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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?

PBS Kids launches 'Lifeboat to Mars' (an online simulation game to teach kids about biology. Also Sesame Workshop unveils the Elmo Monster Maker iPhone app) (USA Today) (Mashable) - Barnes & Noble enlists Common Sense Media (to power a new "For... Read the rest of this post

We here at IFK are posting the images we created for our summer mailer and discussing them a bit. I work digitally so everything below was created in Painter X using a Wacom tablet. I use the tools and brushes in the program in a 'traditional' sense. Another way to look at it is, if I was creating this image without a computer, it would still look the same.

Our theme was "Make A Splash with Illustration for Kids!", and we all agreed that a beach or water scene would compliment the slogan. I took note of the the image that I was next to (in this case, Jenn, who did a 'water' piece, mostly in blue) so I decided to do a beach scene--having the primary color a yellow hue--so our pieces would compliment each other. I enjoy doing scenes where there are groups of people or animals with lots of things going on so that's the direction I took this. Below is the finished art:



Below: My rough for the idea and the initial inking. I wasn't sure if this was going to be in pen & ink, thinking I might go more painterly with it. But I thought this piece more naturally asked to be drawn in a cartoon-ish style in line & wash. I had completed the piece with the first boy looking down at where my name would be, but I changed it out to a boy splashing water with his foot to, again, tie in with theme ("Make a splash...". Get it? Heh.).



I must have had too much time on my hands or something because, at some point I decided to try another idea and make an image where the characters weren't so small and intricate. The mermaids came to mind so I worked this up. In the end, I chose the beach scene. Now...What to do with the mermaids...