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[0:02] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how immigrants, Jews, queers, African Americans, and other outcasts invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process.

[0:17] David Armstrong: I'm David Armstrong, and I have to admit I'm wearing a number of hats at the current moment, including this week returning to the Fifth Avenue Theater to co-direct Irving Berlin's White Christmas.

[0:29] David Armstrong: Rehearsals have just begun, and I couldn't be more excited about it.

[0:33] David Armstrong: At the same time, I'm also working on deadline for my upcoming book, also titled Broadway Nation.

[0:39] David Armstrong: And I couldn't be more excited about that.

[0:41] David Armstrong: But of course, first and foremost, I want to keep this podcast vital and alive in the midst of everything else.

[0:48] David Armstrong: So today I've asked my frequent co-host and I know a favorite of many of yours, Albert Evans, to take over the podcast.

[0:56] David Armstrong: I'll be back next week with another new episode, but in the meantime, I know you'll be in great hands with Albert.

[1:03] Albert Evans: Here we go. Thanks, David, for giving me the keys to Broadway Nation.

[1:08] Albert Evans: I promise to tidy up before I go.

[1:10] Albert Evans: And hello to everyone listening.

[1:12] Albert Evans: David told me I could talk about whatever I wanted to.

[1:16] Albert Evans: So I thought and perused and dithered and delayed for weeks until I finally picked a topic which I don't think has been overanalyzed.

[1:26] Albert Evans: The pastiche musical.

[1:29] Albert Evans: What a strange word.

[1:31] Albert Evans: It's mostly used in the arts, where it means a work that lovingly imitates the style of another artist or era.

[1:40] Albert Evans: In the theater, that could mean the manner of Cole Porter or Fred Astaire, or the musicals of another decade.

[1:47] Albert Evans: Stephen Sondheim was a master of the song pastiche.

[1:52] Albert Evans: About half of his Follies score is written in imitation of theater songs of the past.

[1:57] Albert Evans: After all, the characters are often revisiting signature songs from their youth.

[2:02] Albert Evans: So "Beautiful Girls" is a Ziegfeld beauty parade number, modeled on Irving Berlin's "A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody."

[2:10] Albert Evans: Other pastiche songs from Follies include "Broadway Baby," "A Paris," "Rain on the Roof," "One Last Kiss," "Who's That Woman," and more that I'm forgetting.

[2:21] Albert Evans: In Follies, pastiche evokes memories, sometimes painful memories.

[2:27] Albert Evans: In the final "Love Land" sequence, Buddy, Sally, Phyllis, and Ben are trapped along with the ghosts of their younger selves in a sort of nightmare follies, performing pastiche numbers that force them to act out their personal failures.

[3:13] Albert Evans: Spend sleepless nights to think about you.

[3:32] Albert Evans: Just being calm losing.

[4:07] Albert Evans: No wonder the first audiences were a bit disconcerted.

[4:12] Albert Evans: This was not what a 1971 audience expected from a show called Follies, and they either hated it or they thought it was the greatest thing ever.

[4:22] Albert Evans: And it's still a ride that some people just don't want to go on.

[4:26] Albert Evans: But today I'd like to talk about musicals that are entirely pastiche.

[4:32] Albert Evans: Songs, dialogue, setting, and style, shows that ask us to pretend that they were written decades ago.

[4:40] Albert Evans: They allow us to laugh at their dated theatrics while still getting involved, even emotionally moved by the characters' frankly trivial dilemmas.

[4:50] Albert Evans: The heyday of pastiche shows was the 1950s and 60s.

[4:55] Albert Evans: By mid-century, musical theater had moved on to the Rogers and Hammerstein musical play paradigm, leaving the sometimes ramshackle structure of anything for laughs musical comedy, with its choruses of identically dressed boys and girls, as they were called, leaving all that behind in favor of realism.

[5:17] Albert Evans: Now musical comedy was firmly in the past and ripe for parody.

[5:22] Albert Evans: Let's look at three pastiche musicals, two from the nineteen fifties and one from the 1960s.

[5:30] Albert Evans: The first is Sandy Wilson's The Boy Friend.

[5:33] Albert Evans: In a recent episode of Broadway Nation, David interviewed Deborah Phillips, the author of And This Is My Friend Sandy, a long overdue book about Sandy Wilson and London Fringe Theatre in the 1950s.

[5:48] Albert Evans: And if you haven't heard those episodes, I strongly encourage you to go back and listen to them.

[5:54] Albert Evans: But here is the short version.

[6:13] Albert Evans: He grew up surrounded by popular music on gramophone records and learned to play all the current songs on the family piano.

[6:21] Albert Evans: In the 1940s, when he was in his own twenties, he longed for the innocent and tuneful musicals of his childhood, which he was too young to have actually seen, but later somehow recreated in his fantasies.

[6:36] Albert Evans: During the Second World War, he served as a file clerk in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps in Egypt and Iraq.

[6:45] Albert Evans: Then returning home, he got a scholarship to Oxford, where he wrote songs for student reviews, then attended the Old Vic Theatre School on a production course.

[7:07] Albert Evans: Need I mention that he was gay?

[7:10] Albert Evans: Deborah Phillips paints a vivid picture of the lively but guarded gay scene of the Soho district with its artists, hustlers, criminals, bohemians, and small discreet theaters.

[7:24] Albert Evans: Like any big city bohemia, Soho had a large queer presence at a time when homosexuality was a prison offense and a positive representation of it on stage could land a theater in severe legal trouble.

[7:39] Albert Evans: But the more daring theaters dodged censorship.

[7:43] Albert Evans: By operating as private clubs, patrons had to become members, but nobody was fooled.

[7:50] Albert Evans: Sandy found an artistic home at the Players Theater, one of those members-only playhouses, where in 1953 he wrote the first version of The Boy Friend as a Christmas treat.

[8:51] Albert Evans: I call it the first pure pastiche musical, a breezy new 1920s show that invited the audience to rediscover the authentic style of the 1920s jazz age musical.

[9:04] Albert Evans: It was so successful that it transferred to the West End where it stayed for over 2,000 performances.

[9:04] Albert Evans: In 1954, The Boy Friend opened on Broadway, introducing 19-year-old Julie Andrews to America.

[9:18] Albert Evans: Julie followed that with My Fair Lady, and well, you know the rest.

[9:23] Albert Evans: Let's consider the songs of The Boy Friend and Wilson's uncanny imitation of the great American and British show composers of the 1920s.

[9:33] Albert Evans: Vincent Newman's No, No, Nanette, the classic musical comedy of the 1920s, opened with a harmoniously costumed line of chorus girls singing straight out to the audience and announcing "Flappers Are We."

[9:50] Albert Evans: Flapper zombie!

[9:52] Albert Evans: Flapper zombie!

[10:25] Albert Evans: Now that's sufficiency.

[10:28] Albert Evans: No tiresome exposition.

[10:30] Albert Evans: Here's who we are, you see us, we see you.

[10:33] Albert Evans: Now on with the show.

[10:35] Albert Evans: The Boy Friend uses the same time-saving strategy.

[10:39] Albert Evans: The female ensemble are giddy rich girls at a posh finishing school.

[10:44] Albert Evans: As they explain to their maid and to us in the audience.

[10:59] Albert Evans: We're perfect, young ladies, preparing to make.

[11:03] Albert Evans: Then let's stop the chance we possess.

[11:06] Albert Evans: We're being finished, and love family is well, maybe diminished, but at least we all have perfect health.

[11:16] Albert Evans: And making the grade is our duty, you see.

[11:19] Albert Evans: The perfect young lady is all we.

[11:22] Albert Evans: In Good News, the 1927 college football musical, the ensemble helpfully informs us, students are we, as if we didn't know.

[11:33] Albert Evans: Other shows announced that the chorus members were mounties, bandits, gold miners, dock workers, etc.

[11:40] Albert Evans: Sandy Wilson's genius was that he could imitate old songs without sounding stale.

[11:47] Albert Evans: For example, here's the title song from Rogers and Hart's 1926 musical, The Girlfriend.

[12:06] Albert Evans: Stunning the cunning lady can be a look at the pigeon, we'll go up the lady.

[12:10] Albert Evans: She's a girlfriend.

[12:14] Albert Evans: She's refined from the GB.

[12:17] Albert Evans: She has one, she has mine, gosh, the girl's ideal.

[12:24] Albert Evans: And I fought in my followed it I for pleasure to meet my body fashion appears with the passion for the girlfriend.

[12:30] Albert Evans: Sandy Wilson not only borrows two-thirds of The Girlfriend's title, but he writes a title song that's frankly even more memorable.

[12:38] Albert Evans: We've got to have, we want to have, for it's so dreary not to have that certain thing called the boyfriend.

[12:48] Albert Evans: We scheme about and dream about, and we need them to scream about that certain thing called the boyfriend.

[13:12] Albert Evans: Our dreams just won't come true without.

[13:15] Albert Evans: That certain thing called the boyfriend.

[13:21] Albert Evans: No, no, no, no, no, had a big hit with "I Want to Be Happy."

[13:25] Albert Evans: So Sandy Wilson writes, "I Could Be Happy With You."

[13:29] Albert Evans: And what 1920s musical could neglect the Charleston?

[13:33] Albert Evans: To dance with you is thrilling to my poor leg.

[13:39] Albert Evans: So baby, say you're willing to shake a leg.

[13:44] Albert Evans: Oh, won't you tell using with me?

[13:49] Albert Evans: Won't you tell some with me?

[13:53] Albert Evans: And while the band is playing that homo deo dough, around we will go.

[13:59] Albert Evans: Together we'll show them how the Charleston is done.

[14:05] Albert Evans: We'll surprise everyone.

[14:09] Albert Evans: Just think what heaven it's gonna be.

[14:12] Albert Evans: If you will challenge Charleston with me, won't you, Charleston?

[14:25] Albert Evans: But the miracle of The Boyfriend is that it's not a "weren't they silly then" spoof. Sandy Wilson called it a loving Valentine to a vanished age, not making fun of, but making fun with. And when played sincerely as he wanted, The Boyfriend's two-dimensional characters can break your cynical old heart.

[14:56] Albert Evans: May I have this dance, Pierret?

[14:59] Albert Evans: I'm afraid I can't dance with a stranger.

[15:02] Albert Evans: But I am Pierre.

[15:04] Albert Evans: You are Pierret.

[15:06] Albert Evans: Surely we are not strangers.

[15:09] Albert Evans: But I don't know who you are.

[15:11] Albert Evans: Perhaps this kiss will remind you.

[15:20] Albert Evans: Yes, Polly.

[15:21] Albert Evans: It is I, Tony Polly.

[15:27] Albert Evans: I couldn't be happy with you.

[15:31] Albert Evans: If you could be happy with me.

[15:37] Albert Evans: I'd be contented to live anywhere.

[15:42] Albert Evans: What would I care?

[15:45] Albert Evans: As long as you let the skies may not always be blue.

[15:51] Albert Evans: But one thing is clear as can be.

[15:56] Albert Evans: I know that my boy has been bringing you by The Boyfriend opened on Broadway in 1954, but it was a small show, unlike big blockbusters like Rogers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma, South Pacific, and The King and I, and other shows written in the new serious musical play style.

[16:30] Albert Evans: And its success may have suggested to producers that maybe there's still money to be made from those actual old shows.

[16:39] Albert Evans: But mounting a Broadway show was expensive. A less risky venue was off-Broadway, which emerged during the 1950s with artsy offerings like Brecht and Weill's Three Penny Opera, which ran for over 2,000 performances and placed an unlikely song on the pop charts.

[17:24] Albert Evans: Before long, New York saw a string of budget revivals of forgotten musicals, like Jerome Kern's Leave It to Jane, and continuing into the 1960s with Rogers and Hart's Boys from Syracuse, and a really fantastic revival of Cole Porter's Anything Goes.

[17:42] Albert Evans: And then, inspired by the success of shows like The Boyfriend, more pastiche shows, newly written in the old style, began to pop up. Notably Rick Bassoyan's sly operetta spoof, Little Mary Sunshine.

[18:17] Albert Evans: Like Sandy Wilson, Rick Bassoyan was born in 1924. He was raised in California and served in World War II in the U.S. Army Special Services Entertainment Division.

[18:31] Albert Evans: After the war, Bassoyan returned home, toured for a couple of years in a Gilbert and Sullivan troupe, then moved to New York, where he studied at the American Theater Wing and taught musical comedy at the Stella Adler studio.

[18:45] Albert Evans: In 1957, he contributed songs to a little nightclub review, and his Act II finale was titled Gems from Little Mary Sunshine.

[18:58] Albert Evans: Two years later, he expanded that short skit into a full musical, a takeoff on old-fashioned operetta and related targets. It was a surprise hit and ran for three years and 1,143 performances.

[19:15] Albert Evans: Over the decades, this very easy to produce show has racked up over a hundred thousand productions in schools and amateur and semi-professional theaters.

[19:27] Albert Evans: Even now you can see recent high school and college productions on YouTube, long after the shows of spoofs have been forgotten.

[19:36] Albert Evans: Little Mary Sunshine is set at a tourist inn high in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, where the Canadian mounties of Rosemarie have been reimagined as sturdy American Forest Rangers.

[19:49] Albert Evans: Here's their introduction, which might as well be called Forest Rangers Are We.

[19:55] Albert Evans: John Larted is the Forest Ranger, he's the south.

[19:59] Albert Evans: He's thoughtful, friendly, courteous and kind.

[20:03] Albert Evans: He's reverent and brave, he's healthy and trim, he's clean in soul and body and mind.

[20:09] Albert Evans: Yes, sir!

[20:10] Albert Evans: He's cheerful, honest, empty and obedient.

[20:14] Albert Evans: To love the good and hate the bad supply.

[20:18] Albert Evans: So with the Zandy danger, you can be sure the board is ranger, the Martin Bad.

[20:34] Albert Evans: The unlikely guests at the inn include a giggling gaggle of young ladies from a finishing school, Shades of The Boyfriend, as well as a Viennese opera diva, and her former suitor, a Washington diplomat.

[20:49] Albert Evans: Also, unfortunately present in the plot are three operetta Indians, and I use the term deliberately.

[20:56] Albert Evans: These three have no resemblance to Native Americans, alive or dead, and their stereotypical portrayals make modern productions questionable.

[21:07] Albert Evans: Little Mary Potts is the Jeanette MacDonald of the Rockies, and Captain Jim is her Nelson Eddy figure.

[21:14] Albert Evans: And that brings up an important point.

[21:17] Albert Evans: In 1958, a dwindling number of people would have remembered the American stage stars of Rosemarie, The New Moon, or Naughty Marietta.

[21:28] Albert Evans: But everyone still knew the Hollywood versions of these shows, starring Nelson and Jeanette, who are actually quite good in these adaptations.

[21:36] Albert Evans: And their songs are actually quite ripe for pastiche.

[21:41] Albert Evans: The big love duet in Rosemarie is the haunting Indian love call.

[21:47] Albert Evans: And Little Mary Sunshine, Rick Bassoyan recycles it as the over-the-top Colorado love call.

[21:55] Albert Evans: Here they are, back to back.

[22:54] Albert Evans: Yet I'll count the lonely eyes till we can be as one till we can be as one as one as war you and I shall live and die underneath a Colorado sky very soon we'll have our June underneath a Colorado moon. Though I must leave you must believe my lonely heart will grieve till then I must be stir and for your sake my lonely heart will ache and quake and break if you do not return my heart will yearn and burn so please return you and I shall live and die underneath a Colorado sky till then I try till then I'll try to say goodbye!

[24:31] Albert Evans: To say goodbye!

[24:34] Albert Evans: Goodbye!

[24:37] Albert Evans: Goodbye!

[24:39] Albert Evans: Good-by-mine!

[24:41] Albert Evans: Goodbye!

[24:44] Albert Evans: Goodbye!

[25:03] Albert Evans: By the way, that recording of Colorado Love Call is from the London cast, starring the incomparable Patricia Rutledge.

[25:11] Albert Evans: Bassoyan's score casts its net wide.

[25:15] Albert Evans: It recalls songs from Gilbert and Sullivan, the turn of the century blockbuster Floridora, the operettas and musical comedies of Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, Rudolph Friml, Sigmund Romberg, and even the counterpoint songs of Irving Berlin.

[25:32] Albert Evans: Another example.

[25:57] Albert Evans: Which Bassoyan pastiches as a mild scolding to the mischievous soubrette, Nancy Twinkle.

[26:04] Albert Evans: Oh Nancy, whatever are we going to do with you?

[26:09] Albert Evans: We can't condone your headstrong way, and yet you make our lives so gay.

[26:17] Albert Evans: Naughty naughty, Nancy, you're so mischievous, it's true.

[26:21] Albert Evans: You're so full of ginger and so full of spice.

[26:25] Albert Evans: We can't help but wonder how a naughty girl like you can be so naughty yet so very nice.

[26:34] Albert Evans: You're probably noticing that unlike the restrained pastiche of The Boyfriend, Little Mary Sunshine has a more overt tone of parody.

[26:43] Albert Evans: The songs are set up to elicit laughs.

[26:46] Albert Evans: This may be because it was developed from a nightclub sketch or just Rick Bassoyan's sense of humor.

[26:53] Albert Evans: But there is certainly a broad note of musical burlesque, the kind of thing we'd see a decade later on The Carol Burnett Show.

[27:01] Albert Evans: Little Mary herself was played by a young unknown named Eileen Brennan, a role that launched her long career on stage, screen, and television.

[27:12] Albert Evans: She was Irene Malloy in Hello, Dolly!

[27:15] Albert Evans: She appeared in The Last Picture Show, and she played Captain Doreen Lewis in Private Benjamin, both the film and the TV show.

[27:24] Albert Evans: Also in the Little Mary Sunshine cast was future Broadway stalwart John McMartin as song and dance man Billy Jester.

[27:33] Albert Evans: Once in a bloom, I think you love me.

[27:38] Albert Evans: I often think I like to love you.

[27:41] Albert Evans: Once in a bloom, I think you go.

[27:45] Albert Evans: It's rather pleasing to be so teasing.

[27:48] Albert Evans: Once in a boon, I think you hate me.

[27:53] Albert Evans: I only hate you because I love you.

[27:55] Albert Evans: Once in a boon, I think you hold it.

[27:59] Albert Evans: I'm undecided and must be guided.

[28:03] Albert Evans: McMartin later created the role of Oscar in Sweet Charity and Ben Stone in Follies.

[28:10] Albert Evans: Once in a boon, you're in our world.

[28:13] Albert Evans: She set me reeling, or such a feeling.

[28:17] Albert Evans: Why this conducive?

[28:22] Albert Evans: Here's the conclusion.

[28:24] Albert Evans: I am your once in a blue moon girl.

[28:37] Albert Evans: Don't go away. Broadway Nation will be back right after this quick break.

[28:47] Albert Evans: Both The Boyfriend and Little Mary Sunshine were written by gay authors, although, of course, that was never publicized.

[28:56] Albert Evans: It was the 50s, after all. But both shows were shot through with a queer sensibility that had emerged long ago, perhaps the late 18th century. It was a sensibility that had a name in the secret gay world, a name that was all but unknown to straight society, but was about to be brought into the light by the scholar Susan Sontag in her 1964 article, Notes on Camp. Sontag's still brilliant essay consisted of 58 numbered notes approaching Camp from different angles as topics for further academic studies. She doesn't get around to the homosexual affinity for camp till Note 51, although earlier she does drop code words like androgynous and episcene. I think it's fair to say that Notes on Camp launched the thriving academic field of gay studies and may be inadvertently one of the founding documents of gay liberation.

For the next 15 years or so, Camp was everywhere. In Streisand's early nightclub appearances, wearing antique thrift shop getups, singing secondhand rows, in newly minted pop songs like Winchester Cathedral, Everything Old Is New Again, and in Tiny Tim's outrageous persona on The Tonight Show. And even in the vaudeville and music hall sounds that float through the Beatles Sgt. Pepper album. For the unconverted squares, Camp was repackaged as nostalgia, but the gay subtext was always present. Our final pastiche musical was written during the first full flowering of American gay sensibility. The Boyfriend was a parody of a 1920s musical. Little Mary Sunshine has a double target antique operettas and their film versions.

Dames at Sea, our third pastiche musical, is a satiric spoof of 1930s musical movies. Its main referent is the film musicals choreographed and sometimes directed by the unique Busby Berkeley, who started on Broadway as a stage choreographer or dance director, because let's face it, choreographer was far too high class term for someone who just moved showgirls around in formation. But one of his stage shows, Woofy, became a Hollywood movie in 1930 with its stage star Eddie Cantor. And Berkeley, its dance director, came along for the ride. In Hollywood, his bizarre imagination was allowed free reign. His production numbers employed seemingly hundreds of beautiful girls, diving into Art Deco swimming pools, playing neon violins, and arranging themselves into dazzling kaleidoscopic patterns filmed by overhead cameras, a perspective no stage could match.

Dames at Sea began as a no budget off Broadway entertainment at the Cafe Chino, a coffee shop slash unlicensed performance space in the West Village. Founded by former dancer Joe Chino on a stage built on milk cartons, the Tiny Cafe featured beatnik poetry and play readings and soon became a venue where young playwrights like John Guare, Tom Ions, Sam Shepherd, Robert Patrick, and Lanford Wilson got their first public hearings. Joe Chino had a very unusual way of choosing his authors. He didn't read their scripts, he made all his decisions based on their astrological signs. Might be as good a way as any. Actors who graduated from Cafe Chino Productions include Harvey Keitel, Al Pacino, and Bernadette Peters, who starred in a rare Cafe Chino musical, Dames at Sea, or Gold Diggers Afloat, written by Jim Wise, George Haimson, and Robin Miller.

The show was little more than a short sketch, but director Robert Dotta lengthened it to 50 minutes and later claimed to have conceived and written much of the show. But when it moved to the Bowery Lane Theater and then to the Theater Lee on Christopher Street, Dotta's name and participation had somehow been erased. It was actually the first musical I ever saw in New York, and I laughed so hard I honestly couldn't breathe. Nineteen year old Bernadette Peters was perfection as the Ruby Keeler character. She artfully captured Keeler's charmingly naive line readings and heavy-footed hoofing while greatly improving on her vocal delivery. The story borrows heavily from Warner Brothers 42nd Street.

Ruby arrives from Utah with nothing but tap shoes in her suitcase and a prayer in her heart. She gets a job in a Broadway chorus and meets Dick, a sailor and aspiring songwriter. The theater is about to be torn down. The show somehow moves to the deck of a battleship. The leading lady becomes seasick, and Ruby steps in to save the day and become a star all in 24 hours, like you do. Dames at Sea kept the Cafe Chino's miniature style as its comic twist, delivering Busby Berkeley style extravaganza with a cast of six, a laughably cheap set, and a two-piano orchestra. Now, a word to you, cast recording collectors. The Dames at Sea album features terrific orchestrations by young Jonathan Tunick, which perfectly capture the sound of the 1930s Warner Brothers movies, only somewhat miniaturized.

Tunick, of course, would go on to become the dean of theater orchestrators and score most of the Sondheim shows. Now I have a feeling that most of you are probably familiar with the Dames at Sea score, so I'm not going to dwell on it, except to say that the Dames at Sea songs, like those in The Boyfriend and Little Mary Sunshine, often echo vintage tunes while cautiously avoiding copyright issues. But one Dames at Sea song, that Mr. Man of Mine, was just a little too close to a Gershwin standard. And maybe for that reason it was omitted from the published vocal selections while it does remain in the score. So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit the two songs for your judgment. Someday he'll come along the man I love, and he'll be big and strong, the man I love, and when he comes my way, I'll do my best to make him still.

No king was on no Dem Corgin, no movie star, his face was kind of funny. No lock and va, but Lordy, he had money that Mr. Man of Mine. And we might add losing my mind to the Man I Love sound alike. But in Follies, it's obviously a loving homage, not a ripoff. The sun comes up. I think about you. Like The Boyfriend and Little Mary Sunshine, Dames at Sea emerged from humble origins to become a major hit. And lo and behold, Bernadette Peters became a major star. I'm the star Todd of the Navy. I'm the hit miss of the sea. When the ocean's getting wavy, leave those handsome sails to me on the swell swab, on the poop deck, on the ship shaped shipmate in the hold. I'm the star tour, I'm the tar star of the navy, blue and gold.

Heave ho on the top pop in the crow's nest, on the big bell. Sailors love to ring in the folks all. As the old show audience entered their 70s, the nostalgia connection to the old shows aged as well. Now, if a vintage musical comedy was revived, it would be as a state-of-the-art Broadway extravaganza, something the boomers could enjoy. These shows could be great fun, like the wholly unexpected revival of No No Nanette, with a rewritten book and Take No Prisoners orchestrations. The overture is a show in itself. Or Gower Champion's magnum opus, 42nd Street, which discarded the film's dark underpinnings and offered a series of gorgeous dances stitched together with a strictly functional script.

But now the shows of the new audience's youth were the musical plays of the 40s and 50s. And they were written with artistry and humanity and real drama and were a lot harder to make fun of, Broadway Nation, for listening to my man in chair ramblings. Back to draw the curtain. Now here's the information about how you too can become a patron of Broadway Nation. A donation of just seven dollars a month will not only keep Broadway Nation rolling along, it will also provide you with exclusive access to the complete unedited versions of many of the interviews that you hear on this podcast. And all patrons will receive special shout outs and acknowledgments of your vital support for Broadway Nation.

To join, simply go to Broadway Nation Podcast. That's Broadway Nation Podcast. Or click the link in the show notes to this episode. Broadway Nation is written and produced by me, David Armstrong. Special thanks to Pal'Mox for his help with editing this episode and to the entire team at the Broadway Podcast Network.