Word: broadway
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...concert revival of a Broadway show sounds simple enough - get the sheet music, assemble a band and a cast, and start playing. Not always. A 17th century Monteverdi opera has cleaner, fuller charts than many an old Broadway hit, whose arrangements might have ended up in the garage or the garbage. The sheet music for the Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II "Sweet Adeline," which had been performed outdoors, was festooned with mosquito carcasses. As Judith Daykin, who brought the series to City Center, told TIME's Elaine Rivera for an Encores! story we did in 1998: "The musicians didn't know...
...premier composers; (2) boast a lush score, preferably with a few standards; (3) have a libretto that today is either amusingly anachronistic or lingeringly poignant; (4) offer strong roles to either contemporary musical theater stars or star-is-born kids; and (5) haven't received full-dress Broadway revivals in decades. The ideal musical, by these criteria, is Rodgers and Hart's 1937 "Babes in Arms." The show's melodic bounty still astonishes: "Where or When," "I Wish I Were in Love Again," "My Funny Valentine," "Johnny One-Note," "The Lady Is a Tramp"... Care to sing along, anyone...
...revived, George Gershwin two ("Strike Up the Band," "Pardon My English"). His brother Ira did the lyrics for those and for two other Encores! specials ("Lady in the Dark," "Ziegfeld Follies of 1936"). Jerome Kern ("Sweet Adeline") and Irving Berlin ("Call Me Madam") complete the honor roll of indisputable Broadway royalty...
...role of Encores! godfather, I'd designate George Abbott. That legendary ringmaster - whose Broadway career spanned 75 seasons and whose final job as director, of his own play "Broadway," opened on his 100th birthday - either wrote the book for, or originally directed or produced (sometimes all three), eight of the shows revived at City Center: "The Boys from Syracuse," "Pal Joey," "Out of This World," "Call Me Madam," "Wonderful Town," "The Pajama Game," "Fiorello!" and "Tenderloin." He also directed the 1926 play "Chicago," whose musical version would become Encores!' biggest hit when it transferred to Broadway...
...final airs - the capper to a beautiful evening. Fisher is the one who has worked with the arrangers to locate the score (or to reimagine what it might have been), who has rehearsed his two dozen superb musicians (a larger number than in the pit of most Broadway shows) and who later supervises the transferring of some of the Encores! revivals to CD. About a third of the shows have been commemorated on disk, their vitality miraculously intact. Good, but not good enough - every Encores! show must be preserved...