Archives for May 20, 2019

I made up my own Broadway-musical sort-of-meme in 2009 when I compiled an annotated list of “fifteen American musicals that I believe to be of indisputably permanent interest.” Here, conversely, is a real meme, plucked from the Web over the weekend and posted solely for your amusement:

• MUSICAL I HATE: Promises, Promises

• MUSICAL I THINK IS OVERRATED: Hello, Dolly!

• MUSICAL I THINK IS UNDERRATED: Giant

•  MUSICAL I LOVE: On the Town, She Loves Me (tie)

• MUSICAL I CHERISH: The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee

• MUSICAL I COULD LISTEN TO ON REPEAT: Guys and Dolls

• MUSICAL I WANT TO DO: Floyd Collins, Follies (tie)

• MUSICAL THAT MADE ME FALL IN LOVE WITH MUSICALS: A Little Night Music

• MUSICAL THAT CHANGED MY LIFE: The Fantasticks

• GUILTY PLEASURE: I don’t do guilty pleasure—if I like something, it’s good

• MUSICAL I SHOULD HAVE SEEN BY NOW BUT HAVEN’T: You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown

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Laura Benanti sings “Vanilla Ice Cream” in the PBS Great Performances telecast of the 2016 Broadway revival of She Loves Me, written by Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joe Masteroff:

Maria Tallchief, André Eglevsky, and members of New York City Ballet dance the second movement from George Balanchine’s Scotch Symphony, set to excerpts from Mendelssohn’s Third Symphony. Both dancers created their roles in the ballet, choreographed by Balanchine in 1952. This performance was originally telecast by NBC on April 9, 1959, as part of an episode of The Bell Telephone Hour. The conductor is Donald Voorhees:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity.”

Albert Einstein, “Self-Portrait”