Posts by Doug Reside

Original Cast of Fiorello! / Photo by Joseph AbelesWhen Jerry Bock died in 2010, his papers (drafts, correspondence, business records, etc.) came to the library as he had planned. A year or so later, his friend and lawyer, Richard Ticktin, compiled many of Bock's personal audio recordings onto a hard drive and passed a copy to the library. While we are still in the process of processing and preserving this material, I'm very excited today to share with you a preview of the treasures in this collection. Using the library's player below, you can listen to three tapes Bock made while 

A guest post by Ben West of UnsungMusicalsCo.

The cast of Are You With It? (Photo by The Graphic House)November 1945. The New York Post calls it "a long-awaited musical comedy hit;" Universal purchases the film rights for more than $100,000; and The New York Times urges its readers to "hurry, hurry folks and get your tickets. On second thought, it probably isn't necessary to break a neck: this carnival should be hereabouts for a long time to come."

If you've never heard of this raucous entertainment 

UPDATED: September 25, 2013

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts is excited to announce the first ever meetup for participants in the musical theater writing game, Across A Crowded Room. 

Participants have been placed into nine groups, each with a composer, a lyricist, a book-writers, and a singer, and given 10 days to a plot a synopsis with song titles and at least one complete song (with music and lyrics) in response to the prompt:  

Write a musical set during the 2013 NYC mayoral 

A guest post by Ben West of UnsungMusicalsCo.

Between March 1946 and December 1948, six highly successful musical revues opened on Broadway, playing a combined total of 2,653 performances and marking a brief resurgence of the once fashionable form. The rapturous response to these half-dozen hits was quite likely the driving force behind the pack of ten new entries that stormed the scene in the three years that followed (1949-1951).

However, with the exception of the Bert Lahr-Dolores Gray vehicle

Photo by The Graphic House (Theater Photo Collection B)A guest post by Ben West of UnsungMusicalsCo.

When I was approached about recording Barefoot Boy With Cheek, I jumped at the opportunity. Based on the best-selling novel by Tony Award nominee Max Shulman, the zany 1947 romp has quickly become one of my favorite musicals. Sidney Lippman and Sylvia Dee's score is top-drawer Broadway brass and Mr. Shulman's book is both endlessly witty and brilliantly constructed. Yet, the original George Abbott production never received a cast album. Barefoot Boy is truly an unsung musical. As 

The Wizard of Oz in the BookReaderIn 2005, the Internet Archive released the first version of their BookReader, a web widget that allows a user to flip through images of book pages with an animation that suggests the turning of physical paper. The current version also allows you to view the images as set of thumbnails or as a vertically scrolling set of page images (like a PDF). The code is open source and written in JavaScript (a computer language that runs entirely in the web browser), so it's very easy to install the widget on 

Musical theater is an exceptionally collaborative art form, and finding the right collaborator can be as complicated as dating. Although New York City is filled with hopeful musical theater writers and composers, it is also, as Sondheim's Marta sings in Company, "a city of strangers" where making connections of any kind can be difficult.

However, part of the mission of the New York Public Library is to "strengthen our communities," and so today I am pleased to announce Across A Crowded Room a summer project that I hope will strengthen the 

Photo by The Graphic House (Theater Photo File B)A guest post by Ben West

“A young alumnus of the University of Minnesota and an old hand from Harvard and Broadway have turned out a wonderfully amusing musical comedy called Barefoot Boy With Cheek. A horde of exuberant young singers, dancers and actors, all of them bursting with vigor and brimming with talent, bounced it around the stage of the Colonial Theatre last night and rolled the customers out into the aisles. It’s the newest of the hits and one of the happiest.”

A guest post by Ben West.

The Company (Photo by Dixie Sheridan)Strange as it may seem given its frank narrative and its traditional sound, The Fig Leaves Are Falling is not a conventional musical. This colorful, vivacious and disarmingly sweet 1969 confection is—at its core and in its construction—a unique and exciting entertainment that marvelously straddles the worlds of 1960s musical comedy and 1940s revue. It was, in fact, Fig Leaves' 

I'll be posting a April's Musical of the Month later this week, but before I do, I wanted to share the results of a little experiment.

I recently discovered a new music streaming subscription called Rdio which, for a monthly subscription fee (currently about $5), allows one unlimited access to all of the songs in their catalog. It's more or less the same idea as Spotify, but with one really cool feature for programmers: an open and easy to use API (application programming interface) for playing music within 

The New York Public Library is pleased to announce the release of its Digital Collections API (application programming interface). This tool allows software developers both in and outside of the library to write programs that search our digital collections, process the descriptions of each object, and find links to the relevant pages on the NYPL Digital Gallery. We are very excited to see what the brilliant developers who use our digital library will create. In the following post, Digital Curator for the Performing Arts, Doug Reside, reflects on 

The 1915 cast of Very Good Eddie (White Studio / Theater B Files)Last August, musical theater historian Laura Frankos detailed the history of the Princess Musicals in her introduction to Oh, Boy! This month's musical, Very Good Eddie, was the second of this set of smaller-and-smarter musicals produced at the Princess Theater on 39th street (following Nobody's Home and immediately preceding Oh, Boy!).

The musical is an adaptation of Over Night, a play written by co-bookwriter, Philip Bartholomae, 

A guest post by UnsungMusicalsCo director, Ben West

The CompanyPhotograph © Dixie Sheridan Currently in its fifth year, UnsungMusicalsCo. (UMC) is a not-for-profit production company that I founded with the aim of researching, restoring and presenting obscure but artistically sound works from the Golden Age of musical theatre. It should be noted upfront that I am perhaps more liberal than most in my definition of the Golden Age, by which I mean those 40 glorious years between the Follies: Mr. Florenz Ziegfeld's in 1931 and Mr. Stephen 

A guest post by Levi Branson

Ernest Torrence and the chorus (Theater Photo File B)

By 1920 Jerome Kern had achieved success as a noteworthy American composer with a uniquely American career. His melodies graced many entertainment platforms, but he was most prominently represented on the musical stage. His early composing career included scores for the successful Princess Theatre musicals as well as song interpolations into others' musicals. In 1919 a Charles Dillingham production paired him with a songwriter and librettist who would become a frequent collaborator in the 

A guest post by Maya Cantu

Marilyn Miller in "Sally" "America at the close of the Great War was a Cinderella magically clothed in the most stunning dress at the ball... immense gains with no visible price tag seemed to be the American destiny," as historian Ann Douglas has noted. In the expansively optimistic and prosperous America of 1920, there could hardly have been a musical — or heroine — more suited to its times than Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton's Sally, a Jazz Age Cinderella story clothed in opulent enchantment.

At the dawn of the