One Boss Thing
2017 was Broadway's best year in decades, grossing over $1.6 billion in ticket sales, the highest in its history. The highest average ticket price of $508 was brought in by
Springsteen on Broadway,
starring, of course, the Boss.
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Broadway!
June is for the Tony Awards. And, Rodgers and Hammerstein are still lighting up the great white way with the revival of their musical
Carousel, which stars the incomparable Renee Fleming and has garnered
11 Tony nominations for the 2017-2018 season. Todd Purdum, who usually writes on politics, has taken a break and is out with a new book,
Something Wonderful-Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway Revolution, which details the history of these two legends from the beginning of their partnership. From
Oklahoma
to South Pacific and Cinderella, it's a fascinating read.
Broadway wasn't all success as it turns out. There were flops, including
Pipe Dream, based on a short novel by John Steinbeck, titled
Sweet Thursday,
a sequel to
Cannery Row. The play closed within weeks, and worse, the team had turned down two other opportunities -
My Fair Lady and
Fiddler
on the Roof - to produce Pipe Dream! But even from the flops came some truly stunning songs. For example, in a 2012 off Broadway short run, Laura Osnes sings the haunting Everybody's Got a Home But Me.
Hear it here
We bet you've never heard it. We hadn't, but it's a gem of a song.
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Ringer Singers for a Requiem
On June 3, 2018 a few of the Rockbridge Chamber Singers had the opportunity to help out The Alleghany Highlands Chorale for a Sunday afternoon performance of Gabriel Faure's Requiem. Basses Chris Best and Ted Burrowes and sopranos Melissa Holland and Sue Ann Huger joined the Chorale at McAllister Memorial Presbyterian Church in Covington. Our accompanist on the organ was none other than William McCorkle, artistic director of the Rockbridge Choral Society. This was a talented group of about 19 singers, and we enjoyed being ringer singers. If you get a chance to hear this group or sing with them, don't miss it!
This June feels particularly poignant for musical memoriam. One could not escape the fifty year anniversary of the loss of both Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in April and Robert F. Kennedy in June of 1968. Faure wanted his Requiem to be one of consolation. Of his work, he once wrote, "Everything I managed to entertain by way of religious illusion I put into my
Requiem, which ... is dominated from beginning to end by a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest." Faure's mass for the dead is distinctly different from other works in this form in that it largely minimized the Dies Irae section and replaces it with the more consoling Pie Jesu and ends with the ethereal In Paradisum. Let angels lead them to their rest.
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