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Shalom, Broadway lovers!

On today’s marquee: A) an essay using methods of Jewish textual analysis to explain some puzzling lyrics from Hair; B) a review of Hairspray at the St. Louis Muny; C) a Broadway Maven YouTube GEM about the fiction writer behind the Fiddler tales; D) a “Sondheimcrostics” word game; and E) a Last Blast about South Pacific.

ESSAY: Wearing smells from laboratories? Moving paper fantasies? Supreme visions of lonely tunes?

The last song in Hair can sound, on first encounter, like a gorgeous psychedelic collage of images drawn from the show’s themes rather than a coherent argument. But what if the collage is the argument?

Let’s get some help from a surprising source: Rashi.

Rashi was a medieval Jewish commentator who would analyze brief phrases in texts from the Tanakh and the Talmud with explanations, references, and midrashim (interpretations) that illuminate the language therein. If we approach “Flesh Failures” like Rashi approached the Hebrew Scriptures, suddenly the song becomes profound.

Don’t believe me? Check out just the first stanza:

• “We starve—look at one another short of breath.” The opening cry is not literal famine but the spiritual and emotional starvation of a generation watching its children shipped off to die. The tribe stares at one another, lungs tight with dread—short of breath from the anxiety of the draft, from tear gas at protests, from the suffocating knowledge that the “Age of Aquarius” they sang about earlier is already choking on napalm and body counts. In the broader show this is the mirror image of “I Got Life”: the body that once celebrated itself now gasps for air. The first line evokes the title of the song (”Flesh Failures”), which never appears in the lyric: the flesh is failing because it has been pressed into service for a war the singers—and the show—don’t believe in.

•”Walking proudly in our winter coats.” Pride here is laced with irony and mourning. The “winter coats” are both literal — the cold, buttoned-up establishment uniform the hippies reject — and symbolic: winter is the season of barrenness, numbness, and death. The tribe walks proudly anyway, hirsute heads high, because the counterculture’s only remaining dignity is defiant style in the face of extinction. Yet the coats also suggest emotional armor: we bundle ourselves against feeling the full horror of Claude’s draft and death. This is the show’s recurring tension—vibrant youth parading toward the grave, still insisting on being seen.

• “Wearing smells from laboratories, facing a dying nation.” The “smells from laboratories” are the synthetic perfumes, plastics, and chemical deodorants of consumer America—the artificial scent of progress. It is also Agent Orange, LSD manufactured in underground labs, and the sterile reek of hospitals treating the wounded. The tribe is literally “wearing” the products of a technological society that has turned laboratories into death factories. “Facing a dying nation” is the devastating pivot: we are not the outsiders; we are inside the corpse, staring at the body politic as it convulses. The entire musical has been building to this moment—every anti-war chant, every nude tableau, every plea for love now confronts the nightmare that the nation itself is expiring.

• “Moving paper fantasies.” The phrase is a single, brutal image for bureaucracy, propaganda, and the American Dream sold on newsprint. Draft notices, deferment forms, Pentagon press releases, and the glossy advertisements that promise happiness through consumption—all are “moving paper fantasies.” They flutter past like ticker tape while real bodies pile up in Southeast Asia. In the show’s cosmology this is the opposite of the organic, living “tribe.” Paper is dead matter pretending to be alive; it is the flesh of the machine, and it is failing spectacularly.

• “Listening for.” Not “hearing.” The Tribe is actively coping with the sounds of the world around them, trying to discern what’s true and not just passively accepting life’s noise.

• “New-told lies.” Not ancient myths or even yesterday’s deceptions, but the fresh, hourly falsehoods pouring from television sets and newspapers: “light at the end of the tunnel,” “domino theory,” “hearts and minds.” The repetition of “new-told” underscores the endless cycle—every lie is fresh, every generation must re-learn the same betrayal. This is why Hair refuses to end on a tidy moral: the lies keep coming, and the only honest response left is the song’s exhausted yet ecstatic poetry.

• “Supreme visions.” The climax of the lament before the great turn. “Supreme visions” are the drug-heightened, almost mystical glimpses the tribe has chased throughout the show—hallucinations of cosmic unity, of a better world.

• “Lonely tunes.” Beautiful, private melodies that never quite become communal anthems. The revolution stays solitary even when two dozen voices are singing it. This is the deepest wound of the flesh failures: we have seen the light, heard the music, but it has not saved us. The song then answers its own despair with the sudden, blazing command: “Let the sunshine in.” The visions were real; the failure was only in the flesh. The light was always waiting behind the paper, the laboratories, and the winter coats.

When you sit in the dark and hear those strange, fragmented lines at the end of Hair, it’s easy to dismiss them as a contact high wearing off. But spend time with them as Rashi would—slowly, reverently, line by agonizing line—and something shifts. You realize the tribe isn’t babbling; it’s bearing witness. It has seen the laboratories and the winter coats and the fresh lies and the lonely visions, and it still chooses to sing. That is the final gift of this musical. It hands every audience the same question it handed the original tribe in 1968: the flesh will fail, the nation may be dying, the paper fantasies will keep moving—but will you let the sunshine in anyway?

QUESTION FOR DISCUSSION: In the phrase “facing a dying nation,” is the dying nation the United States or Vietnam? Justify your answer.

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REVIEW: The kickoff show of the summer season at The Muny (what I’ve called America’s greatest theater) is Hairspray, and if the first two performances are any indication, St. Louis is in for some joyful, plus-sized outdoor theater this summer. At the center of this production’s strength are the three performers playing the Turnblads: a droll (if a bit weary) Richard Kind as Edna, the sublime John Bolton as a giggly, over-the-moon Wilbur, and a magnetic Katy Geraghty as Tracy. The nimble Geraghty (and I was in the third row—that wasn’t a fat suit) manages to nail a bubblegum teenager whose dreams turn into a passion for activism, while dancing the fine line between wholesome and sexy.

The choreography frequently deserved praise and occasionally earned applause, such as during “I Can Hear the Bells” when Tracy and Link are surrounded by a rotating wedding cake; or when male dancers scurried crab-like across the stage in “(The Legend of) Miss Baltimore Crabs.”

The production was marred by only one thing, and it wasn’t small. The actress playing Velma Von Tussle chose “shrill and cartoonish” as her interpretation of the show’s racist and scheming TV producer. It may be pastel-colored and set to a pop beat, but there’s nothing cartoonish about Hairspray. Velma is funny because she’s recognizably real. Here, the shrieks and cackles distracted from what was otherwise a joyous evening.

Incidentally, at opening night, the audience erupted in applause when they saw both of the show’s creators were in attendance: Scott Wittman and former Broadway Maven guest Marc Shaiman.

Hairspray runs through Sunday (visit Muny.org for tickets).

BROADWAY MAVEN YouTube GEM: Did you know Tevye originally had seven daughters? Do you know how he became a dairyman—or what ultimately happened to Chava? The book of Fiddler on the Roof draws upon the delightful short stories of Sholem Aleichem, Tevye’s chronicler. Here, Broadway Maven faculty member Steven Bell reviews the major stories of Tevye’s daughters that form the backbone of the world’s Jewiest musical.

Learn more about Sholem Aleichem’s work at a FREE class Sunday, July 5 at Noon and 7 pm ET (two different classes):

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SONDHEIMCROSTICS: Here are descriptions of five Sondheim shows using acrostics based on eight words, one for each letter of SONDHEIM. Once you see how it works, come up with your own versions and put them in the comments. Can you do Company?

Sweeney Todd: Sinister outcast nurses dark hunger, exacting ingenious murder
West Side Story: Society’s outcasts near delinquency; hate escalates into murder
Into the Woods: Stories overlap; nascent desires hurl everyone into maturity.
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Scheming opportunist navigates deception; humor erupts in mayhem
Gypsy: Spotlight on next daughter, her ego inflates monstrously

The Broadway Maven is pleased to announce a 16-part Sondheim series, every Tuesday in July and August at both Noon and 7 pm ET. Broadway Maven faculty members David Benkof (lyrics and book) and Asher Shectman (music) will trace The Master’s career from Gypsy (1959) to Into the Woods (1987). We’ll be looking at themes in both the plot and the music, and peeling beneath Sondheim’s many layers to understand his sublime genius as expressed in his best works.

Sondheim sign-up

Join The Broadway Maven! Nowhere else online brims with this much Broadway content, and certainly not for so little (Membership is $25 a month for 5-15 compelling classes). Purchase a monthly or an annual plan. Cancel at any time. Sign up here:

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In this week's Blast: links to the upcoming Annie Get Your Gun and A Strange Loop classes; the recording of Tuesday's The Rocky Horror Show class; a Broadway Blast on Company; a YouTube quiz on Broadway plots; and the Archive clips reel of the week on The Little Mermaid.

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Note: A full calendar of upcoming classes is always available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.

• Monday, June 22 Annie Get Your Gun with Asher Shectman and David Benkof, Noon and 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, June 23 A Strange Loop with Mateo Chavez Lewis, Noon ET ($25 for a four-part Pride Series; Register HERE)

• Monday, June 29 Flower Drum Song with Ted Chapin, 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, June 30 Come From Away with Mateo Chavez Lewis, Noon and 7 pm ET (FREE, Register HERE)

• Sunday, July 5 Fiddler on the Roof, Noon and 7 pm ET (different classes, FREE, Register HERE)

• Monday, July 6 Dear Evan Hansen with Mateo Chavez Lewis, Noon ET (link for MARQUEE subscribers in an upcoming Friday Blast)

• Tuesday, July 7 Gypsy with David Benkof and Asher Shectman, Noon and 7 pm ET, different classes ($50 for a 16-part course, register HERE)

• Sunday, July 12 Schmigadoon! with Marc Bonanni, Noon ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, July 14 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum with David Benkof and Asher Shectman, Noon ET ($50 for a 16-part course, register HERE)

• Tuesday, July 14 Evening Primrose with David Benkof and Asher Shectman, 7 pm ET, ($50 for a 16-part course, register HERE)

LAST BLAST: In South Pacific, nurse Nellie Forbush proudly describes herself as a “cockeyed optimist.” It’s one of the most charming self-descriptions in musical theater—and one of the least flattering. Nellie hears “optimist” and treats the phrase as a compliment. She never seems to notice that “cockeyed” means distorted, crooked, or askew. That’s what makes the song so revealing. Nellie has built an identity around seeing the bright side of everything, but the musical gradually exposes the dangers of not seeing things clearly. By the time “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” arrives, the problem isn’t simply prejudice. It’s vision. Nellie isn’t cured of pessimism. She’s cured of being cockeyed.

The Broadway Maven is a vibrant educational community that helps its members think more deeply about musical theater. We offer 5-15 classes a month for just $25. We also foster enthusiasm for Broadway through the FREE weekly Substack newsletter MARQUEE and host an expansive YouTube channel. It’s your home for Broadway appreciation. Contact The Broadway Maven at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.

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BONUS ESSAY: It’s not a popular claim. But is it right?

When composer and music director Kevin Lynch sued over a Broadway opportunity in Wicked that explicitly excluded white males like him, many critics treated the case as obviously meritless. Perhaps it is. But before reaching that conclusion, it is worth examining a straightforward factual question: What do the numbers actually say about who succeeds on Broadway today? And what if the news—for advocates of minority representation—is actually quite good?

If Broadway is stacked against Black artists, last week’s Tony Awards were a curious way of showing it. Awards are not the whole of access, but they are Broadway’s clearest public measure of prestige. In the major musical categories awarded to named individuals—acting, direction, choreography, book, score and orchestrations—Black artists won four of 12 recipient slots, or 33 percent. Among the winners were a star of Ragtime and three key creative forces behind CATS: The Jellicle Ball.

That strong representation was not an aberration. Looking at the first five full post-COVID Tony ceremonies, from 2022 through 2026, Black artists won 14 of 56 recipient slots in those same categories, or 25 percent—nearly double their share of the U.S. population. Sustained over five years, that begins to look less like an exception than a pattern.

By Broadway’s most prestigious measure of artistic achievement, then, the evidence does not suggest an industry in which Black artists are shut out of the top tier. It suggests an industry in which they are already firmly established at the highest levels.

Because the available Tony data are easiest to analyze for Black artists, that is the focus of the preceding section. The box-office evidence paints a similar picture for racial minorities more broadly. Tony voters can be dismissed as an unusually progressive group. Paying audiences are harder to explain away. And on Broadway today, minority-led and majority-minority productions are not living on the margins.

The evidence is not limited to a few famous hits. By a conservative count, at least eight of the 17 musicals currently running on Broadway feature majority-minority casts: Hamilton, The Lion King, MJ, Hell’s Kitchen, Buena Vista Social Club, CATS: The Jellicle Ball, Maybe Happy Ending, and Aladdin. That does not include shows such as Ragtime, SIX and The Book of Mormon, which feature substantial numbers of minority performers despite not being counted here as majority-minority productions.

Nor are these majority-minority shows marginal commercial curiosities. Hamilton, The Lion King and MJ rank among Broadway’s biggest commercial successes. Hell’s Kitchen, Buena Vista Social Club, Maybe Happy Ending, and Aladdin are major Broadway attractions.

Whatever else may be true about Broadway in 2026, these are not the hallmarks of an industry in which racial minorities occupy only a peripheral place. They are, rather, the hallmarks of an industry in which minority artists have become central to both Broadway’s cultural mainstream and its commercial marketplace.

The Tony Awards measure prestige. The box office measures popularity. But the most important question may be whether Broadway is becoming more or less representative over time. The Broadway that produced In the Heights, Hamilton, A Strange Loop, Hell’s Kitchen, Buena Vista Social Club, and Maybe Happy Ending is not the Broadway of previous generations.

Productions built around nonwhite performers and stories are no longer novelties. They are part of the mainstream. In many cases, they are defining it.

None of this settles Kevin Lynch’s lawsuit. But it does provide important context for evaluating it. The Tony data suggest that artists of color are succeeding at the highest levels of artistic recognition. The box-office data suggest that they are succeeding at the highest levels of commercial success. The broader historical trend suggests that those successes are not isolated events but part of a decades-long movement toward greater representation.

What do you think? Put your answers in the comment section below.

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Join The Broadway Maven! Nowhere else online brims with this much Broadway content, and certainly not for so little (Membership is $25 a month for 5-15 compelling classes). Purchase a monthly or an annual plan. Cancel at any time. Sign up here:

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Broadway Maven Members get the Friday Blast once a week filled with Members-only goodies. It’s the easiest way to get links for upcoming classes. This week’s Friday Blast contains: the link to Tuesday’s The Rocky Horror Show class; a recording of David Armstrong’s class on La Cage aux Folles; a Broadway Blast on Waitress; a YouTube video quiz on early Broadway lyrics; and the Broadway Maven Archive clips reel of the week: The Best of David Zippel.

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Shalom, Broadway lovers!

On today’s marquee: A) an essay about the mistakes (?) of Stephen Sondheim; B) an “aptagrams” game about last Sunday’s Tony Awards; C) a StageStreams about theater etiquette; D) a recommendation for a fellow Substacker’s work; and E) a Last Blast about Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

ESSAY: Did Sondheim make mistakes? Occasionally, it may seem. But method hides behind nearly all of his seeming lapses, which more often illustrate character than reveal sloppiness. Here are four notable cases, three of which represent deliberate brilliance and one of which I have to admit I struggle to defend.

First: Merrily We Roll Along.

In Merrily, Frank dismisses Mary:

“Mary is a nudge. Mary is a purist, Charley’s a judge.”

The rhyme reveals a lapse of pronunciation. The Yiddish word “nudzh” (more commonly rendered “noodge”) carries a slightly different vowel color and cultural texture than the flattened American “nudge.” The rhyme feels like a sanding-down of something specific and ethnic into something blander and easier.

But that flattening is dramatically apt.

Frank is not Jewish. He works in a Jewish industry and borrows freely from it—but he is always a half-step outside. His entire arc is about absorption and repackaging: of Charley’s seriousness, of Mary’s devotion, of other people’s idioms. He could have said “pest.” He could have said “nag.” Both scan cleanly and carry no cultural freight. Instead, he reaches, trying to make Mary manageable by labeling her in language he thinks he can control.

If the rhyme felt perfectly authentic to Yiddish-friendly ears, it would imply a cultural rootedness Frank doesn’t possess. The slight abrasion is, well, character.

Then there’s Gypsy. In “Dainty June and Her Farmboys,” the dancers sing “Extra! Extra!” as if they were still “newsboys,” touting “the biggest scoop of the decade!”

The stress lands de-CADE—an emphatic shove onto the second syllable that jars the ear. In ordinary speech “DEC-ade” is the norm, so it seems a classic scansion error: accenting the wrong syllable to make the musical phrase fit.

Except the lyric is not really Sondheim’s. It is diegetic hype—press-agent copy within the world of the show. The voice behind it is Madame Rose, the least subtle publicist in American musical theatere.

If it scanned elegantly, it would betray the character. Rose is a hustler who barrels over taste and proportion. The “error” doesn’t feel like an oversight; it feels like a woman who would absolutely pronounce something the “wrong” way if it sold one more ticket.

In Sweeney Todd, Anthony, gazing at Johanna, sings the romantic “I feel you, Johanna,” but quickly pivots to the creepier “I’ll steal you…”

It’s an awkward choice at best. Love songs promise devotion, rescue, union. “Steal” implies possession. Paired with the easy rhyme of “feel/steal,” it can read as a convenient, slightly lazy coupling.

But Anthony is not a psychologically nuanced adult. He is a young romantic whose model of love is melodrama. He has known Johanna for minutes and already imagines spiriting her away as if she were a jewel in a case.

The diction tells on him. “Steal you” reveals that his fantasy of rescue is also a fantasy of acquisition. The simplicity of the rhyme—so direct it’s almost juvenile—mirrors his emotional simplicity. If he sang something ethically pristine and poetically refined, he would become a conventional tenor hero. Instead, the language exposes his immaturity.

We are meant to hear that Anthony’s idea of love is shaped by storybook tropes, not by an understanding of Johanna as a person.

Finally: a line that is likely an actual error.

In “A Little Priest,” also from Sweeney, Mrs. Lovett riffs on a cannibalistic pun about politicians: “Well, you never know if it’s going to run.”

The joke depends on “run” meaning “run for office.” But in British political idiom, the standard verb is to “stand” for election. “Run” is intelligible, but it carries a distinctly American flavor.

In a score otherwise meticulous about its London setting, that Americanism sticks out. There’s no strong character-based reason for Mrs. Lovett to reach for transatlantic political slang here. The line exists to further the pun machine. “Run” is the funnier word.

Unlike the previous examples, the awkwardness doesn’t reveal psychology, status anxiety, or thematic intent. It doesn’t expose a character’s blind spot or social positioning. It simply makes us smile.

That doesn’t diminish the song’s brilliance. It suggests that even Sondheim, in service of velocity and clarity, occasionally defaulted to the most legible phrasing.

In Sondheim, you cannot separate the lyric from the mouth that sings it. His words are not dispatches from an omniscient poet; they are choices made by particular people under particular pressures—a social climber smoothing a borrowed word, a stage mother bulldozing past good diction, a lovesick boy grabbing the rhyme that sounds romantic without hearing what it confesses. When a line sounds wrong, the question is never “Did Sondheim fail?” It’s “Who is speaking, and what does this choice reveal?” Usually, the answer is the whole point. And when it isn’t—when a cheerfully American verb lands in a London pie shop because the joke demanded it—we’re left with something almost as interesting: proof that Sondheim, faced with a choice between precision and delight, occasionally let delight win. His characters misspeak. Once in a great while, like it or not, so did he.

APTAGRAMS, 2026 TONY EDITION: Unscramble these names of newly crowned Tony winners. Answers at the end of the issue, under the Last Blast.

MIGRATE (Tony-winning musical about immigrants, Black Americans, and upper-class whites)

MACHO DOINGS (Tony-winning musical in which a male character resists show tunes)

HASH JOURNEY (Tony-winning actor whose character’s arc moves from hope to horror)

SEE? SAY? CIVIL! (Tony-winning actress playing a refined mother)

JET-SCALE CHILL BALLET (Tony-winning musical that’s a cool, dance-heavy show)

StageStreams: Ms. Mojo scores again, this time with some thoughtful commentary and analysis about the continuing decline in audience behavior in Broadway houses. Is Broadway etiquette a lost art? Why are people becoming more and more disrespectful? What are some of the worst examples of egregious behavior? And how should Broadway respond? This video has appropriately provocative answers, including commentary from diva Patti LuPone and YouTuber Mickey-Jo Boucher.

RECOMMENDATION: Ruth Leon’s Theatrewise is a thoughtful, ambitious Substack that covers not just Broadway and the West End (she’s based across the pond) but “the arts online.” It’s a great way to put musicals in the context of other genres like opera and popular music, as well as some provocative takes on the people who make stages shine. Definitely worth subscribing.

Join The Broadway Maven! Nowhere else online brims with this much Broadway content, and certainly not for so little (Membership is $25 a month for 5-15 compelling classes). Purchase a monthly or an annual plan. Cancel at any time. Sign up here:

Broadway Maven Membership

Broadway Maven Members get the Friday Blast once a week filled with Members-only goodies. It’s the easiest way to get links for upcoming classes. This week’s Friday Blast contains: the link to Tuesday’s The Rocky Horror Show class; a recording of David Armstrong’s class on La Cage aux Folles; a Broadway Blast on Waitress; a YouTube video quiz on early Broadway lyrics; and the Broadway Maven Archive clips reel of the week: The Best of David Zippel.

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Note: A full calendar of upcoming classes is always available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.

• Tuesday, June 16 The Rocky Horror Show, Noon ET ($25 for a four-part Pride Series; Register HERE)

• Monday, June 22 Annie Get Your Gun with Asher Shectman and David Benkof, Noon and 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, June 23 A Strange Loop with Mateo Chavez Lewis, Noon ET ($25 for a four-part Pride Series; Register HERE)

• Monday, June 29 Flower Drum Song with Ted Chapin, 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, June 30 Come From Away with Mateo Chavez Lewis, Noon and 7 pm ET (FREE, Register HERE)

• Sunday, July 5 Fiddler on the Roof, Noon and 7 pm ET (different classes, link for MARQUEE subscribers in an upcoming Friday Blast)

• Monday, July 6 Dear Evan Hansen with Mateo Chavez Lewis, Noon ET (link for MARQUEE subscribers in an upcoming Friday Blast)

AND save the date: Sondheim: Putting it Together every Tuesday in July and August.

LAST BLAST: The title character in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is presented in the show’s anthem “Any Dream Will Do” as being a dreamer, which is also indicated by the term for his garment mentioned in the show’s title. But the show’s plot suggests his talent is not for dreaming but for interpreting dreams, as he does with his own, the butler, the baker, and Pharaoh. The distinction matters because it’s key to the show’s politics—it indicates that interpretation, not imagination, is power. Joseph doesn’t invent visions of the future; he explains them in ways that make him indispensable. Dreams float freely in this world, but meaning is scarce—and Joseph controls it. By turning chaos into narrative, he becomes useful to authority rather than threatening to it.

ANSWERS TO THE GAME: Ragtime, Schmigadoon!, Joshua Henry, Caissie Levy, CATS: The Jellicle Ball

The Broadway Maven is a vibrant educational community that helps its members think more deeply about musical theater. We offer 5-15 classes a month for just $25. We also foster enthusiasm for Broadway through the FREE weekly Substack newsletter MARQUEE and host an expansive YouTube channel. It’s your home for Broadway appreciation. Contact The Broadway Maven at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.

Broadway Maven YouTube Channel

Join The Broadway Maven! Nowhere else online brims with this much Broadway content, and certainly not for so little (Membership is $25 a month for 5-15 compelling classes). Purchase a monthly or an annual plan. Cancel at any time. Sign up here:

Broadway Maven Membership

Broadway Maven Members get the Friday Blast once a week filled with Members-only goodies. It’s the easiest way to get links for upcoming classes. This week's Friday Blast contains: links to the Tony Awards Watch Party and David Armstrong's class on La Cage aux Folles; recordings of last week's Hamilton and Falsettos classes; a Broadway Blast on Oklahoma!; a YouTube clip on Mel Brooks; and the Archive clip reel of the week: Assassins.

Shalom, Broadway lovers!

On the marquee of today’s issue of MARQUEE: A) a video interview with R&H expert Ted Chapin about Cinderella; B) a Broadway Blast about Merrily We Roll Along; C) two polls about the upcoming Tony winners; and D) a Last Blast about My Fair Lady.

VIDEO: Impossible! Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella is justifiably beloved. But it’s nonetheless not as well-known as the pair’s blockbusters like Oklahoma!, South Pacific, and The Sound of Music. In this recent Broadway Maven class, Ted tells the story of the live TV version, the role of the St. Louis Muny in the development of the show (and similar shows), the multiracial TV version, and whether “In My Own Little Corner” is a proto-”I Want Song.” Is this the only truly funny Rodgers & Hammerstein musical?

Ted has just shared the good news that he’s returning for another year as a Broadway Maven faculty Member, starting in early August, when he will offer two FREE classes on Oklahoma!. Watch MARQUEE for details on how to join the class.

BROADWAY BLAST: In Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along, the song “Bobby and Jackie and Jack” lands at a very specific historical moment: it’s 1960, Nixon has lost, and the Kennedys are hailed as “the First Family with class.” The friends thus must be singing the parody in November or December, a brief window of interregnum American optimism. But Merrily isn’t really about politics—it’s about friendship, fame, and family. And it’s no accident that the song’s title mirrors the trio at the show’s heart: two men, one woman, bound by ambition and affection, hurtling toward a future they can’t yet see.

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Note: A full calendar of upcoming classes is always available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.

• Sunday, June 7 Tonys Watch Party, 7:45 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, June 9 La Cage Aux Folles with David Armstrong, Noon ET ($25 for a four-part Pride Series; Register HERE)

• Tuesday, June 16 The Rocky Horror Show, Noon ET ($25 for a four-part Pride Series; Register HERE)

• Monday, June 22 Annie Get Your Gun with Asher Shectman and David Benkof, Noon and 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, June 23 A Strange Loop with Mateo Chavez Lewis, Noon ET ($25 for a four-part Pride Series; Register HERE)

• Monday, June 29 Flower Drum Song with Ted Chapin, 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, June 30 Come From Away with Mateo Chavez Lewis, Noon and 7 pm ET (FREE, Registration opens soon)

BROADWAY BLAST: In My Fair Lady, why is Henry Higgins so upset about Eliza dropping her “H”s? On the surface, it’s just bad pronunciation. But the fixation is oddly specific—almost disproportionate. The answer is embedded in the sound itself: the “H” she cannot produce is the sound that starts the linguist’s favorite two words in the English language: Henry and Higgins. The flaw isn’t abstract—it’s personal. She can’t say his name. And for a man as brilliant and deeply arrogant as Higgins, that matters. He does not simply want correctness; he wants recognition on his terms—intellectually, socially, linguistically. The correction, then, isn’t just technical. It’s the moment she becomes able to pronounce him properly, on his terms.

The Broadway Maven is a vibrant educational community that helps its members think more deeply about musical theater. We offer 5-15 classes a month for just $25. We also foster enthusiasm for Broadway through the FREE weekly Substack newsletter MARQUEE and host an expansive YouTube channel. It’s your home for Broadway appreciation. Contact The Broadway Maven at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.

Broadway Maven YouTube Channel

Join music educator Mateo Chavez Lewis Monday, June 1 for two FREE classes on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash-hit, Tony-winning musical Hamilton. These hour-long classes are offered at Noon and 7 pm ET, and your registration means you can come to both!

How musically intricate is the score? How many motifs does Miranda layer together? Was there any music Miranda had to burn? These questions and more are answered in this FREE online class, so why not join us!

Sign me up for Hamilton!

Shalom, Broadway lovers!

On the marquee of today’s BONUS issue of MARQUEE: A) an “Opening Acts” interactive crossword puzzle; B) a Broadway Blast about Andrew Lloyd Webber shows; C) a capsule review of a new Judy Blume: A Life biography with some good Broadway nuggets; and D) a Last Blast about Hair.

PUZZLE: February’s Sondheim anagrams puzzle was the most popular MARQUEE issue of the year, so the MARQUEE crossword is now a quarterly feature. The Spring puzzle, “Opening Acts,” has a clever theme that’s quite different from the last puzzle. Happy solving!

Solve the Puzzle

YOUR SCORE: How did you do at the crossword? What was your time? Brag (or eat crow) below.

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BROADWAY BLAST: “I am the mask you wear...” sings the Phantom in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera. But the title character’s famous mask in the musical actually isn’t show-specific. It’s a pattern—and theme—across much of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s corpus. The composer’s characters don’t uncover who they are; they invent a version of themselves and then commit to it until others accept it as real. Eva constructs a public identity in Evita and lives inside it. The face of Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard communicated artifice throughout her silent-film career, and she has come to treat every moment like a close-up. Dewey in School of Rock puts on someone else’s identity and proves that authority depends more on appearance than truth. Even the makeup and costumes in CATS and Starlight Express form masks of a sort. Again and again, Webber returns to the same idea: if you perform a self convincingly enough, it stops being a mask and becomes who you are.

CAPSULE REVIEW: Are you there, Broadway? It’s me, the Maven. And do I have a book to recommend for you! The best biography I’ve read in a decade, Mark Oppenheimer’s Judy Blume: A Life has a surprising amount of musical theater content for a biography centered on the queen of young adult fiction. Did you know that Blume took tap lessons with Mandy Patinkin and Joel Grey? Or which musicals she saw on Broadway as a child, the musical adaptation on which she explored working with Annie composer Charles Strouse, or the musical she drafted songs and a script for that was based on letters she received from children?

But the biggest gem for musical theater fans is the “most intriguing letter” Blume received in 1999 proposing an adaptation of her 1977 novel Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself from none other than Bobby Lopez and Jeff Marx before their Avenue Q days. Oppenheimer calls Lopez “arguably the most important musical theater composer of his generation” (aside from Lin-Manuel Miranda) and writes that the pair were “scrappy, early career hustlers” when they wrote several songs for Blume’s characters. Oppenheimer got to listen to one of the songs as part of his preparation of the book, and it stands as a missed opportunity for the world of musical theater and that of coming-of-age literature to inform each other.

Oppenheimer writes an excellent Substack I’ve been recommending since its very start. He’s a terrific writer and Judy Blume: A Life would be an ideal first exposure to his compelling prose, especially for Broadway fans.

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Join the combined faculty of The Broadway Maven for FOUR different classes celebrating the LGBTQ+ community during Pride month. You’ll come away with tidbits, tales, and analysis from some of Broadway’s famous countercultural musicals. Each faculty member offers something different and it’s a great chance to try out the number of classes that The Broadway Maven has to offer!

These classes are offered every Tuesday in June at Noon ET on Zoom, running from June 2 to June 23. Each class is one hour long. See the calendar below for dates.

Join The Broadway Maven! Nowhere else online brims with this much Broadway content, and certainly not for so little (Membership is $25 a month for 5-15 compelling classes). Purchase a monthly or an annual plan. Cancel at any time. Sign up here:

Broadway Maven Membership

Broadway Maven Members get the Friday Blast once a week filled with Members-only goodies. It’s the easiest way to get links for upcoming classes. In this week's Friday Blast: links for upcoming classes on Hamilton and Falsettos; a Bonus Blast on South Pacific; a YouTube clip on Jesus Christ Superstar; and the Archive clips reel of the week: Miss Saigon.

Note: A full calendar of upcoming classes is always available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.

• Monday, June 1 Hamilton with Mateo Chavez Lewis, Noon and 7 pm ET (FREE, register HERE)

• Tuesday, June 2 Falsettos with Max Clark and David Benkof, Noon ET ($25 for a four-part Pride Series; Register HERE)

• Sunday, June 7 Tonys Watch Party, 7:45 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, June 9 La Cage Aux Folles with David Armstrong, Noon ET ($25 for a four-part Pride Series; Register HERE)

• Tuesday, June 16 The Rocky Horror Show, Noon ET ($25 for a four-part Pride Series; Register HERE)

• Monday, June 22 Annie Get Your Gun with Asher Shectman and David Benkof, Noon and 7 pm ET (FREE, register HERE)

• Tuesday, June 23 A Strange Loop with Mateo Chavez Lewis, Noon ET ($25 for a four-part Pride Series; Register HERE)

BROADWAY BLAST: In Hair, the choice of the word “tribe” signals a longing for something pre-modern—a return to a simpler, more “authentic” way of living. But that longing is itself constructed. The Tribe performs rituals, chants slogans, and stages its own identity. What’s presented as natural is carefully shaped. The word “tribe” becomes part of that performance, a way of naming themselves into a kind of purity they don’t actually possess. That borrowed language doesn’t just describe the group—it legitimizes it, giving their rebellion the weight of history they don’t actually carry. The Tribe isn’t recovering authenticity; it’s trying to sound like it already has it.

The Broadway Maven is a vibrant educational community that helps its members think more deeply about musical theater. We offer 5-15 classes a month for just $25. We also foster enthusiasm for Broadway through the FREE weekly Substack newsletter MARQUEE and host an expansive YouTube channel. It’s your home for Broadway appreciation. Contact The Broadway Maven at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.

Broadway Maven YouTube Channel

Join music educator Mateo Chavez Lewis Monday, June 1 for two FREE classes on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash-hit, Tony-winning musical Hamilton. These hour-long classes are offered at Noon and 7 pm ET, and your registration means you can come to both!

How musically intricate is the score? How many motifs does Miranda layer together? Was there any music Miranda had to burn? These questions and more are answered in this FREE online class, so why not join us!

Sign me up for Hamilton!

Shalom, Broadway lovers!

On the marquee of today’s BONUS issue of MARQUEE: A) an opinion essay opposing a small but growing movement among Broadway people to boycott Israel; B) a Broadway Blast about Guys and Dolls; C) a “Double Takes” game; and D) a Last Blast about A Chorus Line.

ESSAY: The Band’s Visit is not a war musical. It is not a propaganda piece. It is a quiet fable about Egyptian musicians stranded in an Israeli desert town, where strangers manage, awkwardly and imperfectly, to meet one another as human beings.

Thought experiment: If it opened today, would the theater community still know how to receive it that way—as a story about contact, loneliness, hospitality, music, and peace? Or would some voices ask whether Israeli art had become suspect?

Sadly, I’m not sure.

As the 2026 Tonys approach, here’s something to watch: several dozen theater organizations have endorsed a “Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel” organized by Theater Workers for a Ceasefire. Part of the group’s expansive definition of “ceasefire” includes demands for an end to the “Israeli occupation” of “Historic Palestine.” That is not a call merely to end occupation of the West Bank or Gaza. It frames the Jewish state itself as an occupation. That leaves no room for peaceful coexistence with a Jewish state.

The boycott, underscored by a petition signed by thousands of theater workers, represents a disturbing trend inside the performing arts that treats public geopolitical alignment not as a personal choice, but increasingly as a form of cultural virtue.

The Substack Stage Left Report has been covering the movement and encouraging theater workers attending the Tonys and other awards shows to wear ceasefire pins “to show solidarity with the movement.”

As an American-born Jewish Israeli who publishes a Broadway newsletter, I find this trend disturbing not simply because it targets Israel, but because it misunderstands what Broadway is supposed to be. Broadway is not a political party. It is not an activist coalition. It is not a morality pageant where artists prove their worth through ideological signaling.

At its best, Broadway is a collision point: immigrants, outsiders, obsessives, radicals, traditionalists, cynics, romantics, Jews, Christians, atheists, gay men, Midwestern tourists, downtown experimentalists, and yes, people who profoundly disagree about politics, all crammed together into one gloriously unstable artistic ecosystem. That ecosystem contracts the moment orthodoxy and fashion become conditions of belonging.

The practical effect of these cultural-boycott campaigns is lopsided. A Broadway performer wearing a ceasefire pin at the Tonys is not changing Israeli military policy. A dramaturg refusing to engage with Israeli artists is not materially improving Palestinian lives. But inside theater culture, these gestures do produce real consequences: American Jewish artists feeling pressured to disavow Israel, Israelis becoming professionally radioactive, and colleagues of all backgrounds quietly learning which opinions are safest to express publicly.

The movement’s defenders often insist they are not boycotting Israeli or Jewish artists as individuals, only Israeli institutions, state-backed projects, and so-called normalization efforts. (Is a musical that humanizes Zionists a normalization effort?) But in a small artistic ecosystem, that distinction collapses quickly. Once Israeli cultural institutions are treated as presumptively toxic, Israeli artists become professionally suspect, and Jewish artists receive the message that Zionism—the expression of the Jewish people’s connection to our historic homeland—is something to explain, apologize for, or even renounce. Broadway has room for everybody. Zionists should not have to hide or apologize for who we are in order to belong.

Israel is being treated as a uniquely disqualifying moral stain in ways few other nations are, no matter their abuses. Broadway artists who happily collaborate with people connected to governments accused of repression, occupation, censorship, criminalization of homosexuality, or indiscriminate warfare suddenly discover an uncompromising absolutism when Israel enters the conversation. One does not need to support every action of the Israeli government to notice the asymmetry. In practice, boycotters increasingly treat Israel not as a country with policies necessitating debate, but as a cultural identity to quarantine.

Great theater depends on contradiction, competing truths, wounded people, compromised people, people trapped by history and fear and identity and grief. Think Les Misérables, Evita, Cabaret, and—yes—The Band’s Visit. Broadway understands this instinctively onstage. The boycott trend seems less comfortable extending that same complexity to real life.

Broadway was built by outsiders, immigrants, and iconoclasts, many Jews among them. It became great not because everyone agreed, but because artists were free to collide with one another creatively, politically, spiritually, and aesthetically.

Theatermakers who genuinely want audiences to understand Palestinian lives more deeply already possess the perfect tool: storytelling. Not slogans. Not petitions. Not public rituals of ideological alignment. Stories.

I mean, think about it: What would a Palestinian Ragtime look like? A Palestinian Parade? A Palestinian Fiddler? (Well, given that show’s worldwide embrace, the Palestinian Fiddler may just be Fiddler.)

Theater expands empathy through specificity—families, arguments, humor, longing, memory, tension. Broadway does not need fewer Israeli voices. It needs more Palestinian ones.

Where’s the pin for THAT?

SPEAK OUT: What do you think about efforts to boycott Israeli cultural institutions and artists in the theater world? I welcome thoughtful responses from readers who agree, disagree, or are still thinking it through.

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NOTE: I’ve found community and solidarity through the Jewish Broadway Alliance, a terrific organization supporting Jewish theater artists in a difficult time. (Our weekly Broadway Shabbat livestream with Seth Rudetsky is a particular joy.)

BROADWAY BLAST: In Guys and Dolls, “Luck Be a Lady” is usually treated as nothing more than Sky Masterson’s suave gambler anthem. But the title carries deeper resonances. Sky doesn’t ask for his luck to be “good” (the normal idiom). He asks luck to behave like a lady. That turns chance into etiquette. His real fantasy is not winning; it’s that randomness might follow social rules. The joke, it seems, is that Sky, who lives by odds, suddenly wants to summon morality from probability. Why? Well, the word “lady” suggests his mind is fixated on Sarah Brown, whose uprightness he has begun to desire and imitate. By the time he sings the show’s iconic anthem, gambling and courtship have fused. Sky isn’t only betting on dice. He’s betting on love.

DOUBLE TAKES: Each of these descriptions matches the plot of at least two Broadway shows. Name them. Answers at the end of the issue, after the Last Blast:

1. Female baker creates unusual pies.
2. Plucky orphan works for a better future.
3. Green girl struggles for acceptance.
4. Man creates a fantasy version of himself, but begins to believe it.
5. Plant growth leads to a giant problem.

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Join The Broadway Maven! Nowhere else online brims with this much Broadway content, and certainly not for so little (Membership is $25 a month for 5-15 compelling classes). Purchase a monthly or an annual plan. Cancel at any time. Sign up here:

Broadway Maven Membership

Broadway Maven Members get the Friday Blast once a week filled with Members-only goodies. It’s the easiest way to get links for upcoming classes.

Note: A full calendar of upcoming classes is always available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.

• Monday, May 18 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Monday, May 18 Sondheim for Musicians with Sondheim Hub publisher Alex Marsden, 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, May 19 Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella with Rodgers & Hammerstein expert Ted Chapin, 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, May 25 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed)

• Monday, June 1 Hamilton with Mateo Chavez Lewis, Noon and 7 pm ET (FREE, register HERE)

• Tuesday, June 2 Falsettos, Noon ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Sunday, June 7 Tonys Watch Party, time TBA (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, June 9 La Cage Aux Folles, Noon ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

LAST BLAST: In A Chorus Line, every dancer is assigned a number—and every dancer sings a “number.” The overlap isn’t accidental. Their identities are reduced to digits, but they’re given musical numbers to prove they’re more than that. Each solo is a bid for individuality, a way of saying: I am not interchangeable. But the structure of the show undercuts that hope. After all the stories, all the distinctions, they end up in identical costumes, moving in perfect unison. The same word—“number”—names both their erasure and their expression. And in the end, erasure wins.

ANSWERS TO GAME: 1. Waitress and Sweeney Todd; 2. Annie and Oliver! 3. Wicked and Shrek 4. The Great Gatsby and Dear Evan Hansen 5. Little Shop of Horrors and Into the Woods

The Broadway Maven is a vibrant educational community that helps its members think more deeply about musical theater. We offer 5-15 classes a month for just $25. We also foster enthusiasm for Broadway through the FREE weekly Substack newsletter MARQUEE and host an expansive YouTube channel. It’s your home for Broadway appreciation. Contact The Broadway Maven at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.

Broadway Maven YouTube Channel

Join music educator Mateo Chavez Lewis for two FREE classes on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash-hit, Tony-winning musical Hamilton. These hour-long classes are offered at Noon and 7 pm ET, and your registration means you can come to both!

How musically intricate is the score? How many motifs does Miranda layer together? Was there any music Miranda had to burn? These questions and more are answered in this FREE online class, so why not join us!

Sign me up for Hamilton!

Shalom, Broadway lovers!

On this week’s marquee: A) An essay proposing a relatively simple way to improve the plot of My Fair Lady; B) a Broadway Blast about Dear Evan Hansen; C) a “Broadway Bites” game; D) a StageStreams about the creation of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies; and E) a Last Blast about La Cage Aux Folles and Sunday in the Park with George.

NOTE: Given the enthusiastic responses to my essay on “script doctoring” The King and I, I’ve decided to make that kind of essay an occasional feature that lets MARQUEE do what it does best: re-examine old shows with fresh lenses. In this week’s issue, the script doctor treatment goes to My Fair Lady, and a moment in which the musical could show, not tell, to great effect.

ESSAY: “Stays mainly on the plain....” It’s one of the most dramatic moments in the musical theater canon. Eliza Doolittle finally pronounces “The Rain in Spain” correctly. She’s been struggling to escape her Cockney accent, and her breakthrough is cause for singing and dancing.

The scene, though, is a missed opportunity. We don’t see what they’re excited about except in a generalized way. After lots of monotone practice, Eliza finally says the sentence right.

That’s supposed to be dramatic?

We’ve seen Eliza improve, certainly. She moves from failure to success, but the transition is diffuse. It emerges out of drills, encouragement, and a speech from Higgins about the beauty of the English language—Shakespeare, Milton, the Bible. The speech fuels the moment emotionally, but it still doesn’t locate the exact instant where sound shifts into correctness. The scene builds energy, but the key moment lacks a precise trigger. We are told she has it—“By George, she’s got it!”—but we don’t quite hear the instant she gets it. Or why.

For one of the best-regarded musicals of the Golden Age, it’s a small but significant violation of dramatic clarity. In musical theater, especially when dealing with skill acquisition, the audience wants a click. A hinge. Not just improvement, but a moment where the difference between correct and incorrect is unmistakable to the ear. Anna tells The King to count “one, two, three, AND.” Harold Hill teaches the school board they can be a barbershop quartet. And the children learn the basics of music once they can sing “Do-Re-Mi.”

These are moments in which something shifts, audibly and unmistakably, from incorrect to correct. The pleasure is not just in the result, but in witnessing the change as it occurs—hearing it as it happens. Yet we’re denied that in My Fair Lady.

The gap would be easy to fill. Here’s my proposal:

Higgins, exasperated, snaps: “Have you no brain?”

Eliza, stung, fires back: “I do so have a brain!”—and in doing so, accidentally produces the correct vowel sound, which of course is the one she’s been missing in “The Rain in Spain.“

Higgins freezes. “By George, she’s got it.”

Now the moment lands. Eliza’s voice changes at the exact instant she claims ownership of herself. The audience hears the shift, not as an abstract improvement, but as a direct consequence of character and conflict.

This adjustment doesn’t alter the structure of the scene; it sharpens it. It turns a gradual improvement into a dramatic event. My Fair Lady gets almost everything right in this sequence: the buildup, the stakes, the payoff. It just needs the payoff to arrive at a single, unmistakable point. One line, one sound, one moment. And in a show that’s all about sounds and their meanings?

By George, that’s all it would take.

NEXT WEEK: The Broadway Maven Spring Crossword Puzzle: “Opening Acts”

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BROADWAY BLAST: In Dear Evan Hansen, the song “You Will Be Found” lands as reassurance—until you remember what “found” can also mean. Not rescued. Not seen. Found out. The show builds a world where Evan is lifted up by a story that isn’t true, and the same word that promises visibility and acceptance quietly predicts exposure. At first, the phrase feels like salvation: he will be noticed, understood, embraced. But as the lie grows, the meaning shifts under our feet. To be “found” is no longer comfort—it’s inevitability. The song that crowns Evan also foreshadows his collapse. In this world, being seen and being exposed are only a syllable apart.

“BROADWAY BITES”: Add a food word to a Broadway character’s name to create a pun. Best answers keep the rhythm and make us groan. Include your punny names in the comments section.

Examples:

Curly Fries McLain (Oklahoma!)
Fred Graham Cracker (Kiss Me, Kate)
Oh! Henry Higgins (My Fair Lady)
Mama Morton’s Salt (Chicago)
Sausage Link Larkin (Hairspray)

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StageStreams: The latest documentary at the Staged Right YouTube channel is a deep dive into the creation of Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman’s Follies. Rare archival footage, thoughtful commentary and analysis, and some delightful commentary by the show’s wise chronicler Ted Chapin (a Broadway Maven faculty member). Where does Follies fit in Sondheim’s career? His legacy? And why has the show never made money?

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Join The Broadway Maven! Nowhere else online brims with this much Broadway content, and certainly not for so little (Membership is $25 a month for 5-15 compelling classes). Purchase a monthly or an annual plan. Cancel at any time. Sign up here:

Broadway Maven Membership

Broadway Maven Members get the Friday Blast once a week filled with Members-only goodies. It’s the easiest way to get links for upcoming classes. In this week’s Friday Blast: links to the Cinderella Watch Party, Sondheim for Musicians, and Cinderella with Ted Chapin; recordings of the Hair, Maven style classes; a Broadway Blast about Merrily We Roll Along; a YouTube video on challenge songs; and the Archive Clips Reel of the week: Kiss Me, Kate.

Note: A full calendar of upcoming classes is always available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.

• Sunday, May 17 WATCH PARTY: Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, Noon ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, May 18 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Monday, May 18 Sondheim for Musicians with Sondheim Hub publisher Alex Marsden, 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, May 19 Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella with Rodgers & Hammerstein expert Ted Chapin, 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, May 25 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed)

• Monday, June 1 Hamilton with Mateo Chavez Lewis, Noon and 7 pm ET (FREE, register HERE)

• Tuesday, June 2 Falsettos, Noon ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Sunday, June 7 Tonys Watch Party, time TBA (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, June 9 La Cage Aux Folles, Noon ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

LAST BLAST: The anthem of La Cage aux Folles is the defiant declaration “I Am What I Am.” Identity, the song insists, is inherent and unapologetic: existence itself is justification. But the show it defeated for the Best Musical Tony—Sunday in the Park with George—contains a slightly different formulation that’s nonetheless striking. In “We Do Not Belong Together,” George explains himself with the line “I am what I do.” One word shifts the entire philosophy. Albin defines identity as essence; George defines it as action. One claims the right simply to be. The other ties selfhood to work. Two rival musicals from the same Broadway season quietly offer opposite answers to the same question: what makes a person who they are?

The Broadway Maven is a vibrant educational community that helps its members think more deeply about musical theater. We offer 5-15 classes a month for just $25. We also foster enthusiasm for Broadway through the FREE weekly Substack newsletter MARQUEE and host an expansive YouTube channel. It’s your home for Broadway appreciation. Contact The Broadway Maven at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.

Broadway Maven YouTube Channel

Join The Broadway Maven! Nowhere else online brims with this much Broadway content, and certainly not for so little (Membership is $25 a month for 5-15 compelling classes). Purchase a monthly or an annual plan. Cancel at any time. Sign up here:

Broadway Maven Membership

Broadway Maven Members get the Friday Blast once a week filled with Members-only goodies. It’s the easiest way to get links for upcoming classes. This week’s Friday Blast contains: links for both Sondheim for Musicians and “Hair, Maven-style”; recordings of both sessions of Tuesday’s FREE Fiddler on the Roof class; a Bonus Blast from The King and I; a Broadway Maven YouTube video on List Songs; and the clip reel of the week from the Archive: Circus Broadway.

Shalom, Broadway lovers!

On this week’s marquee: A) An essay explaining how Stephen Sondheim’s Company undermined Oscar Hammerstein’s “conditional love song” in a revolutionary way; B) a Broadway Blast about The Prince of Egypt; C) an Aptagrams quiz about Broadway shows; and D) a Last Blast about The King and I.

ESSAY: Last week’s essay explored a dozen “conditional love songs” from Broadway’s Golden Age by showing a variety of spins on Oscar Hammerstein’s innovative format: songs by characters who are not ready to say they love each other but do it a different way.

But by the end of the 1960s, the device needed refreshing, if not abandonment. And it took a Sondheimian revolution to break the impasse.

In Company (1970), Sondheim shattered the romantic assumption that had sustained the conditional love song for decades. Hammerstein’s characters used indirection because they were not yet ready to admit what they felt. In Oklahoma! Curly and Laurey warned each other not to attract gossip. In Carousel, Billy and Julie imagined what they might say “if” they were in love. These songs postponed the confession, but they never called it into question.

Bobby’s “Marry Me a Little” operated under a very different emotional logic. Instead of imagining the moment when love might finally be spoken, Bobby proposed a relationship designed to prevent that moment from ever arriving. His idea is gentle on the surface but cautious at its core: affection with boundaries, closeness with escape routes, commitment carefully limited so it will never become overwhelming. The Golden Age lovers avoided saying “I love you.” Bobby avoided the vulnerability those words demand. No wonder everyone agrees Company marked a rupture with the Golden Age musical.

Though it was, for a time, cut from the original production, “Marry Me a Little” was one of the first signs that Broadway’s long tradition of conditional love songs had begun to crack.

Another Company song challenges the tradition from a different angle. In “Sorry-Grateful,” the married men in Bobby’s circle describe love not as something awaiting confession but as a permanent paradox: “You’re always sorry, you’re always grateful, you’re always wondering what might have been.” In every Golden Age conditional love song, ambivalence is temporary—a tension that resolves the moment the characters finally admit what they feel. In “Sorry-Grateful,” the confession has already happened. These men are married. And it hasn’t settled anything. The song quietly dismantles the assumption that sustained Hammerstein’s device for decades: that once lovers stop dancing around their feelings, emotional clarity will follow. For Bobby’s friends, nothing is conditional and nothing is resolved.

Finally, “Being Alive”—Company‘s eleven-o’clock number—turns the conditional love song inside out. Bobby begins by listing love’s demands as complaints: “Someone to hold you too close, someone to hurt you too deep.” Then the song pivots into a desperate plea for exactly those things. The structure rhymes with Hammerstein’s form—a character saying one thing while meaning another—but the emotional content has completely changed. The Golden Age characters said, “I don’t love you” while meaning “I do.” Bobby says, “I don’t want this” and discovers, mid-song, that he does. It is not shyness being overcome but existential resistance cracking open. And unlike most Golden Age conditional love songs, this is no duet. Unless it’s a duet with himself.

The conditional love song was one of the Golden Age musical’s most elegant inventions. It allowed Broadway writers to dramatize the moment before love could safely be spoken, turning hesitation itself into music. For decades, composers and lyricists played variations on the idea, refining and reinventing Hammerstein’s solution to the same storytelling problem. By the time Sondheim arrived, however, the culture around romance had changed. His characters were no longer shy about love; they were uncertain whether they wanted it at all. In that sense, the history of the conditional love song mirrors the history of the Broadway musical itself—from confident romantic storytelling to the more complicated emotional world that followed.

NEXT WEEK: Script doctoring My Fair Lady.

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BROADWAY BLAST: In the stage adaptation of Stephen Schwartz’s animated musical The Prince of Egypt, not all Hebrew is created equal. When Yocheved sings to her infant son Moses, “יַלְדִּי הַטּוֹב וְהָרַךְ, אַל־תִּירָא וְאַל־תִּפְחָד” (“Yaldi hatov v’harach, al tira v’al tifchad” — don’t be afraid, my dear child), the language sounds unmistakably Biblical. The last four words echo the Hebrew Bible’s standard phrasing for “do not fear,” and the opening is a poetic flourish that would not feel out of place in a Torah narrative. The moment is meant to feel ancient, foundational, part of sacred history. But later, Tzipporah declares “אני חופשייה” (“ani chofshiya” — “I am free”)—not in Midianite, but in unmistakably modern Israeli Hebrew. The shift isn’t just linguistic; it’s temporal. Yocheved sounds like she belongs to the world of Exodus. Tzipporah sounds like she could be living in present-day Tel Aviv, which helps situate her as an ass-kicking proto-feminist, someone who would fit just fine in the Israeli army. The musical thus collapses thousands of years into a single soundscape, using different registers of Hebrew to position characters differently in time. One anchors the story in myth. The other pulls it into modern identity.

APTAGRAMS: Unscramble these names of Broadway shows. Answers at the end of the issue, under the Last Blast. The first is very easy.

CAST (show that calls for many performers)

ASSEMBLER LIES (show whose secretive protagonist runs a factory)

SEND A KEY MAN (show about a team that needs a player to rescue it)

MALIGNERS (show about ruthless, gossipy high school girls)

NUGATORY INGENUE (show whose heroine begins as a nobody)

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Note: A full calendar of upcoming classes is always available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.

• Sunday, May 10 Hair, Noon and 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, May 11 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Monday, May 11 Sondheim for Musicians with Sondheim Hub publisher Alex Marsden, 7 pm ET (Register here.)

• Sonday, May 17 WATCH PARTY: Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, May 18 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Monday, May 18 Sondheim for Musicians with Sondheim Hub publisher Alex Marsden, 7 pm ET (Register here.)

• Tuesday, May 19 Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella with Rodgers & Hammerstein expert Ted Chapin, 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, May 25 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed)

• Monday, June 1 Hamilton with Mateo Chavez Lewis, Noon and 7 pm ET (FREE, Registration opens soon)

• Tuesday, June 2 Falsettos, Noon ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

LAST BLAST: In The King and I, Anna tells her pupils, “You are precisely my cup of tea.” The phrase sounds like ordinary British idiom, a polite way of expressing approval. But the metaphor carries a historical irony. Tea, after all, was first cultivated and consumed in Asia before becoming one of the defining rituals of British identity. Anna therefore praises her Siamese students with a metaphor that ultimately comes from their own part of the world. The line quietly complicates the cultural hierarchy that frames the musical. Anna may see herself as bringing Western knowledge to the East, yet even the language she uses reveals how deeply Western culture has already been steeped in Eastern influence. Even Britain’s most “English” expressions are brewed from Eastern leaves.

ANSWERS: CATS, Les Misérables, Damn Yankees, Mean Girls, Annie Get Your Gun

The Broadway Maven is a vibrant educational community that helps its members think more deeply about musical theater. We offer 5-15 classes a month for just $25. We also foster enthusiasm for Broadway through the FREE weekly Substack newsletter MARQUEE and host an expansive YouTube channel. It’s your home for Broadway appreciation. Contact The Broadway Maven at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.

Broadway Maven YouTube Channel

Join David Benkof, The Broadway Maven for two FREE and different classes on the classic musical Fiddler on the Roof. These hour-long classes are offered at Noon and 7 pm ET, so feel free to attend both!

Why are the themes of Fiddler so universal? How has the musical infiltrated pop culture? Ever wonder why Bock & Harnick chose specific lyrics? These questions and more are answered in this FREE online class including covering how this show fits into the legacy of all musical theater. Perfect for theater lovers, students, and curious minds alike.

Register for Fiddler

Shalom, Broadway lovers!

On this week’s marquee: A) An essay tracing the way Oscar Hammerstein’s “conditional love song” appears across the Golden Age canon; B) a StageStreams looking to possibly redeem the movie version of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers; C) a quiz about Andrew Lloyd Webber names; and D) a Last Blast about My Fair Lady.

ESSAY: Among Oscar Hammerstein’s greatest accomplishments was solving one of musical theater’s biggest storytelling problems: how to write a love song before the characters are ready to say what they wish they could say—namely, “I love you.”

His answer: the conditional love song.

From “People Will Say We’re in Love” (Oklahoma!) to “If I Loved You” (Carousel), lovers talk around their feelings—imagining love, denying it, or blaming it on gossip—while the audience already knows the truth. The device proved irresistible to other writers. From Irving Berlin to Frank Loesser, songwriters kept finding new ways to write lyrics in which lovers insist they don’t love each other.

Here are a dozen examples. (Preview: next week we’ll explore how Stephen Sondheim took a sledgehammer to the structure.)

1. Oscar Hammerstein first set the pattern with the wistful “Make Believe” in a pre-Golden Age musical, Show Boat (1927). Magnolia and Ravenal insist their romance is only a game of theatrical pretending. But that bit of imagination becomes the song’s emotional engine. By framing love as make-believe, Hammerstein lets the characters sing openly about feelings they are not yet ready to admit. The conditional love song was already quietly taking shape.

2. Hammerstein’s first Golden Age example of the form was, of course, “People Will Say We’re in Love,” from Oklahoma! (1943). Curly and Laurey never admit their feelings outright. Instead they invent rules to keep the neighbors from talking: “Don’t throw bouquets at me” and “Don’t praise my charm too much.” Each supposed precaution is really a confession in disguise.

3. The never-satisfied Hammerstein continued to improve on the form with what is undoubtedly its pinnacle, “If I Loved You” from Carousel (1945). Earlier examples of the device were clever and charming evasions. Here it becomes the emotional fulcrum of Broadway’s classic “bench scene.” Billy and Julie spend several minutes imagining what they would say if they were in love, each retreating into the safety of the conditional. The audience, of course, hears the confession plainly. By stretching the idea across a full dramatic sequence, Hammerstein turned it into one of musical theater’s most powerful storytelling tools.

4. An oft-overlooked version of the device comes in “They Say It’s Wonderful” from Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun (1946). The song’s cleverness lies in a tiny grammatical escape hatch. Annie and Frank never say love is wonderful; they only report that others say it is. That bit of misdirection lets them describe the sensation without claiming it. Like Hammerstein’s lovers, Berlin’s pair approaches the truth sideways.

5. With 1947’s Brigadoon, Lerner and Loewe enthusiastically adopted Hammerstein’s device, centering it in the show’s best-known tune and proving how quickly such songs had become part of Broadway’s shared vocabulary. In “Almost Like Being in Love,” Tommy never actually declares his feelings for Fiona. Instead he describes the strange physical sensation of walking through the world as though it has suddenly changed. Love becomes something felt before it is admitted—to Tommy at least. Everyone else in the room feels it right away.

6. A year later, Cole Porter gave the conditional-love treatment to an estranged couple destined to reunite. In Kiss Me, Kate, “Wunderbar” allows Fred and Lilli to approach reconciliation indirectly, disguising their renewed feelings as nostalgic performance. Unlike the earlier examples, the indirection here comes through theatrical playacting. By pretending to be characters in an imaginary operetta, they can express sentiments they’re not yet ready to voice.

7. With “I’ll Know,” from Guys and Dolls (1950), Frank Loesser returned to the Hammersteinian model, showing us two characters who have barely met insisting the other could not possibly be right for them. Each asserts that when true love finally arrives it will be unmistakable—perfect, effortless, undeniable. Naturally, they fail to notice that the supposedly hypothetical description already fits the person right in front of them. But we’ve been paying attention. We know.

8. The next entry is perhaps the most surprising, since the conditional love is expressed in movement, not in lyrics. “Shall We Dance?” from The King and I (1951) shows Hammerstein’s remarkable flexibility with his own form. The lyrics of “Shall We Dance?” remain playful and almost formal. The emotional truth emerges instead from the physical movement of the polka itself. The inspired innovation of Hammerstein and choreographer Jerome Robbins was to implant the conditional love song in the body rather than the voice.

The conditional love song continued through the rest of the Golden Age, with an ever-expanding variety of permutations. Briefly:

9. In “Till There Was You” from The Music Man (1957), Marian describes her awakening to love as something she can only recognize in hindsight—she never heard the birds or the bells until Harold Hill arrived. Rather than declaring “I love you” outright, she confesses her feelings indirectly through a poetic inventory of everything the world had lacked before him.

10. In “Tonight at Eight” from She Loves Me (1963), Georg catalogs his nervousness about an anonymous pen pal—his racing pulse, his inability to eat—thus revealing the depth of his feelings by refusing to name them.

11. In “It Only Takes a Moment” from Hello, Dolly! (1964), Cornelius frames love as something that simply happened to him, an event he reports rather than a confession he makes.

12. And in “Do You Love Me?” from Fiddler on the Roof (1964), Tevye and Golde circle the question from the opposite direction entirely: after twenty-five years of marriage, they sift through shared labor and habit trying to determine whether what they have qualifies as love—arriving at the answer only by exhausting every reason to doubt it.

Hammerstein was playing script doctor when he invented the conditional love song, trying to solve a challenge to dramatizing a couple’s evolving love in the constraints of a single show’s performance. But once that structure calcified into a regular feature of a Golden Age show, it was ripe for reconsideration.

NEXT WEEK: Stephen Sondheim breaks the mold with Company.

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StageStreams: This terrific video (which will be nostalgic for viewers of a certain age) hits hard at the complicated legacy of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, a movie musical that was once beloved for its choreography in particular and considered a rousin’ good time—but is now mostly cringeworthy. Seven Brides presents a romantic narrative that begins with abduction and limited agency for the brides, using comedy to smooth over elements that, viewed today, raise serious questions about consent. The video examines the movie’s strong and weak points, pointing to a production at St. Louis’s Muny that aimed to fix the book problems.

QUIZ: Identify the last name of each of the following Andrew Lloyd Webber characters. They increase in order of difficulty. Answers at the end of the issue below the Last Blast. It will be a challenge to get all six right; put your name in the comments if you surmount the hurdle.

Stephen from Stephen Ward
Bustopher from CATS
Dewey from School of Rock
Betty from Sunset Blvd.
Christine from The Phantom of the Opera
Augustin from Evita

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Sondheim’s music rewards close attention in ways that even well-informed listeners often miss. This course is designed to make that craft visible and audible. Join Broadway Maven guest lecturer and Sondheim Hub publisher Alex Marsden for THREE technical talks about the best within Sondheim’s scores. You don’t need an instrument to participate, but the course expects some knowledge of music theory out of participants.

These classes are offered Mondays at 7 pm ET on Zoom, running from May 4 to May 18. Each class is one hour long.

(Current Broadway Maven Members will get sign-in info in their Friday Blasts.)

Sondheim for Musicians

Join The Broadway Maven! Nowhere else online brims with this much Broadway content, and certainly not for so little (Membership is $25 a month for 5-15 compelling classes). Purchase a monthly or an annual plan. Cancel at any time. Sign up here:

Broadway Maven Membership

Broadway Maven Members get the Friday Blast once a week filled with Members-only goodies.

Note: A full calendar of upcoming classes is always available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.

• Monday, May 4 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Monday, May 4 Sondheim for Musicians with Sondheim Hub publisher Alex Marsden, 7 pm ET (Register here.)

• Tuesday, May 5 Fiddler on the Roof, Noon and 7 pm ET (different classes, REGISTER HERE)

• Sunday, May 10 Hair, Noon and 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, May 11 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Monday, May 11 Sondheim for Musicians with Sondheim Hub publisher Alex Marsden, 7 pm ET (Register here.)

• Sonday, May 17 WATCH PARTY: Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, May 18 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Monday, May 18 Sondheim for Musicians with Sondheim Hub publisher Alex Marsden, 7 pm ET (Register here.)

• Tuesday, May 19 Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella with Rodgers & Hammerstein expert Ted Chapin, 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, May 25 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

LAST BLAST: In My Fair Lady, Eliza learns the phonetic exercise “The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plain” in strict monotone. Higgins insists on flat delivery because, to his ear, Cockney speech is already too musical, full of rises, falls, and singsong exaggerations. Monotone is his corrective: strip the voice down to neutral sound before rebuilding it. The exercise becomes a strange musical waystation between classes. Only when Eliza finally gets the vowel right does the phrase bloom into song. The shift reveals Higgins’s aesthetic: refinement doesn’t eliminate melody; it replaces the wrong kind with the right one.

ANSWERS: Ward, Jones, Finn, Schaefer, Daaé, Magaldi

The Broadway Maven is a vibrant educational community that helps its members think more deeply about musical theater. We offer 5-15 classes a month for just $25. We also foster enthusiasm for Broadway through the FREE weekly Substack newsletter MARQUEE and host an expansive YouTube channel. It’s your home for Broadway appreciation. Contact The Broadway Maven at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.

Broadway Maven YouTube Channel

Join David Benkof, The Broadway Maven for two FREE and different classes on the classic musical Fiddler on the Roof. These hour-long classes are offered at Noon and 7 pm ET, so feel free to attend both!

Why are the themes of Fiddler so universal? How has the musical infiltrated pop culture? Ever wonder why Bock & Harnick chose specific lyrics? These questions and more are answered in this FREE online class including covering how this show fits into the legacy of all musical theater. Perfect for theater lovers, students, and curious minds alike.

Register for Fiddler

Shalom, Broadway lovers!

NOTE: Stephen Schwartz’s Biblical epic Children of Eden is streaming online this weekend only. With so many fans of the composer’s other work (especially Wicked) preparing to watch, this Bonus Issue will revisit that musical and another Biblical Schwartz show, The Prince of Egypt. As you’ll see, preparing this essay has been a different kind of Sunday School lesson.

ESSAY: Traditionally, Christian theology has been forbidden fruit for American Jews. But Stephen Schwartz, a Jewish composer, may be the most consistent creator of Christian music in Broadway history. From writing lyrics for Bernstein’s Mass to adapting the Gospel of Matthew in Godspell, he has repeatedly returned to explicitly Christian material. Yet some of his most ambitious shows draw not on the New Testament but on the Hebrew Bible. The Prince of Egypt and Children of Eden take as their subjects the foundational narratives of Exodus and Genesis, stories central to Jewish tradition. And yet, for all their scriptural sourcing, these works do not simply dramatize the Torah. Instead, Schwartz reshapes these narratives around individual guilt, redemptive suffering, and personal moral transformation—concepts far more central to Christian theology than to Jewish covenantal thought. The result is something like a Christian midrash on the Torah: a retelling that preserves the outline of the original while quietly rewriting its theological grammar.

Much of the very language of The Prince of Egypt is not native to the Torah, though it would fit right into the New Testament. For example, “Thus saith the Lord” (from “The Plagues”) is a faithful rendering of the Hebrew, but it is also the archaic diction of the King James Bible—a translation tradition far more at home in Christian liturgy than in modern Jewish practice. More importantly, The Prince of Egypt centers the concept of “deliverance,” which the narrative in Shemot (Exodus) does not. Early in the show, it’s the word that Miriam incorrectly presents as the translation of “Moses,” which tips off anyone who knows Biblical Hebrew that the show is taking serious liberties with the Torah’s priorities. When the slaves sing “Deliver us to the Promised Land” in the opening song, it sounds biblical, but that isn’t how the Torah thinks. In Exodus, Israel is not “delivered” in one sweeping motion, since different verbs refer to escape and arrival. The musical collapses the sequence into a single word—“deliver”—which the Hebrew Bible does not do, but which aligns neatly with Christian habits of thought, where deliverance often implies a unified journey toward fulfillment. And note the unmistakable resonance with perhaps the most famous Christian prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, with its “deliver us from evil” line. Now, the term does appear (very rarely) in Jewish translations of the Tanakh, but many never use it at all. There’s just no Hebrew word with a one-to-one correspondence with “deliver.”

The most consequential shift in The Prince of Egypt is its transformation of Moses from prophetic emissary into a Christ-like figure of moral suffering and redemptive purpose. When Moses laments “a ransom never to be paid” and offers himself—“Let me be the ransom for my people”—he adopts a theological language foreign to the Torah but central to Christianity, where suffering is understood as a debt requiring redemption. In Exodus, the plagues are acts of divine judgment, not moral liabilities incurred by Moses. Yet in “For the Rest of My Life,” he agonizes over them as if they were his own crimes, relocating the story’s moral center from God’s sovereignty to Moses’s conscience. This shift is reinforced by the musical’s broader emphasis on individual guilt, heroism, and reconciliation—hallmarks of Christian theology rather than Jewish covenantal thought. Even God’s role recedes: “I saw a miracle and now it’s up to me,” Moses declares. By the stage play’s finale, divine judgment gives way to fraternal reconciliation, as Moses’s arc culminates not in law or covenant (as in the animated film) but in forgiveness, completing his transformation into a quasi-sacrificial savior.

With Moses firmly established as a Christ figure, the story begins to generate familiar Christian oppositions—including ones with a long and troubling history. The Prince of Egypt unproblematically recycles classic Christian critiques of the Old Testament (and, by extension, Jews). Two examples: Ramses is cruel, zealous, jealous, and demanding, like tendentious Protestant portrayals of the God of the Torah—as opposed to the loving, accepting, life-affirming Christ-like figure of Moses. The meticulously legalistic, spiritually rigid priest Hotep represents another famous contrast Christians have made: between Christ and the Pharisees, a group of Jewish religious authorities presented as opposed to authentic moral insight. With Moses repurposed as a Christ figure of moral suffering and redemptive purpose, the story needed an opposing force to represent Christ’s Jewish adversaries and found one in an unexpected place: an openly polytheistic priest.

The same pattern appears even more clearly in Children of Eden. The title itself gestures toward scripture while quietly reshaping it. “Children of Eden” is not a traditional biblical phrase; when it appears in the Hebrew Bible, it refers not to humanity but to a specific, non-Israelite people. Schwartz had other, more authentic options available. “Children of Adam”—b’nai Adam—simply means human beings, while “Children of Noah”—b’nai Noach—refers in Jewish tradition to those outside the covenant of Israel. By choosing “Children of Eden,” he centers a concept that carries far greater theological weight in Christianity than in Judaism, where the focus falls instead on covenant, law, and the Exodus. That shift continues within the show itself. God is no longer Elohim or YHWH but “Father,” echoing the division of roles in the Trinity and recasting Genesis as a family drama. The expulsion from Eden becomes not an account of human limitation, but a story of disobedience and rupture, imbued with the psychological and moral weight of what Christians call the Fall. Across the Cain, Abel, and Noah narratives, Schwartz consistently foregrounds individual guilt, emotional conflict, and the possibility of moral growth, transforming Genesis into a unified story of sin and redemption.

Schwartz has repeatedly returned to explicitly Christian material—Bernstein’s Mass, Godspell, even The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Against that backdrop, the theological shape of his Old Testament musicals begins to look less incidental and more a reversion to form. To be sure, musical theater demands introspection and psychological conflict; Schwartz may simply be translating ancient narrative into modern dramatic form. But he achieves emotional resonance by quietly reshaping Jewish scripture into Christian narrative patterns. While that’s certainly his prerogative, it’s a weakness of the shows that they present Genesis and Exodus as authentically rooted in the Hebrew Scriptures or even Judaism itself despite their non-Jewish value systems. In the end, these are not Jewish stories retold, but Jewish stories re-theologized.

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Sondheim’s music rewards close attention in ways that even well-informed listeners often miss. This course is designed to make that craft visible and audible. Join Broadway Maven guest lecturer and Sondheim Hub publisher Alex Marsden for THREE technical talks about the best within Sondheim’s scores. You don’t need an instrument to participate, but the course expects some knowledge of music theory from participants.

These classes are offered Mondays at 7 pm ET on Zoom, running from May 4 to May 18. Each class is one hour long.

(Current Broadway Maven Members will get sign-in info in their Friday Blasts.)

Sign me up!

Join The Broadway Maven! Nowhere else online brims with this much Broadway content, and certainly not for so little (Membership is $25 a month for 5-15 compelling classes). Purchase a monthly or an annual plan. Cancel at any time. Sign up here:

Broadway Maven Membership

Broadway Maven Members get the Friday Blast once a week filled with Members-only goodies.

Note: A full calendar of upcoming classes is always available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.

• Monday, April 27 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Monday, May 4 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Monday, May 4 Sondheim for Musicians with Sondheim Hub publisher Alex Marsden, 7 pm ET (Register here.)

• Tuesday, May 5 Fiddler on the Roof, Noon and 7 pm ET (different classes, REGISTER HERE)

• Sunday, May 10 Hair, Noon and 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, May 11 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Monday, May 11 Sondheim for Musicians with Sondheim Hub publisher Alex Marsden, 7 pm ET (Register here.)

• Sonday, May 17 WATCH PARTY: Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, May 18 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Monday, May 18 Sondheim for Musicians with Sondheim Hub publisher Alex Marsden, 7 pm ET (Register here.)

• Tuesday, May 19 Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella with Rodgers & Hammerstein expert Ted Chapin, 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

The Broadway Maven is a vibrant educational community that helps its members think more deeply about musical theater. We offer 5-15 classes a month for just $25. We also foster enthusiasm for Broadway through the FREE weekly Substack newsletter MARQUEE and host an expansive YouTube channel. It’s your home for Broadway appreciation. Contact The Broadway Maven at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.

Broadway Maven YouTube Channel

Join David Benkof, The Broadway Maven for two FREE and different classes on the classic musical Fiddler on the Roof. These hour-long classes are offered at Noon and 7 pm ET, so feel free to attend both!

Why are the themes of Fiddler so universal? How has the musical infiltrated pop culture? Ever wonder why Bock & Harnick chose specific lyrics? These questions and more are answered in this FREE online class including covering how this show fits into the legacy of all musical theater. Perfect for theater lovers, students, and curious minds alike.

Register for Fiddler

Shalom, Broadway lovers!

On this week’s marquee: A) An essay questioning the reasons for a Cole Porter reference in an Evita lyric; B) a StageStreams revisiting The Sound of Music; C) a Broadway Blast about Company; D) a Broadway acrostics game; and E) a Last Blast about Sweeney Todd.

ESSAY: In the middle of “Rainbow High” from Evita, Eva Perón tosses off a curious phrase: “So Lauren Bacall me—anything goes.” It’s a line that glitters and vanishes in an instant, carried along by costume changes and fierce ambition. But it carries a stowaway. “Anything goes” is not just slang for loosened standards; it’s the unmistakable title of a Cole Porter musical. Why would Tim Rice smuggle a 1930s Broadway satire into a song about Argentine reinvention?

“Rainbow High” is a montage song. Eva has secured power, but now she must be seen in it. As she prepares to appear in public as First Lady, she dictates the details of her transformation—hair, gowns, jewels, lighting—turning private preparation into public command. The number is about calibration: how much spectacle is required to make authority feel inevitable. We see that no matter how much democracy was involved in her ascent, her triumph feels like a coronation.

Anything Goes, of course, is a 1934 musical comedy set largely aboard an ocean liner, where con artists, debutantes, and social climbers tumble over one another in a world with no fixed moral center. The plot runs on disguise and reversal: criminals pass as respectable, the respectable behave badly, and everything works out swimmingly anyway. The show treats social order as a kind of polite ficti, making a mockery of ordinary rules and authority.

Rice didn’t need to explain or harp on the reference for it to work. By the 1970s, Anything Goes had long become shorthand for a particular moral climate—and “Rainbow High” drops the phrase into Eva’s mouth at the precise moment she embraces that climate as strategy.

In Anything Goes, moral looseness isn’t abstract—it has a face, and it belongs to Reno Sweeney. She’s a nightclub singer-cum-evangelist, a social arbiter, and the most competent figure on the ship without ever pretending to be respectable in the old sense. The joke is that she thrives precisely because standards are flexible. In Evita, Eva grasps the same truth without the joke. If Reno can slide between sinner and savior, celebrity and authority, then Eva can slide from radio actress to First Lady, “slut” to saint. What is comic elasticity in Porter becomes tactical elasticity in Rice. “Anything goes” stops being a wink and starts being a rule.

Which brings us back to Lauren Bacall. “Rainbow High” accomplishes an impressive grammatical feat: it makes us hear her name not as a reference, but as an imperative verb. Eva is not daydreaming; she is directing. Bacall’s screen persona—steady gaze, measured tone, authority without apology—becomes a posture to adopt at once. In a climate where standards bend (“anything goes”), the advantage belongs to the figure who appears unbent. Eva understands that lesson. If the rules are flexible, then the winning move is to appear immovable.

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NEXT TWO WEEKS: A two-part essay on the evolution of the “conditional love song” pioneered by Oscar Hammerstein—and shattered by Stephen Sondheim.

StageStreams: Here’s one for all you Sound of Music fans: a countdown video of “insane facts” about the show and the film. Who called the show “the sound of mucus”? What did the producers do to hide Julie Andrews’s pregnancy? Which actor performed in drag, and in what scene, and why? It’s a “clean and bright” fresh angle on a widely discussed musical.

BROADWAY BLAST: In “Being Alive” from Company, Bobby insists he wants someone who will “hold me too close… hurt me too deep… sit in my chair and ruin my sleep.” The verbs escalate as each clause removes distance. “Hold” implies contact, “hurt” implies penetration, but “sit in my chair” is invasion. It’s domestic, specific, and irreversible. By the time we reach “ruin my sleep,” the disruption is total. The list isn’t about desire—it’s about surrendering boundaries. Bobby doesn’t just want love; he wants to be occupied. The song charts not romance, but a gradual loss of personal territory, a perfect song for a man deciding if he wants to be both sorry and grateful at the same time.

ACROSTIC GAME: Each line below describes a Broadway musical using an acrostic of its title. The first letter of each word spells out the show’s name (ignoring spaces and punctuation). Once you see how it works, try writing your own in the comments. Use any show you like, but if you want a challenge try a musical with at least 10 letters in its name.

CATS: Cue a tabby singing
Grease: Growing romance evolves as summer ends.
The Producers: Two hustlers engineer profits, risking obvious disaster unless crowds exit, reversing “success”
Chicago: Criminals having it coming are guilty onstage
Evita: Everyone venerates icons; that’s Argentina!

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Sondheim’s music rewards close attention in ways that even well-informed listeners often miss. This course is designed to make that craft visible and audible. Join Broadway Maven guest lecturer and Sondheim Hub publisher Alex Marsden for THREE technical talks about the best within Sondheim’s scores. You don’t need an instrument to participate, but the course expects some knowledge of music theory out of participants.

These classes are offered Mondays at 7 pm ET on Zoom, running from May 4 to May 18. Each class is one hour long.

(Current Broadway Maven Members will get sign-in info in their Friday Blasts.)

Sign me up!

Join The Broadway Maven! Nowhere else online brims with this much Broadway content, and certainly not for so little (Membership is $25 a month for 5-15 compelling classes). Purchase a monthly or an annual plan. Cancel at any time. Sign up here:

Broadway Maven Membership

Broadway Maven Members get the Friday Blast once a week filled with Members-only goodies. This week's Friday Blast contains a look forward to the coming Sondheim for Musicians series; a Broadway Blast about West Side Story; a YouTube clip on the music of Do I Hear A Waltz?; and the Archive clip reel of the week: Ted Chapin on South Pacific.

Note: A full calendar of upcoming classes is always available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.

• Monday, April 27 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Monday, May 4 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Monday, May 4 Sondheim for Musicians with Sondheim Hub publisher Alex Marsden, 7 pm ET (Register here.)

• Tuesday, May 5 Fiddler on the Roof, Noon and 7 pm ET (different classes, REGISTER HERE)

• Sunday, May 10 Hair, Noon and 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, May 11 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Monday, May 11 Sondheim for Musicians with Sondheim Hub publisher Alex Marsden, 7 pm ET (Register here.)

• Sonday, May 17 WATCH PARTY: Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, May 18 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Monday, May 18 Sondheim for Musicians with Sondheim Hub publisher Alex Marsden, 7 pm ET (Register here.)

• Tuesday, May 19 Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella with Rodgers & Hammerstein expert Ted Chapin, 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

LAST BLAST: There’s a broad irony hovering over the song “A Little Priest” from Sweeney Todd, in which the title character and Mrs. Lovett evaluate the quality of various kinds of cannibalistic flesh—and the professions of the people whose bodies have become kitchen-ready. The hilarious number scores in part because the show already centers the process of judging. Here, though, judgment is stripped of its moral authority. Instead of Judge Turpin condemning a child to death, Sweeney’s daughter to an asylum, or Sweeney himself to exile, the evaluations are openly arbitrary and absurd. That’s why the song is funny.

The Broadway Maven is a vibrant educational community that helps its members think more deeply about musical theater. We offer 5-15 classes a month for just $25. We also foster enthusiasm for Broadway through the FREE weekly Substack newsletter MARQUEE and host an expansive YouTube channel. It’s your home for Broadway appreciation. Contact The Broadway Maven at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.

Broadway Maven YouTube Channel

Sondheim’s music rewards close attention in ways that even well-informed listeners often miss. This course is designed to make that craft visible and audible. Join Broadway Maven guest lecturer and Sondheim Hub publisher Alex Marsden for THREE technical talks about the best within Sondheim’s scores. You don’t need an instrument to participate, but the course expects some knowledge of music theory out of participants.

These classes are offered every Monday at 7 pm ET on Zoom, running from May 4 to May 18. Each class is one hour long.

(Current Broadway Maven Members will get sign-in info in their Friday Blasts.)

Sign me up!

Shalom, Broadway lovers!

On this week’s marquee: A) An essay re-examining the clowns in “Send in the Clowns” as well as timing in general in Sondheim’s A Little Night Music; B) a Broadway Blast about South Pacific; C) a poll about bold reinterpretations; and D) a Last Blast about Kimberly Akimbo.

ESSAY: “Losing my timing this late in my career.” With that line from “Send in the Clowns,” Desirée slaps us with the essence of A Little Night Music: the tragedy of mismatched internal clocks.

The song is often heard as a general lament—about lost love, missed chances, romantic irony. But what Desirée is naming is more precise than disappointment. Her tragedy is one of time. She is “late,” professionally, romantically, existentially. She hasn’t misunderstood what she wants; she has misread when she could have had it.

The clown metaphor is frequently softened into something like “lighten the mood” or “cheer me up.” But clowns aren’t known for offering comfort. Their strength is timing. In fact, few performers are more dependent on timing than clowns. A gag lands or dies on the pause, the entrance, the facial expression. Get the timing wrong and the act collapses into embarrassment. When Desirée asks for clowns, she isn’t deflecting tragedy with comedy. She’s naming her failure with brutal precision. She knows what bad timing looks like because she’s built a life around good timing—and now she’s missed her cue.

That obsession with timing isn’t confined to this song. It’s even embedded in the sound of the phrase “A Little Night Music” itself.

Famously, the show is composed almost entirely in triple meter. Waltzes carry elegance, but they also carry instability. Triple meter sways. It never quite plants both feet at once. There’s always a sense of motion without arrival, of circularity rather than grounding. That rhythmic off-balance quality mirrors the emotional temperature of the show: polished on the surface, unsettled underneath.

And listen carefully: A Little Night Music echoes Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, but the resemblance is deceptive. Sondheim’s title can be pronounced in triple meter: A-lit-tle NIGHT-mu-sic. Mozart’s title simply cannot. Like its famous opening section, it must be duple, which means it doesn’t sway.

This isn’t a clever coincidence. It’s structural. The instability you hear in the waltz is already embedded in the name of the show. Before anyone hesitates, before anyone arrives too late in their career, the rhythm has begun to tilt.

That same instability governs the inner lives of its characters, particularly Frederik Egerman in “Now.” Frederik presents himself as a decider, but what he actually constructs is an ever-branching avoidance mechanism. He begins with an alphabet: A means to ravish his virginal wife Anne; B means to nap. Even here, A is unstable. In archaic English it meant to take by force; in modern usage it’s gentler, though still tinged with aggression. It’s unclear—perhaps even to Frederik himself—which meaning he intends.

The confusion deepens. A becomes “charm,” B “physical force,” and B is eliminated for being too much work. Then the alphabet shifts again: A is “suggestive” (and clothed), B “direct” (and nude). And after exhausting literary seduction, Frederik abruptly eliminates A as well. Each redefinition reframes the problem rather than solving it—an odd exercise for a song called “Now.”

This is no decision tree. It’s a dance. By continually redefining his terms, Frederik treats desire as an intellectual puzzle rather than an emotional act. Like the waltz, his thinking is always in motion, always elegant, never grounded. Faced with any given pair of options, he thinks himself into paralysis. The shifting letters reveal a man who cannot quite land on the beat.

Seen this way, the triple meter of the score isn’t decoration; it’s diagnosis. The music doesn’t merely accompany indecision; it embodies it. And that pattern will later define his relationship with Desirée as surely as it defines his marriage to Anne.

If Frederik’s problem is thinking too long, Desirée’s is arriving too late. She hasn’t miscalculated love; she’s misjudged timing. In the first act, the waltz feels playful, even charming—a social dance of near-misses and flirtation. In the second act, the same instability curdles into loss. The sway that once promised possibility now guarantees regret.

What A Little Night Music finally argues is that elegance cannot save you from chronology. You can be witty, articulate, self-aware, exquisitely composed—and still miss your cue. Timing, once lost, does not return simply because you understand it.

Desirée sees the beat she missed. In a show that sways without landing, she finally does. One, two, three. And then, finally, the measure closes.

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NEXT WEEK: The surprising connection between Tim Rice’s lyrics for Evita and Cole Porter’s Anything Goes.

BROADWAY BLAST: In South Pacific, Nellie sings that she’s “in love with a wonderful guy,” but the word doing the most work is “guy.” It’s a strange term for a French planter—oddly casual, almost dismissive. She doesn’t say “man,” “lover,” or even “him.” “Guy” keeps Emile at a distance, reducing him to a type rather than acknowledging him as a full person. That linguistic hedge mirrors her emotional one. She can enjoy the feeling of being in love as long as she doesn’t fully confront his past. The show suggests that prejudice doesn’t always begin in hatred; sometimes it begins in the small, distancing words that let you avoid seeing someone clearly.

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Join The Broadway Maven! Nowhere else online brims with this much Broadway content, and certainly not for so little (Membership is $25 a month for 5-15 compelling classes). Purchase a monthly or an annual plan. Cancel at any time. Sign up here:

Broadway Maven Membership

Broadway Maven Members get the Friday Blast once a week filled with Members-only goodies. This week's Friday Blast contains links to both the In the Heights Watch Party and classes on In the Heights; class recordings of Ted Chapin teaching Me & Juliet/Pipe Dream, Steve Bell teaching Bye Bye Birdie, and Marc Bonanni teaching Four Broadway Flops; a Broadway Blast about Oklahoma!; a Youtube highlight about canceling Rent; and the Archive clip reel of the week featuring Mateo teaching Dear Evan Hansen.

Note: A full calendar of upcoming classes is always available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.

• Sunday, April 19 In the Heights Watch Party, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, April 20 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Tuesday, April 21 In the Heights, Noon and 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, April 27 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Monday, May 4 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Monday, May 4 Sondheim for Musicians with Sondheim Hub publisher Alex Marsden, 7 pm ET (Register here.)

• Tuesday, May 5 Fiddler on the Roof, Noon and 7 pm ET (different classes, registration opens soon)

• Sunday, May 10 Hair, Noon and 7 pm ET (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, May 11 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET (part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Monday, May 11 Sondheim for Musicians with Sondheim Hub publisher Alex Marsden, 7 pm ET (Register here.)

LAST BLAST: In Kimberly Akimbo, the second word of the title refers to one of the show’s anagrams, but it’s also doing quiet metaphorical work. “Akimbo” describes a stance with the elbows bent outward, arms angled away from the body—an awkward, defiant posture. It’s a perfect image for Kimberly’s life. Because of her rare condition, she’s a teenager whose body ages four times faster than normal, leaving her permanently out of alignment with the world around her. Nothing about her existence fits the expected proportions of adolescence. The word “akimbo” captures that asymmetry.

The Broadway Maven is a vibrant educational community that helps its members think more deeply about musical theater. We offer 5-15 classes a month for just $25. We also foster enthusiasm for Broadway through the FREE weekly Substack newsletter MARQUEE and host an expansive YouTube channel. It’s your home for Broadway appreciation. Contact The Broadway Maven at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.

Broadway Maven YouTube Channel

Sign up for David Armstrong’s 8-week Introduction to Broadway course for just $50 and get two month’s Broadway Maven Membership for FREE — with no recurring charges. David will be tracing Broadway history from the very beginnings in the late 19th century all the way to today. David teaches musical theater at the University of Washington and is the author of the text Broadway Nation: How Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists invented the Broadway Musical. These eight 70-minute classes will be a perfect first exposure to (or review of) the development of the art form we love.

(Current Broadway Maven Members will get sign-up info in their Friday Blasts.)

Sign me up!

Shalom, Broadway lovers!

On this week’s marquee: A) A Sondheim “aptagrams” game; B) a radio interview with The Broadway Maven; C) a Broadway Blast about Waitress; and D) a Last Blast about Annie and Les Misérables.

An “Aptagram” is an anagram that, unscrambled, forms a word or phrase that relates to the item under consideration. Example: MALIGNERS would be a good aptagram for Mean Girls because it contains the same letters but scrambled—and because the main characters in the show malign each other. Puzzle fans who celebrated the aptagrams that appeared in an issue of MARQUEE will be happy to know the puzzle will now be a monthly feature in the “quizzes/games/polls” section of MARQUEE. We kick off that feature with a lead story in which all the entries are Sondheim shows. Answers at the end of the issue, below the Last Blast.

ETHICAL SLUT TIMING (show with a promiscuous but noble woman who has lost something “this late” in her career)

FATHOMED THE HIP, FUNNY, TOUGH, TWO-PENNY, FAT ROMAN ARENA (what Sondheim did to create his raucous 1962 hit comedy)

CAMPY? NO. (show that’s clever but not that funny)

ARTIFICE COVER-UPS (show evoking another culture through stylized theater)

ODDEST WEENY (show whose central character is quite a piece of work)

LOL, MARY! ONE WRY GRILLER (show with a caustic but funny female friend)

EIGHTIES HUNK: WE RAP ANGRY DOT (Sondheim show in which a handsome artist addresses an annoyed woman)

TOOTED IN SHOW (1987 musical with a strong woodwinds section)

IN SOAPS (show whose love triangle belongs in daytime drama)

HOOD WARS (show about a fight over a planned community in the Southern US)

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NEXT WEEK: MARQUEE takes a break for the Passover holiday. We return April 15 with some surprising commentary on Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, and the role that timing plays in the show.

BROADWAY MAVEN RADIO GEM: I always suspected I had a face for radio.... Last month, I joined longtime Broadway Maven student Vicki Mansfield on Showtune 220, a music-and-talk program run out of England. What is my favorite show and why? Why is my opinion of Rodgers & Hammerstein changing? What recent changes at The Broadway Maven have expanded student horizons? And when given the chance to request any show tune for Vicki to play, what did I choose and why?

Listen to the interview

BROADWAY BLAST: Jenna’s opening refrain in Waitress celebrates the basic ingredients of baking: “Sugar, butter, flour.” It’s a satisfying list—rhythmic, elemental, comforting. Yet one ingredient is conspicuously absent: eggs. Anyone who bakes knows that eggs are just as fundamental as the other three. And in a story centered on an unexpected pregnancy, the omission is hard to ignore. Jenna sings about sweetness, richness, and structure, but the ingredient most closely associated with new life never appears in the refrain. Whether intentional or not, the gap feels telling. At the very moment the show introduces baking as Jenna’s language for understanding the world, the ingredient that symbolizes the life growing inside her is the one she never quite says aloud.

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Join The Broadway Maven! Nowhere else online brims with this much Broadway content, and certainly not for so little (Membership is $25 a month for 5-15 compelling classes). Purchase a monthly or an annual plan. Cancel at any time. Sign up here:

Broadway Maven Membership

Broadway Maven Members get the Friday Blast once a week filled with Members-only goodies. This week’s Friday Blast contains links to next week’s Intro to Broadway session; Members-Only recordings of Rent and Les Misérables; a video Sondheim Rhyme quiz; a Bonus Blast about The Music Man; and the Archive clips reel of the week: The Book of Mormon.

Note: A full calendar of upcoming classes is always available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.

• Monday, April 6 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY) part of an 8-week course

• Sunday, April 12 Me and Juliet and Pipe Dream with Ted Chapin, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, April 13 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY) part of an 8-week course, registration required

• Tuesday, April 14 Bye Bye Birdie with Steven Bell, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, April 14 Four Broadway Flops with Marc Bonanni, 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Sunday, April 19 In the Heights Watch Party, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, April 20 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET(part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Tuesday, April 21 In the Heights, Noon and 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, April 27 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET(part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

LAST BLAST: Broadway loves tomorrow, but not always kindly. In Annie, tomorrow is a child’s best weapon against despair: invisible, unverifiable, and absolutely trusted. Annie’s anthem treats the future like a guarantee: if you can just endure today, the sun will come out tomorrow. But Les Misérables treats the same idea with suspicion. In that show, tomorrow isn’t a promise—it’s an appointment with consequence. “One Day More” pulses with anticipation, but also with the knowledge that once the sun rises, choices harden into fate. And the song doesn’t imagine one shared tomorrow; it fractures tomorrow into competing dreads and desires. For Marius, it is romance; for Enjolras, revolution; for Valjean, danger; for Javert, pursuit. Annie imagines tomorrow as one clear sunrise. The people of Les Misérables see something more complicated: the same dawn, but a different fate waiting for everyone who wakes up beneath it.

ANSWERS TO QUIZ: A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC, A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM, COMPANY, PACIFIC OVERTURES, SWEENEY TODD, MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG, SUNDAY IN THE PARK WITH GEORGE, INTO THE WOODS, PASSION, ROAD SHOW

The Broadway Maven is a vibrant educational community that helps its members think more deeply about musical theater. We offer 5-15 classes a month for just $25. We also foster enthusiasm for Broadway through the FREE weekly Substack newsletter MARQUEE and host an expansive YouTube channel. It’s your home for Broadway appreciation. Contact The Broadway Maven at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.

Broadway Maven YouTube Channel

Do YOU hear the people sing? The Broadway Maven offers a FREE online class on one of the largest musical spectacles ever to march onto a Broadway stage. The hour-long classes are offered on March 31, 2026 at Noon and 7 pm ET. The content of each class will be different, so feel free to attend both!

Join David Benkof, The Broadway Maven, for an in-depth conversation on the development of the musical, its many adaptations including the film version, the lyrical and musical genius of the score, a comparison between the book and the musical, and how its legacy lives on in the pantheon of musical theater. Plus, a musical analysis segment will break down the technical genius of the score.

Sign me up for Les Miz!

Shalom, Broadway lovers!

On this week’s marquee: A) An essay about the integration of racial themes in the romantic songs in South Pacific; B) a StageStreams about two Broadway stars volunteering at an urban elementary school; C) a Broadway Blast about My Fair Lady; D) a poll about the names of Sondheim shows with multiple interpretations; and E) a Last Blast about Waitress.

ESSAY: How do you know the race of a stranger across a crowded room?

Maybe you don’t.

When audiences think about the racial politics of South Pacific, they usually think of one song: “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.” That number states the message directly. But Rodgers and Hammerstein embedded the same moral argument throughout the score, especially in songs audiences tend to hear as purely romantic. Again and again, the musical asks whether people will recognize another person’s humanity instinctively—or allow explanations and justifications to get in the way.

“Some Enchanted Evening.” The show’s best-known song, “Some Enchanted Evening,” is usually heard as an ode to love at first sight. It’s more “Wonderful Guy” than “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught.” Or is it? After all, what could be more racially progressive than seeing a “stranger” and embracing that person? The lyric centers on a moment of recognition: you see someone across a crowded room and instantly know that this person matters. In that way, “Fools give you reasons / Wise men never try” echoes “Taught” quite tightly. Both warn against letting justifications interfere with the simple recognition of another person’s humanity. Love succeeds precisely when the mind does not interfere—when instinct outruns the social rules that would later try to explain why the relationship should not exist.

“Younger Than Springtime.” Lieutenant Cable’s love song to Liat, “Younger Than Springtime,” operates in a similar way. The language of the song is striking for its imagery. Cable describes Liat almost entirely through images of nature: birds, starlight, winds, heaven, and of course springtime. In that world there are no social categories, no hierarchies, no racial distinctions. Nature does not recognize them, and neither does God. For the duration of the song, Liat is not a racialized figure at all; she is simply the Edenic object of romantic wonder. The love Cable describes belongs to a realm older and simpler than the one he inhabits as an American officer. That makes the later collapse of the relationship more painful. When Cable retreats from the possibility of marrying Liat, it is not because the love itself has changed. It is because the social world—the world of explanations, expectations, and inherited prejudice—has reasserted itself.

“This Nearly Was Mine.” Heavenly and natural imagery return in Emile’s lament for a relationship that seems doomed. Paradise, moonlight—it’s all there. But it also reveals the emotional cost of prejudice. By the time he sings it, Nellie has recoiled from discovering that his children are of mixed race. Emile’s song is a lament not for a love that failed naturally but for one destroyed by social conditioning. The life Emile imagines—one of companionship, domestic happiness, and shared future—has slipped away because Nellie cannot overcome what she has been taught. The tragedy of the song lies in its sense of proximity (”close to my heart she came”): the life he describes almost existed. In that sense, the romantic heartbreak is inseparable from the show’s racial conflict.

Taken together, these songs suggest that South Pacific embeds its anti-prejudice argument far more deeply than audiences tend to notice. “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” states the problem explicitly: prejudice is something people learn. But the romantic songs approach the same idea more subtly and from another angle, contrasting immediate recognition of humanity with the rationalizations that later interfere with it. As “Some Enchanted Evening” insists, love begins with seeing a stranger and accepting that person without explanation. For in South Pacific, prejudice requires elucidation. Love does not.

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NEXT WEEK: Aptagrams for the names of ten Sondheim shows (the letters are scrambled to form a clue related to the show).

StageStreams: Show-tune TV meets reality in this Broadway-themed episode of Celebrity Substitute. Glee besties Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff team up to prepare an elementary school in Harlem for its talent show. The stars getting down on the ground with the kids and give acting advice is utterly charming. And they devote a whole segment to helping the kids be good losers, too. Check it out:

BROADWAY BLAST: In My Fair Lady, Professor Henry Higgins casually describes phonetics as both his profession and his hobby. The line sounds harmless, but it collapses a crucial distinction. A profession carries responsibility, structure, and accountability; a hobby implies pleasure, experimentation, and low stakes. By claiming both, Higgins creates a system where he can move between seriousness and play at will. When he is rigorous, it’s “work.” When he is careless or cruel, it’s “just a hobby.” Eliza is caught inside that instability. She is treated as both subject of study and object of amusement. The show reveals that this category collapse isn’t incidental—it’s what allows Higgins to avoid ever fully recognizing the consequences of what he’s doing.

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Sign up for David Armstrong’s 8-week Introduction to Broadway course for just $50 and get two month’s Broadway Maven Membership for FREE — with no recurring charges. David will be tracing Broadway history from the very beginnings in the late 19th century all the way to today. David teaches musical theater at the University of Washington and is the author of the text Broadway Nation: How Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists invented the Broadway Musical. These eight 70-minute classes will be a perfect first exposure to (or review of) the development of the art form we love.

(Current Broadway Maven Members will get sign-up info in their Friday Blasts.)

Sign me up!

Join The Broadway Maven! Nowhere else online brims with this much Broadway content, and certainly not for so little (Membership is $25 a month for 5-15 compelling classes). Purchase a monthly or an annual plan. Cancel at any time. Sign up here:

Broadway Maven Membership

Broadway Maven Members get the Friday Blast once a week filled with Members-only goodies.This week: links to next week’s Rent and Les Misérables classes; Members-Only recordings of Bock & Harnick and “My Fair Lady, Maven-style” classes; a video compilation of Broadway in the 40s; a Bonus Blast about Merrily We Roll Along; and the Archive clips reel of the week: Singer-songwriters.

Note: A full calendar of upcoming classes is always available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.

• Sunday, March 29 Rent with Mateo Chavez Lewis, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, March 31 Les Misérables, Noon and 7 pm ET (the two classes are different). FREE, Register HERE.

• Monday, April 6 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY) part of an 8-week course

• Sunday, April 12 Me and Juliet and Pipe Dream with Ted Chapin, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, April 13 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY) part of an 8-week course, registration required

• Tuesday, April 14 Bye Bye Birdie with Steven Bell, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, April 14 Four Broadway Flops with Marc Bonanni, 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Sunday, April 19 In the Heights Watch Party, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, April 20 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET(part of an 8-week course, registration closed).

• Tuesday, April 21 In the Heights, Noon and 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

LAST BLAST: In Waitress, Dawn casually mentions that she lives on TV dinners—prepackaged meals designed somewhere else, reheated according to instructions. It’s a small line, but it quietly defines her place in the show. Dawn consumes food exactly as it’s given to her, while Jenna invents pies from scratch, combining ingredients and naming them after emotional states. One woman reheats a prefabricated life; the other creates something new out of whatever she has on hand. The contrast helps explain why Jenna’s baking feels so central to the story. Her pies aren’t just desserts—they’re acts of invention. In a musical about rebuilding a life, the difference between reheating and creating isn’t just culinary. It’s the whole point.

The Broadway Maven is a vibrant educational community that helps its members think more deeply about musical theater. We offer 5-15 classes a month for just $25. We also foster enthusiasm for Broadway through the FREE weekly Substack newsletter MARQUEE and host an expansive YouTube channel. It’s your home for Broadway appreciation. Contact The Broadway Maven at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.

Broadway Maven YouTube Channel

Do YOU hear the people sing? The Broadway Maven offers a FREE online class on one of the largest musical spectacles ever to march onto a Broadway stage. The hour-long classes are offered on March 31, 2026 at Noon and 7 pm ET. The content of each class will be different, so feel free to attend both!

Join David Benkof, The Broadway Maven, for an in-depth conversation on the development of the musical, its many adaptations including the film version, the lyrical and musical genius of the score, a comparison between the book and the musical, and how its legacy lives on in the pantheon of musical theater. Plus, a musical analysis segment will break down the technical genius of the score.

Sign me up for Les Miz!

Shalom, Broadway lovers!

On this week’s marquee: A) An editorial arguing that attacks on producers for expensive tickets do not tell the whole story; B) a fan-favorite video about interpreting “Send in the Clowns” by Stephen Sondheim; C) Broadway Blast about Gypsy; D) a poll about future canonical Broadway shows; and E) a Last Blast about Falsettos.

EDITORIAL: Broadway audiences have a favorite villain when they see $400 prices on their stubs. With apologies to Mel Brooks, it’s the producers.

It’s an easily told story when others in the cast are ignored: Producers raise prices, chase profits, and turn a night at the theater into a luxury purchase.

But Broadway ticket prices are shaped by an economic system that includes:

• Producers (like Bialystock and Bloom from The Producers);
• Union members (like Babe from The Pajama Game); and
• Theater owners (like Gilles and Firmin from The Phantom of the Opera).

Act I: Producers

We have to start with the supposed villains.

Broadway producers are not cushy salaried executives collecting predictable paychecks. They are Broadway’s key risk-takers. They’re usually lovers of the art form who raise millions of dollars to mount shows that probably won’t succeed on Broadway.

A large-scale musical today can cost $15–25 million or more to bring to Broadway. No more than 20-25 percent of shows recoup (earn back) those investments. Producers hope for a handful of hits to pay for an expected graveyard of flops. When ticket prices spike, it’s tempting to assume that means producers are swimming in profit. In reality, many productions close with their investors losing every dollar.

Even the most experienced Broadway investors, analyzing the market soberly, expect no more than 5 to 10 percent of their shows to be truly lucrative—a much higher bar than merely recouping. A Bucknell University study of Broadway musicals from 2008-2017 found that only about a quarter of the shows that recouped had a realistic chance of doubling their investors’ money. The jackpot shows that so enriched their investors included rare blockbusters like Hamilton, Dear Evan Hansen, and The Book of Mormon.

Dynamic pricing or no, ultimately, the specific price for a specific seat is determined by supply and demand. When demand for a show surges, prices rise; when it softens, they fall. Tickets sell for whatever two parties agree it is worth in that moment.

In a high-risk industry where most productions fail, it is reasonable — and certainly not “greedy” — for producers to capture the full upside when demand supports it. Without that incentive, many fewer shows would be produced in the first place, and Broadway would be very much impoverished.

Act II: Unions

Broadway relies on one of the most heavily unionized workforces in American culture.

Actors, musicians, stagehands, wardrobe crews, hair and makeup teams, and many others work under contracts negotiated by powerful unions. Those agreements guarantee strong minimum salaries, pensions and healthcare contributions, and strict staffing minimums. Broadway’s status as a viable career — not just a gig economy — exists because of those protections.

But union contracts fundamentally shape the economics of a production.

On a large-scale musical costing $750,000 or more per week to run, labor is typically the single largest expense. And wages are only the starting point. Since producers also contribute to union pension and health funds, the true cost of each employee is significantly higher than the base salary audiences might imagine.

Broadway contracts are built around minimums — minimum orchestra sizes, minimum crew complements, minimum rehearsal hours. Minimums protect jobs and standards. But they do not flex downward when a show’s artistic vision or financial condition might justify a leaner model. That rigidity has consequences.

A production might technically be able to run with fewer musicians in the pit, and sometimes the show’s artistic team will find that appropriate — or even necessary. Or a show may call for a leaner backstage crew on quieter nights, but the contract requires the full complement anyway.

That rigidity isn’t merely theoretical. As The New York Times noted last week, labor costs and rules are the primary reason it’s so much cheaper to produce a musical in London than New York.

Face it: despite their essential role, unions are a central factor in the troubled economics of Broadway, where their rules can constrain both commercial success and artistic freedom.

The irony is that the very protections that make Broadway a sustainable career for thousands of artists also contribute to making Broadway less affordable for audiences.

Act III: Houses

Now we arrive at the least-discussed player in Broadway economics: the theaters themselves.

There are only 41 Tony-eligible Broadway houses. Most are controlled by three groups: The Shubert Organization, the Nederlander Organization, and ATG (which owns the former Jujamcyn theaters).

In other words, Broadway isn’t just an artistic ecosystem. It’s also a real estate market with extremely limited supply.

Producers don’t simply decide to put on a show. They must first secure one of those 41 houses—and that means negotiating rent with the handful of companies that control them. Those agreements tend to involve significant weekly guarantees plus a percentage of box office revenue.

When a hit show’s lease expires, theater owners can play competing producers against each other for the space, ratcheting terms upward. It is one of the quietest concentrations of leverage in American entertainment — three companies controlling the real estate that an entire art form depends on.

Investors risk millions. Workers are only paid when their shows are running. Landlords collect their rent no matter how the show ends.

When audiences see a $400 ticket, they rarely think about that structural leverage. But scarcity has consequences. Limited theaters mean intense competition for space, which pushes financial pressure upward through the system.

Blaming producers alone ignores the architecture of the Broadway marketplace. Now, Broadway will probably never be cheap. The scale, talent, and craftsmanship that audiences expect from a Broadway production simply cost too much. But if we’re going to have an honest conversation about ticket prices, we should at least identify all the players onstage.

What do you think? How can we explain high ticket prices? Comment below.

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NEXT WEEK: Think South Pacific’s racial message lives in only one song? Well, you’ve got to be carefully taught.

BROADWAY MAVEN YouTube GEM: This look at Sondheim’s most popular tune is by far the most widely viewed Broadway video on our channel. Check it out:

BROADWAY BLAST: In Gypsy, the newsboy Kansas gives Louise a “real stuffed cat” for her birthday—a gift that’s funny because if it’s stuffed, it’s not real. It recalls Carousel, where Billy brags about giving Julie a “solid gold–plated” ring. In both cases, the gift is an impossible contradiction, meant to sound grander than it is. Each character is trying to seem more generous than his means allow, which makes the moment both funny and a little heartbreaking—gestures of affection dressed up in language they can’t quite afford.

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Sign up for David Armstrong’s 8-week Introduction to Broadway course for just $50 and get two month’s Broadway Maven Membership for FREE — with no recurring charges. David will be tracing Broadway history from the very beginnings in the late 19th century all the way to today. David teaches musical theater at the University of Washington and is the author of the text Broadway Nation: How Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists invented the Broadway Musical. These eight 70-minute classes will be a perfect first exposure to (or review of) the development of the art form we love.

(Current Broadway Maven Members will get sign-up info in their Friday Blasts.)

Sign me up!

Join The Broadway Maven! Nowhere else online brims with this much Broadway content, and certainly not for so little (Membership is $25 a month for 5-15 compelling classes). Purchase a monthly or an annual plan. Cancel at any time. Sign up here:

Broadway Maven Membership

Broadway Maven Members get the Friday Blast once a week filled with Members-only goodies. This week: links to next week’s Bock & Harnick and “My Fair Lady, Maven-style” classes; Members-Only recordings of the two-part The King and I class and the “Waitress, Maven-style” class; a video quiz on naming Broadway shows in 5 seconds; a Bonus Blast about Sunday in the Park with George; and the Archive clips reel of the week: Gershwin on Broadway.

Note: A full calendar of upcoming classes is always available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.

• Monday, March 23 Introduction to Bock & Harnick with Steven Bell, 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, March 24 My Fair Lady, Maven-style, Noon and 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Sunday, March 29 Rent with Mateo Chavez Lewis, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, March 31 Les Misérables, Noon and 7 pm ET (the two classes are different). FREE, Register HERE.

• Monday, April 6 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY) part of an 8-week course

• Sunday, April 12 Me and Juliet and Pipe Dream with Ted Chapin, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, April 13 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY) part of an 8-week course, registration required

• Tuesday, April 14 Bye Bye Birdie with Steven Bell, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, April 14 Four Broadway Flops with Marc Bonanni, 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

LAST BLAST: The title Falsettos sounds strange until you remember what falsetto singing is: a man producing notes above his natural vocal register. That musical term becomes a metaphor for the entire show. Nearly every character is living outside the role they were supposed to inhabit. Marvin and Whizzer try to build a family that defies conventional structure; Mendel steps from therapist to husband in what might be the happiest adultery in musical theater; and even young Jason struggles to locate his own emotional pitch amid the adults’ chaos. Everyone is operating slightly above the register the world expects of them.

The Broadway Maven is a vibrant educational community that helps its members think more deeply about musical theater. We offer 5-15 classes a month for just $25. We also foster enthusiasm for Broadway through the FREE weekly Substack newsletter MARQUEE and host an expansive YouTube channel. It’s your home for Broadway appreciation. Contact The Broadway Maven at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.

Broadway Maven YouTube Channel

Sign up for David Armstrong’s 8-week Introduction to Broadway course for just $50 and get two month’s Broadway Maven Membership for FREE — with no recurring charges. David will be tracing Broadway history from the very beginnings in the late 19th century all the way to today. David teaches musical theater at the University of Washington and is the author of the text Broadway Nation: How Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists invented the Broadway Musical. These eight 70-minute classes will be a perfect first exposure to (or review of) the development of the art form we love.

(Current Broadway Maven Members will get sign-up info in their Friday Blasts.)

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Shalom, Broadway lovers!

On this week’s marquee: A) a review of Daniel Okrent’s new Sondheim biography; B) a quiz based on trivia and knowledge from the book; C) a Broadway Maven YouTube GEM with an internationally focused Broadway Maven interview with Lynn Ahrens; D) a review of a Maltby-Shire revue; E) a Broadway Maven YouTube GEM that’s a French-language lecture on translating “Losing My Mind” from Follies; and F) a Last Blast about Fiddler on the Roof.

ESSAY: The title of Art Isn’t Easy, the first authoritative biography of Stephen Sondheim in a generation, comes from the musical Sunday in the Park with George. In it, George explains how a successful work of art is put together by its individual elements (”every moment makes a contribution, every little detail plays a part”). The many compelling anecdotes and interpretations woven into the 230 pages of Daniel Okrent’s excellent book fully justify its title.

Some interpretations I really liked related to Sondheim’s childhood: the idea that his love of “order” (a key word in Sunday) may date to his memories of military school and that Sondheim’s first experience writing dialogue may have come as a child when he composed his side of the verbal spats he had with his mother.

Okrent gives us more Sondheim than most Sondheim biographies do; in (twice) mentioning the names of papers published by his psychotherapist, the book comes as close as I’ve seen in print to brushing against a long-circulating rumor about Sondheim’s intimate life.

We also learn about Sondheim’s meeting with the Beatles, and why he didn’t like Bob Dylan’s music; the fact he cried often; the heartfelt reactions of Richard Rodgers and Alan Jay Lerner to the composition of Company; and how “by any definition of the word, Stephen Sondheim was an alcoholic.” Oh, and Okrent provides the best two-word description of Sondheim’s writing project I’ve ever seen: cultural ventriloquism.

Despite being part of a Yale University Press series called “Jewish Lives,” the biography doesn’t provide much that’s Jewish, though you can find more than most treatments of Sondheim provide. There are about three pages speculating on the few Jewish characters in his work and their absence elsewhere, and we learn he referred to “the Forum tsuris” and we get a reasonable explanation for his oft-cited claim not to have known what a bar mitzvah is until adulthood. For a man who grew up in New York, it’s a strange premise until you consider that he skipped seventh grade, the year in which junior high schoolers shuffle from celebration to celebration of the coming-of-age-ceremonies of classmates.

As long as you can set aside the fact Okrent makes the common mistake of flubbing the name of Madame Rose from Gypsy, and I’ve been able to, the book is an unalloyed gem.

BOOK QUIZ: Art Isn’t Easy is soaked through with ingredients from Sondheim’s life that MARQUEE readers will find delicious. Here are several bits of trivia; answers at the end of the issue, beneath the Last Blast.

1. Which Sondheim song was originally called “Drinking Song”?
2. What Sondheim show did Hal Prince call his “gentile musical”?
3. Which of Sondheim’s librettists was “musical as a sofa” and didn’t even own a device that plays music?
4. Which ill-tempered Broadway legend did Sondheim refer to as “Godzilla”?
5. Which of Sondheim’s collaborators did he call the one true genius he’d ever worked with?
6. What line from Sunday in the Park with George caused an early heckler to shout “It sure is!”
7. Which musical adaptation of The Wizard of Oz was one of Sondheim’s favorite musicals, so much that he saw it six times?
8. What TV show named most of its 180 episodes after Sondheim songs or lyrics?
9. What in-the-news four-letter abbreviation did Sondheim say he’d like to see “disappear from the English language”?
10. Sondheim once said that at least half his songs deal with what one-word theme?

How many did you get right? Put your score below.

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BROADWAY MAVEN YouTube GEM: Earlier this month, The Broadway Maven hosted Ragtime lyricist Lynn Ahrens. Interviewers included Gordon Cox, whose Substack Jaques covers the Broadway scene from an international perspective. Here are Gordon’s exchanges with Lynn, covering topics like the reception of Ragtime in other countries and the challenges of translating her lyrics. A particular treat from Lynn’s memories of her show Rocky when produced in Germany: How do you translate the gritty urban show into a language without a word for “ain’t”?

GUEST REVIEW: Richard Maltby, Jr. and David Shire are the undisputed titans of the contemporary musical revue / “song cycle” form, having earned the title with their triumphant works Starting Here, Starting Now and Closer Than Ever. Now, as octogenarians, they’ve channeled all of their experience and wisdom into a triumphant conclusion to their trilogy, About Time, playing now at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theatre in NYC.

The writers haven’t hidden the fact that About Time is mostly comprised of their own musical reflections on the experience of aging. And it has found an audience that can relate: I was probably the youngest person in the crowd by forty years. Similarly, all the performers are advanced in age. As Maltby puts it, they aren’t a typical “young and perky” revue cast. But they bring the energy and vocal stamina you’d expect from performers twenty years their junior, with the nuance and wisdom that clearly comes from life experience. Eddie Korbich, the original Zangara from Sondheim and Weidman’s Assassins, leads the company as a kind of stand-in for the writers, and he is remarkable; his high tenor resonated with unbelievable ease even at a Wednesday matinee.

Musically, it is beyond beautiful: Shire’s vocal harmonies blew me to the back of my seat and melted my heart. The unconventional band boasts two pianists and a bassist—the note-perfect pianists share two grand pianos which take up most of the stage. Dramatically, it hits the mark just as well: despite the fact that it’s a revue and therefore it has no story, it does follow an abstract internal logic, and its structure succeeds at delivering a significant catharsis. I found myself very emotional by the end, and arguably, I’m not even the target audience. Lyrically, theater nerds will absolutely geek out about some of Maltby’s wicked-smart rhymes: “adventure / dementia” becomes a perfect rhyme in the right dialect, and even “orange” has a perfect rhyme if you’re resourceful enough to rhyme it with the “foreignj” of “foreign, just.” If you can, I highly recommend checking out this masterclass in song cycle/ revue creation from some of musical theatre’s greatest living artists. About Time runs at the Marjorie S. Deane Little Theatre until April 5. —Mateo Chavez Lewis

BROADWAY MAVEN YouTube GEM: At an early March Jewish studies conference in Paris, I gave a (French-language) talk in which the translation of Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind” (Follies) into French was a focus. Any translation of sophisticated lyrics or poetry involves agonizing choices, as the translator tries to stay close both to the meaning and the style of the original—which is tough with pretty much any of The Master’s lyrics. My own translation aimed to stick as much as possible to Sondheimian uses of language and sound while providing the gist of the meanings. Example: the first four words “The sun comes up” translate nicely given Sondheim’s affection for alliteration, assonance, and word painting: “Le soleil se lève.”

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Note: A full calendar of upcoming classes is always available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.

• Monday, March 23 Introduction to Bock & Harnick with Steven Bell, 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, March 24 A Maven’s My Fair Lady, Noon and 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Sunday, March 29 Rent with Mateo Chavez Lewis, 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, March 31 Les Misérables, Noon and 7 pm ET (the two classes are different). FREE, registration opens soon.

• Monday, April 6 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY) part of an 8-week course

• Sunday, April 12 Me and Juliet and Pipe Dream with Ted Chapin, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, April 13 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY) part of an 8-week course, registration required

• Tuesday, April 14 Four Broadway Flops with Marc Bonanni, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

LAST BLAST: The title Fiddler on the Roof refers to the precarious balancing act of tradition in Anatevka, but the metaphor runs deeper. A fiddle only produces music when its strings are stretched tight between two fixed points. The bow then pulls across those taut strings, creating vibration and sound. Without tension, there is no music—just silence. That’s exactly how life in Anatevka works. Fathers and daughters, tradition and change, faith and doubt are all stretched against each other. The community’s harmony doesn’t come from eliminating conflict but from holding those opposing forces in balance. The fiddler survives on the roof the same way his instrument works: by maintaining tension without letting it snap.

ANSWERS TO BOOK QUIZ: 1. “The Ladies Who Lunch” 2. A Little Night Music 3. George Furth 4. Richard Rodgers 5. Jerome Robbins 6. “It’s hot and it’s monotonous.” 7. The Wiz 8. Desperate Housewives 9. LGBT 10. Ambivalence

The Broadway Maven is a vibrant educational community that helps its members think more deeply about musical theater. We offer 5-15 classes a month for just $25. We also foster enthusiasm for Broadway through the FREE weekly Substack newsletter MARQUEE and host an expansive YouTube channel. It’s your home for Broadway appreciation. Contact The Broadway Maven at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.

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Sign up for David Armstrong’s 8-week Introduction to Broadway course for just $50 and get two month’s Broadway Maven Membership for FREE — with no recurring charges. David will be tracing Broadway history from the very beginnings in the late 19th century all the way to today. David teaches musical theater at the University of Washington and is the author of the text Broadway Nation: How Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists invented the Broadway Musical. These eight 70-minute classes will be a perfect first exposure to (or review of) the development of the art form we love.

(If you get out your calculators you’ll see what a tremendous bargain this is. It’s $50 for an eight-week course, plus at least 10 more classes. If you’re. Broadway Maven-curious, you can’t afford NOT to take this class.)

(Current Broadway Maven Members are already enrolled and do not have to sign up or pay.)

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Shalom, Broadway lovers!

On this week’s marquee: A) An essay analyzing five symbols from Tony winner Maybe Happy Ending; B) a StageStreams about the Sondheim collection at the Library of Congress; C) commentary about translating expletives in Chicago into French; D) two Broadway rebuses; and E) a Last Blast about Mamma Mia!.

ESSAY: The houseplant may be the most important character in Maybe Happy Ending.

Audience members often leave recharged—though perhaps wistful—after seeing last year’s Tony-winning musical. They bask in its humor, its standout performances, and its unexpectedly emotional robot protagonists. But the musical is also doing something more ambitious. Through a series of recurring images—from a humble houseplant to the glow of fireflies—it builds a symbolic argument about the nature of life, freedom, and what it means to be human. Mild spoilers ahead.

HwaBoon. The plant is alive, but cannot think, choose, or even move. That places it in sharp contrast with Oliver and Claire, who possess growing emotional awareness and agency despite not being biologically alive. By setting a living but passive organism alongside robots capable of love and sacrifice, the musical gently sketches an existential contrast. The plant lives but cannot love; the robots love but cannot live—and the audience instinctively values the second more than the first.

Fireflies. The tiny insects Oliver and Claire encounter glow with a light that comes not from wires or batteries but from life itself. Their bioluminescence stands in quiet contrast to the artificial illumination of the robots’ world—circuits, code, and electricity. In a story about machines trying to understand what it means to live, the fireflies’ glow becomes a symbol of the spark of life the robots can admire and yearn for but never possess.

Records. Oliver plays the music he loves not from an app or CD player but from vinyl. Records are an outdated technology, much like helperbots who have been replaced by newer models. Yet vinyl also evokes warmth and richness, a sound that feels more human than digital perfection. In that sense, the medium becomes a subtle symbol of Oliver himself—obsolete, perhaps, but unexpectedly moving.

Jazz. Its defining feature is improvisation—musicians creating something new in real time. In Maybe Happy Ending, the music Oliver loves reflects the blurring of programming and free choice. The improvisation Oliver enjoys is captured in recorded music, a spontaneous act fixed in time—a surprisingly apt metaphor for freedom emerging within a programmed system. To improvise is to choose in real time, and that freedom is one of the clearest marks of being alive.

Robots. The musical’s most powerful symbol is the one standing in plain sight: its robot protagonists. Built to serve, they gradually demonstrate the traits that define human life—choice, devotion, and love. Claire (whose name suggests clarity) helps illuminate these emotions, while Oliver (the abandoned helperbot who shares his name with a famous Broadway orphan) embodies the ache for belonging. In watching machines discover these qualities, the audience is invited to reconsider what truly separates the human from the mechanical. In an era of increasing unease over artificial intelligence and indeed robots themselves, that theme helps explain why it’s only “maybe” a happy ending.

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StageStreams: In this video from DC’s Signature Theater, archivist Mark Horowitz from the Library of Congress gives a tour of their Sondheim collection. This is fun: Sondheim refers to 158 professions in the drafts for Sweeney Todd‘s “A Little Priest.” Gigolo makes an appearance—and get this draft reference to Jewish clergy from a draft by the never-had-a-bar-mitzvah Sondheim: “Everybody shaves except rabbis and riff raff.”

COMMENTARY: What’s in an expletive? Quite a lot, as it turns out, when a Broadway musical crosses linguistic borders. Last summer, I saw the French-language version of the musical Chicago in Montreal, and last weekend I saw a very different translation in Paris. The differences I noticed are a small but revealing case study in the socio-politico-linguistics of profanity, idiom, and audience expectation.

Take the moment when Roxy gets press attention for announcing a pregnancy. In Paris, Velma’s exasperated reaction was “merde.” In Montréal, the same beat landed with “shit.” The explanation goes well beyond “Montréal is closer to America.” In metropolitan French, “merde” is the ordinary, idiomatic expletive: blunt but widely usable. In Québec French, by contrast, “merde” can sound faintly European and affected. Everyday speech in Québec draws more heavily on English borrowings or religious curses like “tabarnak.” A translator working for a Montréal audience may therefore find “shit” the line that sounds most natural. There were other differences—the translations of “All That Jazz” differed widely, for example—but Velma’s foul interjection put the cross-Atlantic francophone divide into sharpest relief. Zut!

Incidentally, I recently translated Sondheim’s “Losing My Mind” into French for a lecture I gave at a conference in Paris. Francophone MARQUEE readers can watch a video explaining my choices in next week’s issue. À plus!

NEXT WEEK: Blame $400 tickets on “greedy” producers? Think broader. The full cast includes theater owners and (yes) unions.

REBUSES: Identify the Broadway shows represented by these rebuses. Answers at the end of the issue, below the Last Blast.

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Join The Broadway Maven! Nowhere else online brims with this much Broadway content, and certainly not for so little (Membership is $25 a month for 5-15 compelling classes). Purchase a monthly or an annual plan. Cancel at any time. Sign up here:

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Note: A full calendar of upcoming classes is always available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.

• Sunday, March 15 Waitress, Noon and 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, March 23 Introduction to Bock & Harnick with Steven Bell, 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Sunday, March 29 Rent with Mateo Chavez Lewis, 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, March 31 Les Misérables, Noon and 7 pm ET (the two classes are different). FREE, registration opens soon.

• Monday, April 6 Introduction to Broadway with David Armstrong, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY) part of an 8-week course

• Tuesday, April 7 Bye, Bye Birdie with Steven Bell, 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

LAST BLAST: In Mamma Mia!’s “Gimme, Gimme, Gimme,” Sophie doesn’t come off as a sweet ingénue, despite her typical portrayal. She’s downright sharp-tongued, bordering on nasty. She needles Sam for liking “buildings more than people,” cuts Harry down about his age, and dismisses Bill for dating a nightclub singer (her own mother!) despite family wealth. It’s a striking moment: Sophie’s search for identity starts not with yearning but with cutting others down. And that edge matters. Mamma Mia! is wrapped in ABBA’s glittery pop veneer, but beneath the sequins it’s a show about messy family dynamics—resentments, secrets, and disappointments. In “Gimme,” Sophie’s aggression exposes the irony at the heart of her quest: she’s searching for her parents while already lashing out exactly like the one who raised her.

ANSWERS TO REBUSES: 1. Hello, Dolly! (someone greeting Salvador DALI) 2. The Phantom of the Opera (TOM Cruise holding a FAN with OPRAH Winfrey)

The Broadway Maven is a vibrant educational community that helps its members think more deeply about musical theater. We offer 5-15 classes a month for just $25. We also foster enthusiasm for Broadway through the FREE weekly Substack newsletter MARQUEE and host an expansive YouTube channel. It’s your home for Broadway appreciation. Contact The Broadway Maven at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.

Broadway Maven YouTube Channel

Don’t let The King and I be a puzzlement for you! Ted Chapin, who ran the Rodgers & Hammerstein organization for 40 years, will be revealing the secrets of the musical duo’s 1951 Siam-set Broadway show at a FREE class on Monday, March 9 at Noon and 7 pm ET. After recent sparkling R&H classes, students have praised Ted’s deep insights, genial manner, and thoughtful presentations. Not to be missed.

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Shalom, Broadway lovers!

On this week’s marquee: A) An essay re-examining the opening lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind”; B) a StageStreams about the gay men who created West Side Story; C) a Broadway Blast about South Pacific; D) an “aptagrams” game in which you unscramble letters to find Broadway people whose careers match the original words; and E) a Last Blast about Sondheim and Lapine’s Into the Woods.

NOTE: We’re taking a bit of a detour this week. I’m re-examining a song that has only had a brief appearance on Broadway, as a part of Twyla Tharp’s 2006 Bob Dylan dance revue The Times They Are a-Changin’. Despite that slight musical theater connection, I’m excited about a theory I stumbled across while preparing to teach in French at a conference in Paris. I have decided to share it with my MARQUEE family before pursuing publication elsewhere. Enjoy!

ESSAY: We’ve been hearing the opening lines of “Blowin’ in the Wind” for sixty years. What if we haven’t quite heard them right?

Ever since the turbulent Sixties, Bob Dylan’s quiet but stirring anthem “Blowin’ in the Wind” has been interpreted as a double plea for progress on civil rights (”How many years can some people exist/Before they’re allowed to be free?”) and peace (”how many times must the cannonballs fly/Before they’re forever banned?”).

But the first two lines of the song:

How many roads must a man walk down
before you call him a man?

sound uncannily like a prelude to 1971’s extension of the vote to anyone of draft age.

A close look at Dylan’s text (along with what scholars call Reception Theory) suggests that the lines do indeed refer to voting, conscription, and the demand of the Baby Boomers to have a voice in setting national policy. Let’s start with a plain reading of the first two lines of the first hit of an essential musical voice of his generation.

Set aside everything you may have heard about the song’s civil-rights meaning (Blacks being called “boy,” for example, and human dignity itself) and look only at Dylan’s words. He asks how many roads a man must walk down before he is counted as an adult. The line is a prelude to one of his next major hits, “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” with its assertion of the surging voice of the Baby Boom Generation.

(There are other moments in “Blowin’” that underscore the same theme, such as when Dylan asks when a mountain gets washed to the sea. The erosion metaphor reinforces what Dylan’s peers might have called the “generation gap.”)

Now, moving on to lines 3-6 we see images of peace (a dove) and war (cannonballs), which may help explain why the song became an anti-Vietnam anthem. In fact, millions of Americans remember the song as a protest against the war in Indochina. But Dylan certainly did not write it as such, since it was composed in 1962 and published in 1963, and Vietnam did not become a topic of heated public debate until 1964. The dove and cannonballs may have referred to the Cold War in general, but not Vietnam.

And it doesn’t matter.

Reader Reception Theory sets aside author intent to ask how the work is perceived. In this case, “Blowin’ in the Wind” was sung at enough peace marches and other moments of anti-war solidarity that it became a Vietnam song. That counts for something. Indeed, today few people can hear the song without thinking about Vietnam (some people can’t think about Vietnam without remembering the song, either).

So let’s go back to the first two lines and apply Reader Reception Theory to them:

How many roads must a man walk down
before you call him a man?

This was the first question posed in the first major anthem of the emerging 1960s. Before the marches and the manifestos, and certainly before the Nobel Prize, there was this question. Its placement alone gives it unusual interpretive gravity.

In 1971, America passed the 26th Amendment to the Constitution, which lowered the voting age to 18. As the argument went, anyone old enough to fight and die for the country should have input as to the politicians making decisions about their fate. Before the Amendment passed, many young men were wondering how many roads they had to walk down before they would be called a man. I’ve seen no evidence people consciously connected this verse to conscription, but once raised it becomes compelling: in its own way, the song foreshadowed the enfranchisement of draft-age men nine years before it happened.

The history of “Blowin’ in the Wind” reminds us that songs acquire meanings their authors never script. A question posed in 1962 drifted through a decade of protest and war until it settled on a constitutional change. How many roads must a man walk down? For draft-age Americans in the late 1960s, the roads led through induction centers and into arguments about the ballot. By 1971, the answer was no longer abstract. Eighteen-year-olds entered the electorate, and a lyric that once floated in folk clubs found its echo in American law.

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APTAGRAMS: Unscramble these Broadway anagrams. Answers at the end of the issue, below the Last Blast:

1. KEYED THRUSTS (Broadway’s go-to accompanist)

2. RIME TIC (Brit with an urge to rhyme)

3. ERASABLE LIARS (a confessional songwriter whose characters mix themselves up)

4. DIG: RARER CHORDS (a daring composer)

5. ABLER NON-RESIDENT (globetrotting genius)

BROADWAY BLAST: “You’ve Got to be Carefully Taught” in South Pacific uses the passive voice, which is perfect for a show obsessed with passivity. Characters wait—for love to clarify itself, for war to end, for orders to arrive. No one acts; things happen to them. The lyric’s grammar mirrors that moral stance: racism, like war, is treated as something endured rather than chosen. The show’s tragedy isn’t hatred alone—it’s the habit of letting it happen.

StageStreams: There’s a Place for Us! This 27-minute video from the LGBTQ Classic Literature YouTube channel revisits West Side Story through the lens of its creators’ homosexuality. Lots of original gems here, including specific details about the romantic lives of Jerome Robbins, Arthur Laurents, Stephen Sondheim, and Leonard Bernstein, although some of the speculation as to gay overtones in songs like “Something’s Coming” seems a little overblown. Still, worth checking out.

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Join The Broadway Maven! Nowhere else online brims with this much Broadway content, and certainly not for so little (Membership is $25 a month for 5-15 compelling classes). Purchase a monthly or an annual plan. Cancel at any time. Sign up here:

Broadway Maven Membership

Note: A full calendar of upcoming classes is always available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.

• Sunday, March 8 Rodgers & Hart’s Broadway with UW Prof. David Armstrong, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, March 9 The King and I with Ted Chapin, Noon and 7 pm ET (FREE, Register HERE)

• Sunday, March 15 Waitress, Noon and 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, March 23 Introduction to Bock & Harnick with Steven Bell, 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Sunday, March 29 Rent with Mateo Chavez Lewis, 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Tuesday, March 31 Les Misérables, Noon and 7 pm ET (different classes). FREE, registration opens soon.

LAST BLAST: In “Children Will Listen” from Into the Woods, the Witch sings “Wishes come true, not free,” thus laying out the structure and theme of the entire show. We see wishes coming true in the first act, and then they become “not free” in the second act, during which we see the consequences of the choices the characters have made. The word “free” is doing double duty here. It means “without a cost,” which accounts for the losses that follow—but it also means “self-directed.” In the second act, the characters discover that once a wish is fulfilled, it no longer belongs to the wisher. The giantess doesn’t negate their choices; she enforces them. Into the Woods argues that agency exists only at the moment of wanting. After that, consequences take over—and they are anything but free.

ANSWERS TO GAME: 1. Seth Rudetsky 2. Tim Rice 3. Sara Bareilles 4. Richard Rodgers 5. Leonard Bernstein

The Broadway Maven is a vibrant educational community that helps its members think more deeply about musical theater. We offer 5-15 classes a month for just $25. We also foster enthusiasm for Broadway through the FREE weekly Substack newsletter MARQUEE and host an expansive YouTube channel. It’s your home for Broadway appreciation. Contact The Broadway Maven at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.

Broadway Maven YouTube Channel

Don’t let The King and I be a puzzlement for you! Ted Chapin, who ran the Rodgers & Hammerstein organization for 40 years, will be revealing the secrets of the musical duo’s 1951 Siam-set Broadway show at a FREE class on Monday, March 9 at Noon and 7 pm ET. After recent sparkling R&H classes, students have praised Ted’s deep insights, genial manner, and thoughtful presentations. Not to be missed.

Sign up for The King and I

Shalom, Broadway lovers!

On this week’s marquee: A) An essay criticizing (gasp) the plot of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The King and I; B) a fun and punny quiz about the names of Broadway shows; C) key information about the upcoming March 1 joint Purim Party with the Jewish Broadway Alliance; and D) a Last Blast about West Side Story.

ESSAY: With all her British propriety and prim whistling, is Anna of The King and I nonetheless carrying a dead gun? Well, if we asked a particular Russian playwright, the answer would be a firm yes.

Anton Chekhov famously argued that if a gun is hung on the wall in Act One, it must go off by Act Three. The principle isn’t about firearms; it’s about dramatic economy. Don’t introduce an object, idea, or tactic with conspicuous emphasis unless you intend to use it.

When Anna steps onto the deck of the ship and sings “I Whistle a Happy Tune,” she doesn’t merely express nervousness. She offers a method. Whistling, she tells her son, can banish fear. The act itself becomes a tool, a strategy, practically a spell. The show foregrounds it in its very first moments, making it seem like something we’ll need later.

And yet, when fear truly arrives—when Anna confronts the King’s authority, when cultural tensions escalate, when danger or humiliation loom—no one reaches for that tune. The whistling never returns as action. It functions as charming character exposition, yes, but not as deployed equipment. The “gun” is mounted, polished, and admired in the overture of the drama, then left unfired.

The problem wouldn’t be hard to solve. My proposal: show a scary (but somewhat funny) moment and have Louis respond by whistling the tune of the opening song. It’s a small moment, but satisfying and likely to spark laughter if done right.

In the musical theater canon, Chekhovian guns that go off can be deeply satisfying. Legally Blonde is a good example. Early in that show, Elle’s fluency in hair care reads as a joke at her expense, a shorthand for superficiality. The audience is trained to discount it, just as the characters do. But Legally Blonde knows better. By establishing Elle’s detailed understanding of perms—timing, chemistry, and process—it plants a competence that will later matter. In the trial, that dismissed knowledge cracks the case wide open. The victory doesn’t come from assimilation into legal culture, but from trusting the skill she already had. The detail introduced as fluff becomes the hinge of justice.

And then there’s Wicked. Early in the show, the seduction of Elphaba’s mother plays like dark fairy-tale texture. A mysterious stranger, a glowing green drink, a lapse that explains an unusual birth. It feels like mythic backstory—atmosphere rather than engine. But the show is getting us ready for a big reveal. That man isn’t anonymous. He’s not just flavor. He’s the Wizard, as we learn in Act Two. What once seemed ornamental becomes devastatingly specific. Elphaba’s conflict with power becomes a conflict with her own blood. Wicked‘s gun wasn’t a prop but a fact, hung on the wall so discreetly the audience barely noticed it.

To point out a dormant Chekhovian gun in The King and I is not to diminish Hammerstein’s genius, but to engage him on his own terms. He was a dramatist who trusted structure, and who believed that details should matter. “I Whistle a Happy Tune” plants more than charm; it plants a method. One small Second Act moment of whistling under pressure could transform it from a charm song to a plot hinge. The fix could be minor. The satisfaction would be major. Sorry, Oscar, but this time you forgot to pull the trigger.

Postscript: I put this question to Broadway Maven faculty member Ted Chapin, who spent forty years stewarding the Rodgers & Hammerstein canon. He reminded me that the opening number is reprised at the end of The King and I, when fear is acknowledged and Anna sings again. In that sense, the device is not forgotten. And yet the reprise arrives after the struggle has already played out. It consoles; it does not decide. The whistle never shapes a clash of wills, never changes a trajectory. Despite my impulse to defer to Mr. Hammerstein’s wisdom (and Ted’s!), I still think The King and I is missing an opportunity to do something wonderful that would make the libretto more satisfying and structurally complete.

NOTE: The Broadway Maven will be offering a FREE class about The King and I with Rodgers & Hammerstein expert Ted Chapin on Monday, March 9. Register here.

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QUIZ: Sharpen Your Pencils: A Broadway title twist stumper! Below are common words or definitions followed by a familiar phrase with one word missing. The missing word is the one-word title of a Broadway musical. Fill in the blank with the musical that completes the phrase naturally. Answers at the end of the issue, below the Last Blast. Example: Kind of stain (___ spot) → Grease

1. Abs (___ pack)

2. TV dinners, for example (___ food)

3. English rock supergroup (Bad ___)

4. Afro, for one (___ do)

5. Sharpshooter of note (___ Oakley)

6. Tulsa is one (___ city)

7. Canadian city (___, Ontario)

8. Cat’s supposed advantage (___ lives)

9. Queen, for example (___ piece)

10. Grocery item (___ fruit)

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Celebrate Purim with The Broadway Maven and Seth Rudetsky’s Jewish Broadway Alliance with a number of performances live-streamed from The Green Room 42 in Times Square. There will be spiels aplenty (songs with changed lyrics to tell the Book of Esther) and though we can’t share hamantaschen through the screen, you can enjoy while watching with some good company. While the event celebrates a Jewish holiday, people of all faiths are welcomed and encouraged to attend.

Get your ticket here! You can register to attend in person at The Green Room 42 (570 Tenth Avenue New York, NY 10036) or to watch from home with a livestream of the event. David will be attending in-person, so there’s an opportunity to meet The Broadway Maven himself.

Get tickets here!

The entire event serves as a fundraiser for the Jewish Broadway Alliance, a group founded by Seth Rudetsky that works to combat antisemitism and foster Jewish pride within the theater industry. Tickets are $19 whether attending in person or via the live stream and are available here.

Join The Broadway Maven! Nowhere else online brims with this much Broadway content, and certainly not for so little (Membership is $25 a month for 5-15 compelling classes). Purchase a monthly or an annual plan. Cancel at any time. Sign up here:

Broadway Maven Membership

Note: A full calendar of upcoming classes is always available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.

• Sunday, March 1 Purim Party fundraiser for the Jewish Broadway Alliance co-sponsored by the Broadway Maven, both in person in New York at The Green Room 42 (570 Tenth Avenue) or livestreamed. Get your ticket here!

• Tuesday, March 3 Guest speaker lyricist Lynn Ahrens (Ragtime, Anastasia, Once On This Island). Lynn is probably the most prominent and talented living Broadway lyricist of her generation, and she’ll be joining our class along with Mateo Chavez Lewis, Stacy Wolf, Gordon Cox, and others to discuss her body of work. Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Wednesday, March 4 La culture judéo-américaine pour les nuls (French-language lecture) Noon ET (open to the public, hit reply for an invitation)

• Sunday, March 8 Rodgers & Hart’s Broadway with UW Prof. David Armstrong, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, March 9 The King and I with Ted Chapin, Noon and 7 pm ET (FREE, Register HERE)

• Sunday, March 15 Waitress, Noon and 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, March 23 Introduction to Bock & Harnick with Steven Bell, 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

LAST BLAST: What if the real subject of the title of West Side Story isn’t “Story,” but “Side Story”? What if we think of “West” as just a geographical marker? Then, the title quietly insists that the lives unfolding onstage are marginal by design. These aren’t central figures in the city’s narrative; they’re gang members, immigrants, hoodlums—people history will not pause to record. That’s why the tragedy feels both operatic and disposable. Tony and Maria don’t sacrifice all to change the world; they collapse on its edges. The show borrows the grandeur of Romeo and Juliet, but its title reminds us that this version happens off to the side, where lives burn brightly, briefly, and without consequence to the larger order. The heartbreak of West Side Story isn’t just that Tony dies—it’s that the world barely notices.

ANSWERS TO QUIZ: 1. SIX 2. Frozen 3. Company 4. Hair 5. Annie 6. Oklahoma! 7. Hamilton 8. Nine 9. Chess 10. Passion

The Broadway Maven is a vibrant educational community that helps its members think more deeply about musical theater. We offer 5-15 classes a month for just $25. We also foster enthusiasm for Broadway through the FREE weekly Substack newsletter MARQUEE and host an expansive YouTube channel. It’s your home for Broadway appreciation. Contact The Broadway Maven at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.

Broadway Maven YouTube Channel

Don’t let The King and I be a puzzlement for you! Ted Chapin, who ran the Rodgers & Hammerstein organization for 40 years, will be revealing the secrets of the musical duo’s 1951 Siam-set Broadway show at a FREE class on Monday, March 9 at Noon and 7 pm ET. After recent sparkling R&H classes, students have praised Ted’s deep insights, genial manner, and thoughtful presentations. Not to be missed.

Sign up for The King and I

Shalom, Broadway lovers!

On this week’s marquee: A) A Broadway-themed crossword puzzle; B) a Broadway Blast about Les Misérables; C) a poll about dance-driven musicals; D) a StageStreams about a delightful video with fun facts about every Sondheim musical; and E) a Last Blast about Fiddler on the Roof.

CROSSWORD: This year’s Broadway Maven Crossword Puzzle focuses on anagrams related to a musical theater anagram-lover of note, along with dozens of fun Broadway-related clues like “Vegetable in Once Upon a Mattress“ and “McDonald with six Tonys.” Many thanks to George Barany for lending his puzzle prowess to MARQUEE for the second time. The puzzle is easy to solve online at this handy link.

How did you do? Leave a comment below with your solve time, any difficult corners, your favorite clues, etc. Happy puzzling!

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BROADWAY BLAST: In Les Misérables, love is consistently misaligned in time. Fantine loves too early, Éponine too late, Marius too suddenly. Jean Valjean, by contrast, does not love romantically at all—his most enduring love is paternal and moral, centered on Cosette and shaped by responsibility rather than desire. Because his love is patient, sustained, and unglamorous, it survives. The show suggests that tragedy isn’t loving wrongly—it’s loving out of sync with the world’s hourglass.

StageStreams: In this episode of “Ellie Talks Theatre,” the eponymous YouTuber runs down every Sondheim show with delightful trivia in a gorgeously produced and professionally presented video. (Well, except for her repeated botched pronunciation of names like Jule Styne and the Mizner brothers.) Some treats:

• The real reason “Mama’s Talking Soft” was cut from Gypsy
• The stage version of the TV musical Evening Primrose
• The 2013 all-male version of Company that Sondheim attended but rejected
• The two Oz witches who appeared in A Little Night Music

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Join The Broadway Maven! Nowhere else online brims with this much Broadway content, and certainly not for so little (Membership is $25 a month for 5-15 compelling classes). Purchase a monthly or an annual plan. Cancel at any time. Sign up here:

Broadway Maven Membership

Note: A full calendar of upcoming classes is always available at TheBroadwayMaven.com.

• Sunday, February 22 Evita, Noon and 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY) Note: this is part three of a five-part series on Andrew Lloyd Webber.

• Monday, February 23 CATS, Noon and 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY) Note: this is part four of a five-part series on Andrew Lloyd Webber.

• Tuesday, February 24 Lesser-known Lloyd Webber, Noon and 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY) Note: this is part five of a five-part series on Andrew Lloyd Webber.

• Tuesday, March 3 Guest speaker lyricist Lynn Ahrens (Ragtime, Anastasia, Once On This Island). Lynn is probably the most prominent and talented living Broadway lyricist of her generation, and she’ll be joining our class along with Mateo Chavez Lewis, Stacy Wolf, Gordon Cox, and others to discuss her body of work. Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Wednesday, March 4 La culture judéo-américaine pour les nuls (French-language lecture) Noon ET (open to the public, hit reply for an invitation)

• Sunday, March 8 Rodgers & Hart’s Broadway with UW Prof. David Armstrong, Noon ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

• Monday, March 9 The King and I with Ted Chapin, Noon and 7 pm ET (FREE, Register HERE)

• Sunday, March 15 Waitress, Noon and 7 pm ET. (MEMBERS ONLY)

LAST BLAST: During “If I Were a Rich Man” in Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye seems to cherish the idea of having the time he lacks “to sit in the synagogue and pray.” But Tevye prays all the time, engaging in literal conversation with God as he delivers his milk. The very song itself is a prayer! It’s not the activity of prayer Tevye wants. It’s the status to be able to do it in an honored place and without other activities getting in the way of his leisure.

The Broadway Maven is a vibrant educational community that helps its members think more deeply about musical theater. We offer 5-15 classes a month for just $25. We also foster enthusiasm for Broadway through the FREE weekly Substack newsletter MARQUEE and host an expansive YouTube channel. It’s your home for Broadway appreciation. Contact The Broadway Maven at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.

Broadway Maven YouTube Channel