Reflections on Musicals

It is very obvious that I love NPR and I learn a lot from the podcasts that I listen to (just ask me about the tricks/car information I learned from Click and Clack) but one of my favorite things is being introduced to new (to me anyway) music and as I've been listening to a backlog of NPR podcasts, I've been introduced (and then obsessively humming) a few songs. The first one is music from the Broadway show "Promises, Promises". Terry Gross (of Fresh Air) interviewed Sean Hayes about his role in the revival of Promises, Promises and then she interviewed Burt Bacharach and Hal David (who wrote the music and lyrics) and played clips from the original recording. And the songs are really great, there are catchy and very obviously written by Burt Bacharach. But what made me fall in love with the songs is that there were sung by Lenny Briscoe in his previous life as Broadway regular, Jerry Orbach. So I invested about $4 in a CD of the original Broadway recording and besides containing a picture of a very young Jerry Orbach, just listening to him sing (as well as the rest of the cast) is making me very happy. The other musical discovery I have made in the past week (another one from Fresh Air) from a movie called Evening Primrose that was aired once (once!) on ABC Stage 67 in November 1966 with the music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim. It starred Anthony Perkins and the plot is that a poet named Charles (Perkins) decides to live in a department store after hours and discovers other people living in the store as well including a woman named Ella who has lived in the store since she was six. There is a beautiful duet called "Take me to the world" in which Ella tries to convince Charles to take her out of the store and live in the real world together. The song is so beautiful and memorable; Anthony Perkins had a really nice singing voice and the harmony in excellent. The movie has just been released on DVD (after a black a white 16mm was discovered) and the movie is at the top of my Netflix queue thanks to an introduction from Fresh Air (and I purchased a version of the song on iTunes).