I Just Can't Wait to be King Of Broadway

I spent the majority of today at work, which was quiet when I came in around 11:30, steady when I left at 5:30. I tried making a lime pie after work, but I wasn't paying attention to the mix and burned it, then put too much water in it. I hope it comes out ok anyway.

I did finish up the Broadway documentary today. The last two parts covering the 70s, 80s, 90s, and up through 2004 brought back a LOT of memories. I remember seeing commercials for Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, and City of Angels as a kid on Channel 9 and 11 and thinking that this was the height of New York glamor - the Broadway musical. I remember seeing Sweeney Todd on HBO when I was about 6, the original version with Angela Landsbury. Talk about nightmares! I still shudder when I think about that. (I never thought of Landsbury in quite the same way again.) I saw the "I Love NY" post-9/11 commercial with Nathan Lane when I was in college and remember how exciting it was, even after what had happened just across town from Times Square.

As much as I enjoyed it, there were a few things I would have liked to have seen covered more thoroughly. The two big ones were the American operettas of the teens and 20s and the musicals of Kurt Weill. The operettas of the 1910's and 20s were quite influential in their day (Sigmund Romberg wrote shows well into the 50s), and they're sweet guilty pleasures of mine. They could have at least talked about some of the bigger 20s shows, like New Moon and The Desert Song, or mentioned the European-based operettas that World War I swept away, like The Merry Widow. And Kurt Weill, who wrote the influential 30s and 40s shows Knickerbocker Holiday, Lady In the Dark, One Touch of Venus, Lost In the Stars, the opera Street Scene, and the German show The Threepenny Opera that has been successfully revived several times, isn't discussed at all. The only reference to Weill is Danny Kaye singing "Tchaikovsky" from Lady In the Dark over the closing credits of the last part.