Productions
The Golden Apple was one of the first musicals produced Off-Broadway at the Phoenix Theatre, where it opened on March 11, 1954. [1] The musical transferred to Broadway on April 20, 1954, to the Alvin Theater where it played for only 125 performances despite rave reviews. The original production starred Kaye Ballard as Helen and Stephen Douglass as Ulysses. [2] It was the first Off-Broadway show to win the Best Musical award from the New York Drama Critics' Circle. While Latouche's lyrics are much praised, Steven Suskin wrote: "The Golden Apple benefits from imaginative theatricality in all departments but it was the more-than-glorious score that carried this brilliant musical theatre experiment from Off Broadway to the Alvin", a Broadway theater. [3]
The musical is through-composed and exhibits features similar to more operatic musicals like Porgy and Bess , The Mother of Us All , Candide , and The Most Happy Fella . [4] Jerome Moross was a classical composer of concert music and ballets, as well as a highly appreciated film score. Though the show is held in high esteem by devotees of musical theater, the full score was not commercially recorded until 2015 and the show has never been revived on Broadway. The musical is remembered in part for introducing the standard "Lazy Afternoon," sung by Ballard, and its fantastical, suggestive settings by William and Jean Eckart. [5]
The musical was presented Off-Broadway in 1961 at the Equity Library Theatre, and in 1962 it was produced at the York Playhouse. Both productions were directed by Robert Ennis Turoff and starred Roberta MacDonald as Helen and Stan Page as Ulysses. [6]
The musical continues to receive occasional productions. For example, a 1990 production by the York Theater Company in New York featured Muriel Costa-Greenspon. [7] The work was produced in 1995 by Light Opera Works in Chicago, Illinois [8] and in 2006 by the 42nd Street Moon Company in San Francisco, California. [9] The Shaw Festival, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, Canada, presented a staged concert in October 2006. [10]
The complete piano-vocal score was published for the first time in 2009 by Alfred Music Publishing. In October 2014 the Lyric Stage in Dallas, Texas, presented the first performances with full orchestra since the show's Broadway run. [11] On February 8, 2015, Los Angeles' Musical Theatre Guild performed a one-night engagement of The Golden Apple with full orchestra at the Moss Theatre in Santa Monica. [12]
It was presented as part of the New York City Center "Encores!" staged concert series from May 10–14, 2017. [13] [14]
Anyone Can Whistle is a musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and a book by Arthur Laurents. Described as "a satire on conformity and the insanity of the so-called sane," the show tells a story of an economically depressed town whose corrupt mayor decides to create a fake miracle in order to attract tourists. The phony miracle draws the attention of an emotionally inhibited nurse, a crowd of inmates from a local asylum, and a doctor with secrets of his own.
Charles Strouse is an American composer and lyricist best known for writing the music to such Broadway musicals as Bye Bye Birdie, Applause, and Annie.
John Treville Latouche (La Touche) (November 13, 1914, Baltimore, Maryland – August 7, 1956, Calais, Vermont) was a lyricist and bookwriter in American musical theater.
Jeanine Tesori, known earlier in her career as Jeanine Levenson, is an American composer and musical arranger best known for her work in the theater. She is the most prolific and honored female theatrical composer in history, with five Broadway musicals and six Tony Award nominations. She won the 1999 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a Play for Nicholas Hytner's production of Twelfth Night at Lincoln Center, the 2004 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music for Caroline, or Change, the 2015 Tony Award for Best Original Score for Fun Home, making them the first female writing team to win that award, and the 2023 Tony Award for Best Original Score for Kimberly Akimbo. She was named a Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist twice for Fun Home and Soft Power.
Juno is a musical with music and lyrics by Marc Blitzstein and book by Joseph Stein, based closely on the 1924 play Juno and the Paycock by Seán O'Casey. The story centers on the disintegration of an Irish family in Dublin in the early 1920s, during the Irish War of Independence. Juno is a hardworking matriarch who strives to hold her family together in the face of war, betrayal, and her worthless husband's drinking.
Stephen Douglass was an American actor-singer.
Dames at Sea is a 1966 musical with book and lyrics by George Haimsohn and Robin Miller and music by Jim Wise.
Contact is a musical "dance play" that was developed by Susan Stroman and John Weidman, with its "book" by Weidman and both choreography and direction by Stroman. It ran both off-Broadway and on Broadway in 1999–2002. It consists of three separate one-act dance plays.
Kaye Ballard was an American actress, comedian, and singer.
Jerome Moross was an American composer best known for his music for film and television. He also composed works for symphony orchestras, chamber ensembles, soloists and musical theater, as well as orchestrating scores for other composers.
Billion Dollar Baby is a musical with the book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and the score by Morton Gould. Comden and Green were fresh from their success with On the Town, and the production team was something of an On the Town reunion: once again, George Abbott directed and Jerome Robbins choreographed.
Stuart Ostrow is an American theatrical producer and director, professor, and author.
Steven Sater is a Tony Award, Grammy Award, and Laurence Olivier Award-winning American poet, playwright, lyricist, television writer and screenwriter. He is best known for writing the book and lyrics for the Tony Award-winning 2006 Broadway musical Spring Awakening.
Don Walker was a prolific Broadway orchestrator, who also composed music for musicals and one film and worked as a conductor in television.
Michael Elder Rourke, who assumed the pen name Herbert Reynolds in 1913, was an Irish-American lyricist. Reynolds wrote the lyrics to Jerome Kern's first big hit, "They Didn't Believe Me", interpolated into the 1914 American version of The Girl from Utah, produced by Charles Frohman. The show had a successful run of 140 performances at the Knickerbocker Theatre, opening on August 14, 1914. Frohman had hired the young Kern to write five new songs for the score together with Reynolds to strengthen what he felt was a weak first act. Julia Sanderson and Donald Brian starred in the production.
Milton Rosenstock was an American conductor, composer, and arranger.
Fun Home is a musical theatre adaptation of Alison Bechdel's 2006 graphic memoir of the same name, with music by Jeanine Tesori, and book and lyrics by Lisa Kron. The story concerns Bechdel's discovery of her own lesbian sexuality, her relationship with her closeted gay father, and her attempts to unlock the mysteries surrounding his life. It is told in a series of non-linear vignettes connected by narration provided by the adult Alison character.
Steven Suskin is an American theater critic and historian of musical theater. He is a member emeritus of the New York Drama Critics' Circle.
The Phoenix Theatre was a pioneering off-Broadway theatre in New York City, extant from 1953 to 1982. The Phoenix was founded by impresario Norris Houghton and T. Edward Hambleton. The project was a pioneering effort in the establishment of off-Broadway theatre. Houghton and Hambleton wanted a theatre away from Times Square, that would host a permanent company, abjure the star system, produce four or five plays a season for limited engagements, and with ticket prices much lower than on Broadway.
