My passion for musical theater

I love musical theater. Broadway musicals, Gilbert & Sullivan, grand opera. It's all terrific. Music plus story. I don't care very much for pop songs; isolated compositions that are not part of a larger structure of characters in a story don't interest me very much. The historic night the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, what was more interesting to me were the excerpts from the musical Oliver. While my contemporaries were into rock & roll, I was exploring the oeuvre of Rodgers & Hammerstein.

When I was ten years old I spent the summer with relatives who had a small collection of musical LPs. I absorbed the scores of some of the best works of the genre: My Fair Lady; South Pacific; Sound of Music; West Side Story; Kiss Me Kate; King & I. I became particularly fond of some of the lesser-known songs that were more story oriented, like "Just You Wait Henry Higgins" and "How Can Love Survive?" (I was devastated when I saw the film of Sound of Music and they omitted it, as well as "No Way to Stop It").

Also in the mid-late 60s there were a few TV adaptations of musicals. Robert Goulet starred in several: Brigadoon, Kiss Me Kate, Carousel. There was a TV series called "That's Life" which starred Robert Morse and E.J. Peaker and was a weekly musical comedy about the romance of a young couple from first meeting, courtship, marriage and parenthood. The songs were mostly existing tunes (largely drawn from other musicals), some pop tunes and a few original songs. Guest stars were familiar faces from TV and Broadway. It only ran one season; don't know what they would have done if it had run longer. That series was a major factor in fostering my love for musicals.

When I was in high school my history class was studying the American Revolution and at that time there just happened to be a musical on Broadway about that very topic. The teacher arranged a class trip to see 1776, my first live Broadway show. It was absolutely mind-blowing to see real live actors on a stage, in person, performing an entire show in front of me. That was the start of a lifelong love affair with the Broadway theater.

Over the next few years I would see at least one or two shows a month. Ticket prices, at least for the upper balconies, were affordable to a teen with a modest allowance. Sometimes two-fers permitted a chance to sit in the orchestra for $5 or $6.

Just before I turned 18 a major life-changing event occurred, though I didn't realize it at the time. The day after Thanksgiving, CBS showed a performance of HMS Pinafore by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. I knew nothing about G&S; somehow I had thought Dames at Sea was one of their shows. But as musical theater buff I felt it incumbent upon me to be exposed to another example of the form. I watched and was captivated. The music was delightful and the humor appealed to my sense of the ridiculous. Over the next few months there was a series on PBS of excerpts from eight of the G&S shows and I eagerly tuned in each week. This led to the discovery of a whole sub-culture of aficionados that I have now been part of for the last thirty plus years.

After a few years of G&S I became ready for the next step: Grand Opera. From my readings about Gilbert and Sullivan I learned that Sullivan was in the habit of composing parodies of operatic works. From "Poor wandering one" it was but one small step to "Sempre libera". I soon found myself wallowing in Verdi and Mozart.

This has been a very skimpy record of me and the musical, which shockingly has skipped over the Master of the second half of the 20th century: Stephen Sondheim. Every one of his shows is a priceless jewel and I am in complete and utter awe of him. I just wish he hadn't spent fifteen years trying to work out Wise Guys/Bounce/Road Show. And I wish Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick had stayed together and written another half dozen shows.