Honorable mentions: “The Ballad of Czolgosz,” “Unworthy of Your Love” My history teachers from my junior and senior year of high school liked to take the last ten minutes or so of Friday’s class and give a “GIQ,” or “General Information Quiz.” The ten questions were mostly current events, although some involved vague pop culture,… Read More Songs from Musicals: #34, “Another National Anthem,” from Assassins
Honorable mentions: “New Ways to Dream,” “This Time Next Year” Like Jeremy Jordan, Sunset Blvd (as I’m going to call it to avoid confusion) has gotten thorough treatment on this blog in the recent past. And while Sunset Blvd and Sunset Boulevard aren’t the same thing at all, they are devilish close. One occasionally wonders how Don Black and Christopher… Read More Songs from Musicals: #35 “The Greatest Star of All,” from Sunset Boulevard
Honorable mentions: “Mama, I’m a Big Girl Now,” “Good Morning, Baltimore” If I went to middle school with you, and you happen to be reading this, it is probably your fault that it took me until high school to form a genuine interest in musicals. There were, in those days, two musicals that everyone between… Read More Songs from Musicals: #36, “Run and Tell That,” from Hairspray
Honorable mentions: “Roxie,” “Mr. Cellophane” Did somebody say “period comedy involving murder?” Chicago and Sweeney Todd are not exactly the same musical, but golly, they are close. The difference is Foucault: while the harsh sexual standards elide any real sex from Sweeney Todd, there’s also significantly more sexual freedom for characters like Todd and Mrs. Lovett to… Read More Songs from Musicals: #37, “We Both Reached for the Gun,” from Chicago
Honorable mentions: “Pirelli’s Miracle Elixir,” “A Little Priest” This is an admittedly weird song to pick, one of the first to get cut from the average production. Sweeney Todd is more than strange, though: it’s a class-conscious comedy about a serial killer and his lover, who takes the bodies and puts them into her all-the-rage meat… Read More Songs from Musicals: #38, “Parlor Songs,” from Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Honorable mentions: meh The premise of Love Never Dies is, at best, distasteful: a decade after the events of The Phantom of the Opera, we find out that the Phantom has escaped to Coney Island, where Raoul and Christine show up, and we are treated to a sermon about which man Christine should have chosen. I don’t believe… Read More Songs from Musicals: #39, “Til I Hear You Sing,” from Love Never Dies
Honorable mentions: “Seize the Day,” “The World Will Know” Newsies is an utterly conventional musical. It’s so conventional that it changed the sex of one of the roles; the newspaper reporter, played by Bill Pullman in the film, is played by Kara Lindsay in the stage show so the show can have a song about unlikely… Read More Songs from Musicals: #40, “Santa Fe,” from Newsies
Honorable mentions: “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat,” “Fugue for Tinhorns” We’re on our tenth entry of fifty right now, and it’s time to talk about Glee, because I don’t actually know about real musicals. Darren Criss tried out before the show started filming at all, ultimately got on as Blaine, and singlehandedly did CPR for… Read More Songs from Musicals: #41, “Luck Be a Lady,” from Guys and Dolls
Honorable mentions: “Sunday in the Park with George,” “Color and Light” Sunday in the Park with George is not a terribly easy musical to sing along to in the car, so it’s probably cheating to pick the signature song from the show, the one that shows up in high school talent nights. I get that, but… Read More Songs from Musicals: #42, “Move On,” from Sunday in the Park with George
Honorable mentions: “Quintet,” “America” What a mistake it was to turn this into a duet. Like most people who know a musical that’s nearly sixty years old, my first contact with West Side Story was the 1961 movie, the first of four musicals to take Best Picture in that decade. One gets used to the back and forth in… Read More Songs from Musicals: #43, “Somewhere,” from West Side Story
Seeing Things Secondhand 