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Annie

"Annie" is a spunky Depression-era orphan determined to find her parents, who abandoned her years ago on the doorstep of a New York City Orphanage run by the cruel, embittered Miss Hannigan. In adventure after fun-filled adventure, Annie foils Miss Hannigan's evil machinations, befriends President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and finds a new family and home in billionaire Oliver Warbucks, his personal secretary Grace Farrell and a lovable mutt named Sandy.A must for any theatre with a large family audience, "Annie" has proven a sure-fire crowd-pleaser, as its record-breaking Broadway run, star-studded motion picture version, hit 20th anniversary Broadway revival and national tour, and countless productions around the globe each year attest.

Footloose

The successful 1984 film Footloose was more of an extended music video à la MTV than a movie musical. There was plenty of music, most of it written or co-written by composer Tom Snow (with individual tunes by Kenny Loggins, Sammy Hagar, Jim Steinman, and Eric Carmen among others) and lyricist/screenwriter Dean Pitchford, and it was popular; the soundtrack album topped the charts and sold eight million copies, and five singles -- "Almost Paradise," "Dancing in the Sheets," "Footloose," "Holding out for a Hero," "Free," and "Let's Hear It for the Boy" -- became hits. But the movie characters didn't sing those songs, and the songs were not directly tied into the plot. Thus, Pitchford, in turning his screenplay into a stage musical libretto, had the challenge of retaining the popular songs (only "Dancing in the Sheets" is missing) and somehow putting them into the mouths of the characters, while writing extra material to fill out the more extensive needs of a musical score. At the same time, the property's advantages for transfer to the stage were obvious: It was a known property, much of the score was already familiar, and, by definition, the plot involved a lot of dancing. When the show opened on Broadway on October 22, 1998, theater critics (known for their disdain of rock music) felt Pitchford had failed, but Footloose settled in for a long run. Perhaps inevitably, the cast album is not as impressive as the soundtrack, and the new songs Snow and Pitchford have written, such as the duet "Learning to Be Silent" and "Can You Find It in Your Heart?," are closer to character-based theater songs, but also inconsistent with the lively, rock tone of the familiar hits. Onstage, audiences never have long to wait for another driving, danceable production number, but the record's production never matches the sound of the original soundtrack.

Evita

Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's +Evita, which began as a concept album in 1976 and had its first stage incarnation in London in 1978, finally came to the U.S. in 1979 with a production that opened in Los Angeles and moved to San Francisco for multi-week engagements before landing on Broadway on September 25 to begin a Tony-winning, 1,568-performance run. The London production had been represented by a one-disc highlights album, but this one became the second full-length treatment, running, like the concept album, 100 minutes. As such, the revisions made for the stage were more apparent, especially because there were more of them than there had been in London, sometimes to Americanize the language. ("The back of beyond" in "Eva and Magaldi" became "the sticks," while "Get stuffed" in "Goodnight and Thank You" was now "Up yours") "The Lady's Got Potential" had been deleted, and there was a new song, "The Art of the Possible," which, with its musical-chairs staging, was more effective in the theater than on record. And "Dangerous Jade" had been revised to become "Peron's Latest Flame." Many of the changes built up the role of Evita's critic, Che. As played by Mandy Patinkin, who achieved Broadway stardom in the role, Che now rivaled Evita as a musical presence, the actor's elastic tenor and bravura manner drawing more attention to him. But Patti Lu Pone also became a star here, fearlessly bringing out Evita's strident self-interest without attempting to gain the audience's sympathy. (You couldn't say that about London's Elaine Paige.) Lu Pone was at her best when Evita was at her worst, such as in the songs "A New Argentina" and "Rainbow High." The rest of the cast was unexceptional, though Bob Gunton's Juan Peron inspired curiosity as the only actor to use a Spanish accent.
- William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide

Sweeny Todd

Composer Stephen Sondheim and librettist Hugh Wheeler's 1979 musical Sweeney Todd, based on Christopher Bond's modern version of the bloody revenge play originally written by George DibdinPitt in 1847, has had two kinds of revivals since the initial Broadway production, ones like that staged in repertoire by the New York City Opera since 1984, which perform it on a large scale and treat it virtually as an accepted classical work, and ones like that staged by the OffOffBroadway York Theatre Company (with a transfer to Broadway in 1989), which take a minimalist approach and emphasize the drama (an approach dismissed by some critics as "Teeny Todd"). Director John Doyle hewed more to the latter when he first staged the show at a small theater in northern England, even to the point of requiring a reduced cast of actors to do double duty as musicians. At the same time, he only added to the work's disturbing nature by making the characters genuinely disturbed in a showwithinashow structure that had it being put on by the inmates of an insane asylum. ("Marat/Todd" crowed those same critics, recalling the 1965 play Marat/Sade that took a similar approach.) The result gained enough attention to transfer to London's West End and inspire the second Broadway revival in 2005. The American recasting presents two lead performers who had already been specializing in Stephen Sondheim: Michael Cerveris, in the title role, had been John Wilkes Booth in Assassins on Broadway the previous season and also starred in a regional production of Passion with Patti LuPone, here cast as Mrs. Lovett. LuPone, in turn, had previously played that same part in a lavish concert version of Sweeney Todd produced and recorded by the New York Philharmonic in 2000. A comparison with that earlier performance is instructive. At that time, working with a full orchestra, she fully characterized Mrs. Lovett as written, a broad Cockney full of charm and humor, despite the blackness of the story. Five years later, her portrayal was entirely different. Playing a mental patient who is playing Mrs. Lovett (and playing the tuba, too), LuPone largely dispensed with the accent and gave a dry, distanced performance. Cerveris was much the same, though he retained Todd's overwhelming bitterness (equally appropriate to an insane man, which is what Sweeney Todd is, anyway). On disc, the production's primary staging effect, in which the actors keep going back and forth from playing instruments to playing their parts, is lost. All one can hear is that Sarah Travis' orchestrations are much smaller than Jonathan Tunick's were in 1979. But the performances come through clearly enough. It's easy to tell that the production was intended to put an emotional distance between the performers and the play when, for example, the male role of Pirelli turns out to be played by a woman, Donna Lynne Champlin. The effect is interesting, particularly for those already familiar with the work, but purely as an audio effort, Sweeney Todd still works better when done on a larger scale, as on the Original Broadway Cast album.

West Side Story

An adaptation on Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," the Jets and the Sharks are in a gang rivalry. When Tony goes to support the Jets at a school dance he meets Maria, the sister of the Shark's leader, Bernardo, and falls in love. They dream of overcoming their differences, but gang violence makes it impossible for them to live happily ever after.

Kiss me Kate

The idea for Kiss Me, Kate was planted in the mind of producer Saint Subber in 1935. While working as a stagehand for the Theatre Guild's production of The Taming of the Shrew, Subber noticed that the stars of the show, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, had a backstage relationship that was almost as tempestuous as the one they had onstage while portraying Shakespeare's famous quarelling couple.
Although veteran comedy writers Samuel and Bella Spewack had been separated for some time, they reunited to write the libretto for Kiss Me, Kate, and after the production, they chose to stay together permanently. Their libretto creates a play-within-a-play that follows the lives of egotistical actor-producer Fred Graham and his temperamental co-star and ex-wife, Lili Vanessi in a production of, you guessed it, Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Cole Porter's brilliant score borrows freely from Shakespeare's dialogue for lyrics in the musical numbers that take place "onstage" but makes use of more modern syntax in the "backstage" numbers.
Kiss Me, Kate opened at the New Century Theatre on December 30, 1948, with Alfred Drake and Patricia Morison in the lead roles. The production went on to win 5 Tony Awards including "Best Musical," "Best Script" and "Best Score" before closing on July 28, 1951 after 1,070 performances. The show was then remounted at the London Coliseum on March 8, 1951 and ran for another 400 performances. The 1953 film version featured Howard Keel, Kathryn Grayson, Ann Miller and Tommy Rall. A 1999 Broadway revival featured Tony Award nominees Brian Stokes Mitchell and Marin Mazzie