In honor of the 18th anniversary of Parade‘s opening night on Broadway (at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater), here is a rarity: a private demo of the opening number, “The Old Red Hills of Home,” recorded in New York City a month after our first reading of the show (at the Plays & Players TheatreRead More »

I read an article last year about a middle-aged guy who was learning, for the first time, to drive. His realization was this: Driving is not particularly difficult, it’s just incredibly dangerous. This is more or less what I think about music in the theater. It is actually music’s simplicity that makes it so potent.Read More »

Let us now praise Michael John LaChiusa. One of my first jobs in New York was conducting The Petrified Prince at the Public, and so I walked into the Anspacher yesterday to see First Daughter Suite carrying twenty-one years of history with MJLC’s writing. I’ve always said he was the most dexterous of any ofRead More »

October 12, 1995, was the first performance of Songs for a New World at the WPA Theatre on W. 23rd St. in Manhattan. Almost no one saw it, the reviews were polite but dismissive, and the theater doesn’t even exist anymore. Yet Songs for a New World lives on, in its wonderful cast album (producedRead More »

Ooh, I haven’t done one of these in a while! Jason Marks writes: Getting ready to musically direct 13 this fall, and just had callbacks last night. We had lots of terrific kids who are great actors and most who are fairly strong singers. However, the role of Evan Goldman is proving to be aRead More »