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Jimmy Roberts is an American composer for the musical theater as well as a pianist and entertainer. His musical scores include: I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change (1996) [1] and The Thing About Men (2003), both with book and lyrics by Joe DiPietro. He is a 1977 graduate of the Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with the noted pianist, Constance Keene.
"I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change," nominated for Best Musical by both the Outer Critics Circle and the Drama Desk, became the second-longest running Off Broadway musical in theater history (6,000 performances), and was translated into numerous languages, including Chinese, Korean, Spanish, German, French, Catalan, Hebrew, Czech and Hungarian. "The Thing About Men" was voted Best Musical of the 2003/2004 season, by the New York Outer Critics Circle. His children's musical, "The Velveteen Rabbit" (1986, book and lyrics by James Still), toured the United States for a decade, and he contributed individual songs to two other Off Broadway revues, "A . . . My Name is Still Alice" and "Pets!" (lyrics by June Siegel). He also composed "The Truth About Light" (2007), with British playwright/lyricist, Warner Brown, which has not yet been produced.
Among his compositions are two commissioned works: "The Heart of the Matter" (2008), with words by poet Dana Gioia, performed at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; and "I Sing, I Pray" (2007), written for Cantor Roslyn Barak, Congregation Emanu-El, San Francisco. Mr. Roberts also created and performed special piano arrangements for the Grand Piano Marathon at Merkin Concert Hall (2008), and gave a lecture/demonstration at the Newark School of the Arts for the Leonard Bernstein 90th birthday celebration.
As a pianist and performer, Jimmy Roberts devises programs that blend classical and popular music (including Gershwin and Broadway), comedy and song. He has appeared at Merkin Concert Hall, the Time Warner Center, the 92nd Street Y, Steinway Hall and the "Music at Meyer" series in San Francisco. He was guest artist at the Newark School of the Arts in New Jersey, the Cab Calloway School of the Arts, in Wilmington, Delaware, and St. Francis College (Brooklyn). In the summer of 2010, he was guest artist at the inaugural season of the Buck Hill/Skytop Music Festival in Pennsylvania.
The original cast recordings for his shows were recorded on the following record labels: "I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change" (Varese-Sarabande Records); "The Thing About Men" (DRG Records). Both shows are administered by The Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization.
His newest musical, “Welcome to the Big Dipper,” written with librettists Catherine Filloux and John Daggett is slated for production in New York during the 2024/2025 season.
Jimmy Roberts was born in 1952 in New York City but was raised in the town of Great Neck, NY. He graduated from John. L. Miller Great Neck North High School in the Class of 1970. [2] Jimmy's grandfather was a cantor and rabbi and his grandmother played organ and piano. [3]
Carousel is the second musical by the team of Richard Rodgers (music) and Oscar Hammerstein II. The 1945 work was adapted from Ferenc Molnár's 1909 play Liliom, transplanting its Budapest setting to the Maine coastline. The story revolves around carousel barker Billy Bigelow, whose romance with millworker Julie Jordan comes at the price of both their jobs. He participates in a robbery to provide for Julie and their unborn child; after it goes tragically wrong, he is given a chance to make things right. A secondary plot line deals with millworker Carrie Pipperidge and her romance with ambitious fisherman Enoch Snow. The show includes the well-known songs "If I Loved You", "June Is Bustin' Out All Over" and "You'll Never Walk Alone". Richard Rodgers later wrote that Carousel was his favorite of all his musicals.
Jerome David Kern was an American composer of musical theatre and popular music. One of the most important American theatre composers of the early 20th century, he wrote more than 700 songs, used in over 100 stage works, including such classics as "Ol' Man River", "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man", "A Fine Romance", "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", "The Song Is You", "All the Things You Are", "The Way You Look Tonight" and "Long Ago ". He collaborated with many of the leading librettists and lyricists of his era, including George Grossmith Jr., Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, Dorothy Fields, Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin and Yip Harburg.
Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hammerstein II was an American lyricist, librettist, theatrical producer, and director in musical theater for nearly 40 years. He won eight Tony Awards and two Academy Awards for Best Original Song. Many of his songs are standard repertoire for vocalists and jazz musicians. He co-wrote 850 songs.
Richard Charles Rodgers was an American composer who worked primarily in musical theater. With 43 Broadway musicals and over 900 songs to his credit, Rodgers was one of the most well-known American composers of the 20th century, and his compositions had a significant influence on popular music.
Otto Abels Harbach, born Otto Abels Hauerbach was an American lyricist and librettist of nearly 50 musical comedies and operettas. Harbach collaborated as lyricist or librettist with many of the leading Broadway composers of the early 20th century, including Jerome Kern, Louis Hirsch, Herbert Stothart, Vincent Youmans, George Gershwin, and Sigmund Romberg. Harbach believed that music, lyrics, and story should be closely connected, and, as Oscar Hammerstein II's mentor, he encouraged Hammerstein to write musicals in this manner. Harbach is considered one of the first great Broadway lyricists, and he helped raise the status of the lyricist in an age more concerned with music, spectacle, and stars. Some of his more famous lyrics are "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", "Indian Love Call" and "Cuddle up a Little Closer, Lovey Mine".
Lorenz Milton Hart was an American lyricist and half of the Broadway songwriting team Rodgers and Hart. Some of his more famous lyrics include "Blue Moon"; "The Lady Is a Tramp"; "Manhattan"; "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered"; and "My Funny Valentine".
Oklahoma! is the first musical written by the duo of Rodgers and Hammerstein. The musical is based on Lynn Riggs' 1931 play, Green Grow the Lilacs. Set in farm country outside the town of Claremore, Indian Territory, in 1906, it tells the story of farm girl Laurey Williams and her courtship by two rival suitors, cowboy Curly McLain and the sinister and frightening farmhand Jud Fry. A secondary romance concerns cowboy Will Parker and his flirtatious fiancée, Ado Annie.
South Pacific is a musical composed by Richard Rodgers, with lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and book by Hammerstein and Joshua Logan. The work premiered in 1949 on Broadway and was an immediate hit, running for 1,925 performances. The plot is based on James A. Michener's Pulitzer Prize–winning 1947 book Tales of the South Pacific and combines elements of several of those stories. Rodgers and Hammerstein believed they could write a musical based on Michener's work that would be financially successful and, at the same time, send a strong progressive message on racism.
Rodgers and Hart were an American songwriting partnership between composer Richard Rodgers (1902–1979) and the lyricist Lorenz Hart (1895–1943). They worked together on 28 stage musicals and more than 500 songs from 1919 until Hart's death in 1943.
Rodgers and Hammerstein was a theater-writing team of composer Richard Rodgers (1902–1979) and lyricist-dramatist Oscar Hammerstein II (1895–1960), who together created a series of innovative and influential American musicals. Their musical theater writing partnership has been called the greatest of the 20th century.
Samuel Cohen, known professionally as Sammy Cahn, was an American lyricist, songwriter, and musician. He is best known for his romantic lyrics to films and Broadway songs, as well as stand-alone songs premiered by recording companies in the Greater Los Angeles Area. He and his collaborators had a series of hit recordings with Frank Sinatra during the singer's tenure at Capitol Records, but also enjoyed hits with Dean Martin, Doris Day and many others. He played the piano and violin, and won an Oscar four times for his songs, including the popular hit "Three Coins in the Fountain".
Robert Russell Bennett was an American composer and arranger, best known for his orchestration of many well-known Broadway and Hollywood musicals by other composers such as Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers.
Arthur Schwartz was an American composer and film producer, widely noted for his songwriting collaborations with Howard Dietz.
This is a selected list of the longest-running musical theatre productions in history divided into two sections. The first section lists all Broadway and West End productions of musicals that have exceeded 2,500 performances, in order of greatest number of performances in either market. The second section lists, in alphabetical order, musicals that have broken historical long run records for musical theatre on Broadway, in the West End or Off-Broadway, since 1866, in alphabetical order.
James Blanchard Hammerstein was an American theatre director and producer.
Robert L. Freedman is an American screenwriter and dramatist. He is best known for his teleplays for Rodgers & Hammerstein's Cinderella (1997) and Life with Judy Garland: Me and My Shadows (2001), and for his Tony-winning book and lyrics of A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder (2014).
Joe DiPietro is an American playwright, lyricist and author. He is best known for the Tony Award-winning musical Memphis, for which he won the Tony Awards for Best Book of a Musical and Best Original Score as well as for writing the book and lyrics for the long-running off-Broadway show I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change.
David Loud is an American music supervisor, music director, conductor, vocal and dance arranger, pianist and actor. He is best known for his collaborations with and interpretations of the music of both Kander and Ebb and Stephen Sondheim.
Andrew Gerle is an American composer and pianist known for his musical adaptation of "Meet John Doe" with librettist Eddie Sugarman which premiered at the Ford's Theater in Washington. He is the recipient of four Richard Rodgers Awards administered by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Jonathan Larson Grant. His opera "The Beach", a collaboration with librettist Royce Vavrek was presented on May 14, 2011 as part of New York City Opera's VOX Contemporary American Opera Lab.
A Perfect Match is a 1988 album by jazz pianist George Shearing and the singer Ernestine Anderson. The pair had previously appeared together on Shearing's 1988 live album Dexterity.
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