"Show and Tell: The New Book Of Broadway Anecdotes" by Ken Bloom

This book is a "find". There are so many stories and anecdotes about the Broadway community. Here are a few:

"When Jerome Robbins first heard the song "Everything's Coming Up Roses", he said, "I don't get it. Everything's coming up Rose's what?"

The most notable investment by a record company was Columbia Records' Goddard Lieberson, who put up $375, 000 for the entire capitalization of "My Fair Lady", plus another $40, 000 for producing the original cast recording. It is estimated that the LP alone earned over 50 million dollars.

The Angela Lansbury revival of "Gypsy" was in Chicago and one of the newsboys didn't have a boyfriend. So, after one of the performances, Lansbury went to a gay bar with other members of the cast and that night there was a knock on the cast member's door. There was Angela Lansbury with some guy whom she pushed into the room and said, "Have a good time."

But if you had sex while on the road, the rule was you could never talk about it to anyone. Yet another rule was that you had to buy donuts for the entire company. So, if you went down to breakfast and there were donuts, you knew someone had hooked up the night before.

When Lauren Bacall took a vacation from "Woman Of The Year", Raquel Welch replaced her, got rave reviews and did great business. Bacall was furious that anyone else could be successful in her role.

I mean, there are at least two numbers in The Wiz that Smalls didn't write... "Everybody Rejoice" (a/k/a "Brand New Day" was by Luther Vandross, and the "Emerald City Ballet" was by George Faison and Timothy Graphenreed.

I mean, as Jeremy Aufderheide's book on The Wiz recounts, there were several attempts at the show with various songwriters on producer Ken Harper's part, but that doesn't mean Smalls was a front. Ridiculous.

g.d.e.l.g.i. said: "Speaking of Jeremy, I put the question re:The Wizto him in the early hours of this morning, and he had this to say:

"'A bunch' of songwriters is not accurate. A couple is accurate. Originally, they wanted to bring in pop writers to each write a song or two. I think that some of that happened -- at the very least, people were deciding on titles, because there's a list of song titles in my book for songs, but it's not clear if the songs were ever written. Then they met Charlie Smalls. Charlie Smalls wrote almost all of the songs; Luther Vandross wrote 'Brand New Day,'Timothy Graphenreed and Harold Wheeler wrote 'Tornado,'and George Faison and Timothy Graphenreed wrote the 'Emerald City Ballet.'

Ken Harper was sued by a woman who claimed she wrote 'Day Before Yesterday.' And an 'unnamed source'(a household name who has it on good authority) tells me that it was definitely written by someone else [not the one who sued]. Since I couldn't verify it, it's not in the book.

Ken Bloom should really qualify it, though. He's spreading rumors and doing a huge disservice to Charlie Smalls.""

THANKS for this.