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Geoffrey Block, Distinguished Professor of Music History at the University of Puget Sound, is the author of Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical From Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber.  The book offers theater lovers an illuminating behind-the-scenes tour of some of America’s best loved, most admired, and most enduring musicals, as well as a riveting history.  In the original post Block challenges readers to test their Tony knowledge.  We will post the answers next Wednesday so be sure to check back.

1. Who is Tony?

2. What was the first musical to win the Tony for Best Score?

3. What was the first musical to win the Tony for Best Musical?

4. What was the second musical to win the Tony for Best Musical?

Hint: This show made its debut only a little more than three months after the first winner.

5. In what year were the Tony Awards first nationally televised?

6. Who has the most Tony Award wins in the Best Score category?

7. What other lyricists and composers (or lyricist-composers) have won two or more Tony’s in the Best Score category?

8. Who has received more Tony’s than anyone else since the awards were established?

9. One winning musical in the Best Score category was the only musical nominated that year.

10. What year produced arguably the most impressive line-up of Tony nominated musicals?

11. So far there has been only one tie in the Best Musical category? Name the two shows.

12. Fourteen times in the last fifty years the Best Musical and Best Score winners were not the same. No less than half of these disparities have occurred in the past twelve years. What are the names of these last seven shows that won the Tony for Best Musical but not Best Score? What shows did win for Best Score in those years?

13. Name the two Best Musicals that went on to win Best Picture Oscars.

14. Name the three Best Musicals losers that went on to win Best Picture Oscars.

15. Starting in 1994, the Tony Awards decided to make the Best Musical Revival its own category instead of forcing musicals to share the award with revivals of plays. In the years since, the Best Musical Revival category has often proven to be fiercely competitive. Name the three winning revivals that first appeared before the launching of the Tony Awards and the four winning revivals that did not win a Tony Award for Best Musical the season of their Broadway debut.

16. The Four Questions: What show won the Tony for Best Musical in 1984? What Pulitzer Prize winning show lost that year? Who wrote the winning score? What controversial remarks did the winner utter on national television?

17. One composer had been dead for nearly 70 years when he won for Best Score. Who was this composer and what musical did he write?

There's a lot to the world of being this children's author - it's not all kids books! I have also written the libretto to a children's Christmas musical - called, as you might have guessed, Pa's Christmas Star.

This all came about early in 2008 when I received an email that contained the following words and a whole lot more:

I am trying to find a collaborator to work on the book, and you came to mind right away. I'd love to work with you on this project if you're interested.

Of course I was interested and so began the exchanging of numberous emails and then a frantic few months of transforming my unpublished picture book manuscript into a 45 minute musical - and that included creating the words to ten songs, a whole lot of spoken parts and the stage directions.

And this past week here in Sydney we had the joy of getting together with Beth. We of course did the tourist thing (this is us standing at the Three Sisters in the Blue Mountains), chatted just a smidge about the musical and we ate heaps!

Beth is on teh music faculty at Northwest Vista College in Texas, (the daughter of Professor Jill May from Purdue University which is where I used to work) and of course a composer. And Beth's website is here.

I'll have more news about the musical very soon and hopefully this coming Christmas there will be on stage somehwere in the world Pa's Christmas Star.

and this is more of Beth doing the tourist thing ...

My book has something on the order of a polyp, i.e. fixed and better than ever after some minor surgery.

Here's what Amy, my book doctor, had to say: " I really enjoyed the voice and humor...moves very quickly and makes for a good, fun read. You've got your plot down pat, but your character's connection to that plot remains weak...we need to understand what's at stake for her... But (!!!!) I think these issues can be easily fixed."

Some of her concerns were with the protagonist's motivation, which was covered in my discarded first two chapters. So I've sent those to Amy to see if she can help me figure out a way to incorporate some of that material into the revision. (Jason may live again). We're meeting on Saturday, the 16th to discuss her critique.

Not one to put all my eggs in one basket, I'm sending out my musical to a producer and (what chutzpah) Twyla Tharp. Why not?

Richard Barrios has lectured extensively on film, served as a commentator on numerous DVDs, and co-hosted a series on Turner Classic Movies. He currently lives outside Philadelphia. His book, A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film, 2nd edition, illuminates the origins of the movie musical from the smash hits of The Singing Fool and Sunny Side Up to bizarre flops like Golden Dawn and Cecil B. DeMille’s Madam Satan. In the original post below, Barrios looks at the 10 best musical films ever made.  Be sure to check out his 10 worst list here.

Any art, naturally, is inherently subjective. Film, with its particular blend of the personal and the egalitarian, is more subjective, even, than most art. And film musicals— intensely collaborative, yet frequently driven by one dominating force—are among the most very subjective of all films. They also have the potential for being exhaustively uneven and profoundly inconsistent, with higher highs and lower lows. As Pauline Kael once noted, many of them have superb moments, but rarely can they sustain the greatness through their entire length. On rare occasions, through skill and synergy and historical currents and sheer luck, they do. Simple song-and-dance achieves transcendence, words and music matter unutterably, and we are privileged to witness possibly the purest form of American popular art.

Having tested the waters with a lovingly mean-spirited Ten Worst Musicals list, I now venture farther afield with my Top Ten choices. Doing so makes for an oddly fraught process, as it is somehow more difficult to honor the distinguished than to excoriate the guilty. Few observers, in fact, could agree on which films scale this particular Parnassus. There will be a select handful that might be on everyone’s “Top Ten” list—Singin’ in the Rain above all, Love Me Tonight for those in the know–but it remains a slippery slope on which to climb, or for that matter tap dance. The result, then, is a list at once conventional and daring, idiosyncratic and iconoclastic, whimsical and dead serious. It takes into consideration history and influence, innovation and accessibility, innocence and sophistication, and lots of charisma. The choices range from the primitive origins of musical film to its slickest 21st century incarnations. (And, coincidentally, it is the youngest and oldest films on the list which are, along with Gigi, Best-Picture Oscar winners.) Each entry in this pantheon has a variety of reasons for being here. Suffice it to say that these reasons are as valid as they are debatable, and every movie here, and the runners-up too, are, in their own ways, magically irreplaceable. Now, on with the celebration, and more arguments!

The Broadway Melody (1929)
Where it all began—the first true movie musical, a show-biz Rosetta Stone. And, let it be noted immediately, what was a staggering hit eighty years ago is today an ineffably creaky and primitive experience for all but the most dedicated viewer. But that’s part of its m

Geoffrey Block, Distinguished Professor of Music History at the University of Puget Sound, is the author of Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical From Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber.  The book offers theater lovers an illuminating behind-the-scenes tour of some of America’s best loved, most admired, and most enduring musicals, as well as a riveting history.  In the original post below we learn five new things about West Side Story.

1. Did you know that choreographer Jerome Robbins insisted on making the Jets snap their thumbs against their index fingers instead of their middle fingers? Try it, it’s much harder. That’s the point. Robbins wanted to make the Jets stand out from other finger snapper.

2. Did you know that in Arthur Laurents first two libretto drafts Maria kills herself with dressmaking shears. Starting with the third draft, five more drafts, and the final draft, a mortally wounded Tony finds Maria alive, and the lovers are able to share a few final moments together.

3. Did you know that some of the great tunes in West Side Story contain recognizable connections with famous classical melodies? My favorites are the allusions to Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet and the theme Wagner created to depict the Redemption through Love in his Ring cycle, since in these cases Bernstein’s references are so interesting dramatically as well as musically.

4. Did you know that Sondheim was originally listed as a co-lyricist with Leonard Bernstein? When the early reviews ignored Sondheim’s contribution, Bernstein offered the Broadway newcomer sole lyricist billing and the royalty split that went with it. In an unthinking moment he would always regret Sondheim replied, “Don’t be silly. I don’t care about the money,” and turned down the opportunity to split the 4% lyric royalties. Instead of receiving 2% of the lyric royalties, Sondheim thus retained his original 1%.

5. Did you know that the film soundtrack of West Side Story was the Number 1 best selling album of 1962 from May 5 to June 16 and again for the week of October 6-13?