One Musical a Week

Pal Joey opened on Christmas night in 1940, and the critic everyone read the next morning could not bring himself to enjoy it. Brooks Atkinson of The New York Times called it "a joyless book about a s…

Anything Goes opened at the Alvin Theatre on 21 November 1934, ten weeks after a real ocean liner called the Morro Castle burned off the New Jersey coast and killed 137 people. The musical comedy that…

Cabaret opened at the Broadhurst Theatre on 20 November 1966 in a room that showed the audience itself. The curtain was already up when people came in, and where the stage should have been there was a…

Gypsy opened at the Broadway Theatre on 21 May 1959 and was nominated for eight Tony Awards. It won none of them. Six decades on, critics call it the greatest American musical ever written, and the ro…

Show Boat opened on Broadway on 27 December 1927, and it is the show that decided what a Broadway musical was allowed to be about. It put a serious American story on a stage that had been built for re…

Chess arrived on a stage by way of a record. Tim Rice, Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus built a Cold War story about two grandmasters and the woman caught between them, released it first as a double…

Passing Strange starts with a young musician leaving Los Angeles in search of “the real.” The musical turns that journey into a collision between autobiography, rock performance, and theatre: the more…

Ragtime brings three fictional American lives into the same country at the dawn of the twentieth century: a wealthy white family in New Rochelle, a Black pianist and his beloved Sarah, and a Jewish im…

Pacific Overtures looks at Japan’s forced opening to Western trade from the Japanese side of the story. Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman built the musical as a sequence of stylized scenes rather than…

The Secret Garden turns a locked door, a grieving family, and a child’s stubborn curiosity into a lush stage musical. Based on Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel, the 1991 Broadway adaptation brought tog…

The Band’s Visit is a musical about a wrong turn that becomes a night of attention. An Egyptian police band arrives in Israel expecting to perform at a cultural centre, but a mix-up sends the musician…

A Chorus Line turned the audition room into the main event. This episode follows the show from Michael Bennett’s interview sessions with Broadway dancers to the Public Theater and Broadway, then looks…