“In Bye Bye Birdie, the 1960 musical about the coming of rock and roll to small-town America, the members of an Ohio family sing a song called “Hymn for a Sunday Evening” in which they tell of their abiding love for The Ed Sullivan Show, the Sunday-night TV variety show on which they are about to appear with Conrad Birdie, an Elvis Presley-like pop idol: “How could any family be/Half as fortunate as we?/We’ll be coast to coast/With our favorite host.” But while most people who see Bye Bye Birdie today know that Sullivan, unlike Birdie, was a real person and that Elvis Presley’s 1956 performances on his program were a watershed moment in the singer’s early career, the larger point of the song is lost on younger viewers, few of whom are aware of how central a role The Ed Sullivan Show once played in American culture…”

“The main reason why Yip Harburg is not generally known by name today is that Finian’s Rainbow is the only stage musical on which he worked that continues to be performed. The others, like most of the films to which he contributed lyrics in the Thirties and Forties, are now forgotten–and their failure to hold the stage says much about the artistic limitations of the otherwise greatly gifted man who helped bring them into being…”

“In 1964 a pianist with the unusual name of Thelonious Monk appeared on the cover of Time. He was only the fourth jazz musician to be so featured, and unlike his predecessors, Louis Armstrong, Dave Brubeck, and Duke Ellington, he was unknown to the public at large. Why, then, was he put on the cover of a newsmagazine written for a mass audience of middlebrows? Because he was an eccentric whose peculiarities made for good copy–a ‘mad genius,’ in Time’s words…”

“‘Lubitsch and Hitchcock, each with the stamp of a great personality on his work, are names not half as familiar to the American public,’ Vogue said of Sturges when Hail the Conquering Hero, his final hit, was released. Then the bottom fell out of his career, and after 1949 he never again worked in Hollywood. For years the movies that had made his reputation–crazy comedies with wild plots involving political graft, imprisonment on a chain gang, one-night-stand pregnancies, and false war heroics–were neglected, and even after home video gave them a second life, his reputation failed to return to its early heights…”

“To visit the Armstrong house, which is now a museum, is to see how its proud owner achieved ‘everything he has struggled for in life.’ It was the outward symbol of the lessons in life that he learned from Mayann, his devoted mother–and from the Jews of New Orleans, who helped teach him to return love for hatred and seek salvation in work…”

“Frank Loesser’s standing as a giant of American popular song would be secure even if he had written nothing but Guys and Dolls, one of a handful of postwar musicals to have received three Broadway revivals, the second of which ran almost as long as the original production. It is the quintessential Broadway show, a vade mecum of theatrical craft–and the long road that led Loesser to its opening night is in some ways as interesting as the show itself…”

“Could it be that Ayckbourn is ‘the Chekhov of our time,’ as Matthew Warchus, the director of the Old Vic revival of The Norman Conquests, has claimed? At the very least, I believe he is not a commercial playwright but a kind of poet, a craftsman of genius who never lets you forget for a moment that his often ludicrous characters, like Chekhov’s, are trapped in a world that has failed to live up to their expectations…”

“When the Santa Fe Opera commissioned The Letter in November of 2006, I’d never written a stage work of any kind (except for an unperformed play that rests at the bottom of a desk drawer, where it belongs). Instead, I had spent my career practicing a form of literary endeavor that most artists hold in contempt…”