’s prolific collaboration with director-producer Harold Prince to a painful end, Sondheim wrote only six new musicals for the stage: Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods, Assassins, Passion, Road Show and Here We Are, the last of which premiered posthumously. Prince did, of course, collaborate with Sondheim on an earlier version of Road Show, then titled Bounce, but that project never quite found its footing. With a high-profile revival of Sunday in the Park with George starring Jonathan Bailey and Ariana Grande announced for 2027, this feels like a great moment to revisit and rank Sondheim’s post-Prince works. Each of these shows has something valuable to offer, even if they are not equally loved, equally understood or equally easy to embrace.
6. Road Show (2008)
A decade in the making, Road Show finally arrived in 2008 after a long and complicated gestation, having been seen earlier as a workshop in 1999 and as Bounce in 2003. Created in collaboration with John Weidman, Road Show was inspired by the lives of brothers Addison Mizner and Wilson Mizner, a kind of modern American fable that took audiences from the Klondike gold rush of the 1890s to the Florida real estate boom of the 1920s. Expectations were high. Audiences hoped for another Company or Follies; what they got was something smaller, stranger, and far more elusive. For many, that was reason enough to write the show off entirely – myself included, for a time. But revisiting Road Show once the hype had faded revealed more than memory suggested. There is strong material here, including “Addison’s Trip,” “Talent” and the universally loved “The Best Thing That Ever Has Happened.” Its greatest weakness may be that it feels as though it has less to say than Sondheim’s towering achievements. Still, I wonder what a genuinely fresh production, one unburdened by expectation, might uncover. It is unlikely to climb much higher on this list, but it remains more intriguing than its reputation suggests. Its 2019 outing at New York City Centre seems to be evidence of just that.
Raúl Esparza and Brandon Uranowitz in Road Show. (Photo credit: Joan Marcus)
5. Here We Are (2023)
Here We Are, Stephen Sondheim’s final musical, with a book by David Ives based on the films The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Exterminating Angel by Luis Buñuel, arrived posthumously. It follows a group of wealthy, self-absorbed characters attempting to have brunch while society quietly collapses around them. Encountering the cast album made one thing immediately clear for me: despite early speculation, the score does not feel unfinished. As Ives and Joe Mantello, the director of the premiere production, explained, Sondheim stopped writing when the characters had nothing left to sing. Content dictated form. Musically, Here We Are belongs firmly to Sondheim’s later approach to integration, closer in structure to Passion and Sunday in the Park with George than to his earlier works. Its pleasures lie in its momentum and texture, and in exquisite lyrical detail rather than obvious set pieces. Numbers like “Waiter’s Song,” “It Is What It Is” and “Shine” balance wit with unease in the best tradition of Sondheim’s works. Considered alongside his other musicals, Here We Are can feel like a piece that is still finding its place. Time may yet reshape how we understand it, but even now it stands as a thoughtful, unsettling and unmistakably Sondheimian show.
The cast of the UK production of Here We Are in action (Photo credit: Marc Brenner)
4. Into the Woods (1987)
Into the Woods, the fairy tale mashup Sondheim created with James Lapine, has become increasingly difficult for me to appreciate simply because of its ubiquity. Telling the story of a Baker and his wife, who cross paths with Cinderella, Jack and his beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and – of course – a wickedly glamorous witch, the show asks us to consider the importance of community and how we connect with one another. From the turn of the century onwards, it feels like this show has been everywhere, endlessly produced, reimagined, reinterpreted and reinvented. Child narrators, radical design concepts and revisionist framings abound. While it’s actually amazing to see the piece tackled with such love, diversity and vitality, it does make it a little more challenging to return to the show on your own terms. Nonetheless, I was certainly able to discover its pleasures again when I directed it for a local high school. My advice now is the same advice I gave myself back then: clear your mind, return to what was there at the beginning and let your imagination do the rest. The show’s popularity may sometimes obscure its precision, but its rewards remain intact for those willing to listen closely. “Children Will Listen,” indeed.
Haylea Hayns, Megan Rigby, Graeme Wicks and Kate Normington in a South African production of Into the Woods
3. Passion (1994)
Many people hate Passion with an intensity that borders on the visceral. Some even claim it is a bad show. It isn’t. Based on Ettore Scola’s film Passione d’Amore, Passion was the last of Sondheim’s three collaborations with James Lapine and holds the distinction of being the shortest-running Tony Award-winner for Best Musical ever. Set in nineteenth-century Italy, the show examines the obsessive love of Fosca for a young soldier, Giorgio, and the transformation this obsession affects in him. It is a work that demands emotional maturity, not in terms of age, but in terms of experience. What you bring to this show profoundly shapes what you take from it. Passion is intimate, uncomfortable and deeply personal. It cuts close to truths many people would rather not confront. In my opinion, this discomfort is precisely why some audiences struggle with it. As such, people need to approach Passion with openness and curiosity. If you still reject what it has to say, that’s fine, but recognise that dislike does not equate to poor craftsmanship. This is one of Sondheim’s most rigorously constructed and emotionally challenging scores – with some especially memorable highlights in songs like “I Read,” “I Wish I Could Forget You” and “Loving You.”
Michael Ball and Maria Friedman in Passion (Photo credit: Tristram Kenton)
2. Assassins (1990)
I love Assassins. It is a brilliant show, though I will admit I preferred it before “Something Just Broke” was added to the score. To be honest, I’ve softened on that song over time, but my ambivalence remains. Using the macabre framing device of an all-American carnival game, Assassins, which Sondheim wrote with John Weidman, examines one of the darkest threads in American history: people who murdered, or attempted to murder, American presidents, and the distorted ideals that fuelled their actions. Many fans of the show recommend that newbies start off by listening to the Broadway cast recording. I’d argue instead for the earlier Off-Broadway album, which preserves a crucial scene from the show that wasn’t recorded for the revival. Both casts are excellent, but the earlier recording captures the piece in its most uncompromising form. With songs like “Everybody’s Got The Right” and “Another National Anthem,” Assassins remains provocative and incredibly unsettling. It is frighteningly relevant, perhaps more so now than when it first appeared.
The original Off-Broadway company of Assassins (Photo credit: Martha Swope)
1. Sunday in the Park with George (1984)
The top four shows on this list are, in many ways, interchangeable. But Sunday in the Park with George feels like the most ambitious and arguably, the most fully realised. Created with James Lapine, the musical offers a fictionalised account of Georges Seurat painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, using the act of creation itself as its central subject. All the while, the show tracks his rocky relationship with Dot, whose image he preserves for all time through his painting. The second act shifts time and perspective, examining those same questions through the artist’s fictional great-grandson as he faces the gruelling task of “Putting It Together.” Few moments in musical theatre move me as profoundly as “Sunday,” the song that closes both Act I and the show itself. Seeing a preparatory study for La Grande Jatte at the Met last year – capturing Seurat in the middle of his process – with Sondheim’s music in my mind was quietly overwhelming. Art in conversation with art. Process illuminating process. It reminded me that Sunday in the Park with George is Sondheim at his most expansive, humane and searching.
Jake Gyllenhaal in Sunday in the Park with George (Photo credit: Matthew Murphy)
Passing Through Our Perfect Park
Even when you seem to have everything, you cannot always find what you want, a truth borne out repeatedly in Here We Are and across Sondheim’s canon. As his final musical suggests, we are often caught between forward motion and reflection, between certainty and doubt. Looking back across his post-Prince works, what emerges is not decline, but refinement, a lifelong pursuit of clarity, detail and truth in storytelling through song. As always, Sondheim leaves us not with the answer to life but with the tools to navigate it: passion, intellect and heart. Through what he has given us, we can find comfort and joy in the fact that everyone needs to face a blank page at some point in their life – and then try to finish a hat.
Some musicals are “forgotten” in the loosest sense of the word, not because they vanished entirely, but because we remember them for one thing and quietly overlook the rest. Animal Crackers is one such show. More often thought of as one of the Marx Brothers’ early screen comedies, it’s easy to forget that it began life as a Broadway musical comedy, one that helped to bookend their theatrical legacy.
The Marx Brothers in Animal Crackers
With a book by George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind and a score by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, Animal Crackers premiered on Broadway in 1928. Designed as a vehicle for Chico, Groucho, Harpo and Zeppo, it followed hot on the heels of I’ll Say She Is and The Cocoanuts, marking their third – and ultimately final – Broadway outing.
Like many musical comedies of the late 1920s, the plot of Animal Crackers exists largely to facilitate mayhem. Set at the estate of the wealthy Mrs Rittenhouse, the action unfolds during a society party held in honour of the celebrated African explorer Captain Spaulding. When a priceless sculpture goes missing, the evening descends into a series of misunderstandings, wordplay, disguises and gleeful non-sequiturs. Narrative coherence is very much secondary to comic momentum, which is, of course, precisely the point.
What distinguishes Animal Crackers from other musicals of the period is the unmistakable comic language of the Marx Brothers. Their humour is quick and crazy, and defiantly disrespectful of authority, sentiment and social decorum. It’s a style that comes across vividly in the film’s soundtrack, where dialogue and song blur into a single comedic assault. The Broadway production would have relied heavily on that same kinetic energy, demanding the Marx Brothers’ impeccable timing and instinct for controlled chaos.
Musically, one song from the score has enjoyed an afterlife independent of the show itself. “Hooray for Captain Spaulding” is undoubtedly the best-known number, later repurposed as the theme song for Groucho Marx’s television quiz show, You Bet Your Life, becoming his signature musical calling card. Structurally, it’s less a traditional musical theatre song than a series of escalating gags, building towards a raucous chorus that repeatedly drowns out Spaulding’s attempts to speak, a joke that wears its audience down through sheer persistence. When we last revisited the soundtrack, my patient husband begged me to skip to the next track after a couple of verses. I responded by playing the rest of the song at full volume. It almost demands it!
My own favourite song from Animal Crackers, however, wasn’t part of the original stage production at all. Written for the film version, “Why Am I So Romantic?” is a charming slice of period musical comedy. It’s irresistibly tuneful and captures the kind of effortless delight that the best musicals of the era delivered without strain or self-importance.
Groucho Marx as Captain Spaulding in Animal Crackers
Animal Crackers has never truly disappeared and has resurfaced roughly once a decade in revivals since the 1980s, often augmented with interpolated songs, such as the always popular “I Wanna Be Loved by You.” Even so, its identity as a stage musical remains overshadowed by its cinematic incarnation. Seen through a contemporary lens, the show stands as a reminder of a Broadway era when musical comedy ruled the roost: when plots were optional, stars were paramount and laughs were the primary currency.
That said, recent developments invite a fresh look. The show’s songs entered the public domain in 2024, followed by the full script in 2025. For theatre-makers with imagination (and a tolerance for comic anarchy), the show is now open for reinvention. Perhaps this makes Animal Crackers overdue for reconsideration as a theatrical playground rather than a museum piece. And perhaps that’s the real invitation of this particular Forgotten Musicals Friday column: not simply to look back, but to ask what we might still do with shows like these now that they truly belong to everyone.
Towards the end of my time as a student, I sat in a lecture on theatre-making that has stayed with me ever since. One of our lecturers, Professor Mark Fleishman, offered a deceptively simple breakdown of how theatre works. A play, he explained, is divided into acts, acts into scenes, scenes into beats and beats into moments. And it is those singular moments that an audience remembers. At the time, this felt like a neat structural observation. With the benefit of distance, teaching and two decades of making and watching theatre, I’ve come to realise that it goes much deeper than that. It speaks directly to the heart of what makes musical theatre magical, why so many of us fall in love with it so young and stay in love with it for life.
Susan Stroman breaks down how the many magical moments of Crazy for You were created.
A truly magical musical moment is never accidental. It emerges from a kind of collective intuition: music, movement, text, design, performance and timing all aligning so precisely that the audience stops analysing and simply feels. When it works, you don’t notice where one department’s contribution ends and another’s begins. You just know that something has landed. When I reflect on my own love of musical theatre, some of these moments have absolutely lodged themselves in my memory.
Some of my first magical moments were given to me by my grandmother. When I was a toddler, she would play cast albums while I was put down for naps, gently feeding my imagination with The Sound of Music, South Pacific and My Fair Lady. I was so young that the music simply offered a comforting presence and an endless source of wonder. There is even an old cassette recording of me earnestly singing “Sixteen Going on Seventeen,” proof, if any were needed, of how impressionable young minds can be.
Ask most people about the magic of The Sound of Music and they will point, quite rightly, to Julie Andrews spinning through the Alps at the start of the film. When I later directed the show myself, it became abundantly clear that the musical’s true emotional core lies elsewhere for me. The key moment, to my mind, is when the children sing “The Sound of Music” and Captain von Trapp joins in. In that instant, music restores something that was broken and a family begins to heal. That is the moment I always carry with me.
South Pacific offers a quieter moment of magic that is no less emotional. As the final curtain falls, Nellie and Emile clasp hands, a small gesture freighted with all the cost of what they have been through and the hope of what they might achieve as a new family, along with Ngana and Jerome. And in My Fair Lady, the sequence that builds towards “The Rain in Spain” is not just about phonetics or Eliza’s triumph: it’s the precise moment where effort, frustration and joy tip into transformation.
More recently, I watched Maybe Happy Ending, which delivered an instantly recognisable magical moment. Oliver and Claire, two obsolete Helperbots living in near-future Seoul, travel to Jeju Island so that Claire can see the fireflies before her imminent deactivation. As they walk into the forest, pinpricks of light begin to appear. Slowly, the stage fills with glowing fireflies in a final build and some of the production’s musicians are revealed as part of the landscape. Light, sound and movement coalesce into a sequence of breathtaking simplicity and beauty. It’s pure theatrical alchemy, the kind of thing that makes you hold your breath without realising it.
Helen J. Shen as Claire and Darren Criss as Oliver in Maybe Happy Ending (Photo credit: Evan Zimmerman)
I have been lucky enough to encounter many such moments over the years. When I was about ten, Peter and the Darlings soared through the air in Peter Pan and the boundary between the stage and my imagination dissolved entirely. Audra McDonald delivered several when I saw her in Gypsy last June. None of these is an isolated flourish that happens without a great deal of effort from everyone who plays a part in bringing it into being. Each is the product of meticulous collaboration and shared intention, moments where everything converges on stage.
Perhaps this is the miracle of musical theatre. It gives us a language for feeling before we have words for it. It can shape us long before we know we are being shaped. Our families, our teachers, directors, performers and collaborators help guide us, whether we know it or not, toward moments that stay with us.
Acts fade. Scenes blur. But moments endure. If we believe that this is true, then maybe the real measure of a musical’s impact is not how often it is revived or how lavishly it is produced, but how many moments it gives us to carry forward.
I’ll leave you with a question, one I keep returning to myself. What are your magical musical theatre moments? Head down to the comments and share them with us.
Musical Cyberspace 