December 2011
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WEST SIDE STORY: The Making of a Classic
It was September 26, 1957, and something great was coming that evening: a Broadway musical unlike any that had come before. “I thought West Side Story was going to be a flop,” says Arthur Laurents, who wrote the book of the new show. “I thought maybe it would run for three months. I didn’t care. It was so not what a musical should be.” That was evident to audiences from the outset. West Side Story...
Dec 12th
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Dec 9th
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What’s In A Name? Plenty if you’re Dickens
by Douglas Langworthy for Applause magazine Dickens had a way with names. They were much more than personal identifiers for him; they were expressions of a character’s personality, often served up with a comic twist: Sloppy, Wopsie, Bumble, Polly Toodle, the Squeers, Uriah Heep, Pumblechook—and on and on. In A Christmas Carol, the name Scrooge, with its initial twisted clump of consonants and...
Dec 1st
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