Recorded Music

Here is a story, embarrassing but funny in an ironic sort of way. Arriving in Manhattan in March 2016 to see an opera at the Met, I spotted, in Port Authority, a poster for Hamilton. Instantly, I thought—now, bear in mind that I knew absolutely nothing about the show and had never even heard of it—“A musical about Alexander Hamilton. That will never be a hit!”

I was laughably ignorant of the fact that Lin-Manuel

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The Tap Dance Kid. Book by Charles Blackwell; Music by Henry Krieger; Lyrics by Robert Lorick. With Jimmy Tate (Willie); Martine Allard (Emma); Hinton Battle (Dipsey); Samuel E. Wright (William); Gail Nelson (Ginnie); Jackie Lowe (Carole); Alan Weeks (Daddy Bates). Polydor Records, 1984.

In 1974, the late, Tennessee-born author Louise Fitzhugh wrote a novel for adolescents called Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change. In 1980, the novel became a thirty-minute film called The Tap

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Golden Boy. Book by Clifford Odets and William Gibson; Music by Charles Strouse; Lyrics by Lee Adams. With Sammy Davis, Jr. (Joe Wellington); Paula Wayne (Lorna Moon); Billy Daniels (Eddie Satin); Kenneth Tobey (Tom Moody); Johnny Brown (Ronnie); Terrin Miles (Terry); Lola Falana (Lola). Capitol Records, 1964.

When it comes to Broadway musicals, there are hits, there are flops, and there are hits

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From its stern and then scurrying opening measures and its several, famous, semi-spoken lines (Tosca: "Non posso piu"; "Quanto?...Il prezzo"; "Questo e il bacio di Tosca"; "E avanti a lui tremava tutta Roma"), to its tense second act and tragic third, Puccini's Tosca (1900) is to opera-goers so familiar as to be almost a cliché. This writer can hear the whole work, from start to finish, in her mind's ear; "definitive" renditions like the 1953

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Few musicals of the last thirty years can claim as many hit songs as can Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schoenberg’s ubiquitous if powerful Les Miserables. “I Dreamed a Dream,” “Do You Hear the People Sing,” “One Day More,” “On My Own,” “Bring Him Home,” and “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” are among the titles that have, through the decades, become household names–and not in theatregoing “households” only, as Act I’s concerted finale, “One Day More,” has inspired

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