Scene to Song August Newsletter
"Never have I asked an August sky where has last July gone?"
Scene to Song is back for August with an all-new episode. I’ve been calling this “Cats Summer” because of all the excitement around the new production of Cats: The Jellicle Ball at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York City. This production, which mixes Cats with Ballroom culture, has changed the way many people view Cats, and that’s what this episode gets into.
I’ve used the month of August to record more new episodes to be released in the coming months. I also visited the Oscar Hammerstein’s house at Highland Farm, which was wonderful. More info on that below.
I hope you are all enjoying the last weeks of summer. And if you are not yet subscribed to these emails and want to be, subscribe here:
— Shoshana
Recent Episodes
Scene to Song Episode 112: Andrew Lloyd Webber's Musical Cats Part 2
In this episode, writer Andi Carter discusses Andrew Lloyd Weber's 1981 musical Cats. Andi and I last talked about Cats in episode 32 in December of 2019. He returns to discuss how the new production of Cats: The Jellicle Ball at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in New York changes, or does not change, how we talk about Cats. There will be some small spoilers for this production. We also talk about the song "Moonfall" from Rupert Holmes's 1985 musical The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
Music played in this episode:
"Prologue: Jellicle Songs for Jellicle Cats" from Cats
"Moonfall" from The Mystery of Edwin Drood
Meet the Guests!
Andi Carter writes in all media for the stage including plays, comedy sketches, musicals, and operas. He holds an MFA in Musical Theatre Writing from NYU. He is a 2023-2025 librettist fellow with American Opera Projects. He is the founder and Artistic Director of Fish out of Water Productions, a cross-cultural theatre collective created in Beijing, China in 2008. He is a founding board member of Musical Theatre Factory which has developed hundreds of new musicals since 2014 including Broadway and Off-Broadway hits. He also enjoys making short films and was a 2021 Documentary Intensive fellow with BRIC Arts Media. He recently moved back to Pennsylvania to be close to family where he is the Lead Writing Tutor at Penn State Harrisburg.
Hometown: Denver, CO
Current Town: Harrisburg, PA
What are you Working on Right Now: I'm currently working on two short operas with my American Opera Projects (AOP) fellowship. One is about the first cat in space and the other is about the twin Mars rovers Opportunity and Spirit. We have a workshop reading in September and a public performance in May 2025.
What do you have coming up: Briana Harris and I host a monthly cabaret at Soho Playhouse featuring hot new musical theatre writers called "Verse Intro Cabaret." Follow us @verseintrocabaret on Instagram for more info on upcoming shows. Our next shows are September 8th and October 6th at 7:30pm.
Book, TV, film, or Theater Recommendation: Oh, Mary! changes lives, don't miss it! Also, Jen Tepper has a new book coming out in November called "Women Writing Musicals" that everyone should pre-order now.
Where can we find you online/social media: @andileecarter @verseintrocabaret on Instagram is where I am most active these days.
Musical of the Month
Bye Bye Birdie by Charles Strouse, Lee Adams, and Michael Stewart
One of musical theater’s greatest lyricist turned 100 last week. Lee Adams was born on August 14, 1924 in Mansfield, Ohio. He’s written many musicals, most with composer Charles Strouse, and his most popular is the late 50s rock musical Bye Bye Birdie (1960).
I think most theater kids know Bye Bye Birdie growing up. I remember being in a production at my day camp somewhere around age seven, singing “Put on a Happy Face” in a pavilion. My mom then took my sister and me to seeing the early 90s touring production with Tommy Tune and Ann Reinking. We had the movie, of course, and as a kid it was fun to see Albert as a chemist instead of an English teacher, even though that new ending with the speed-up pill is kind of silly.
One doesn’t think of Bye Bye Birdie as having great lyrics, but they are! For every “We hate you Conrad, oh yes we do” sung there is a gem like:
“What did he ever do for me?
Well, to be honest he was sometimes nice,
But still it wasn’t worth that awful price.
It was rough from the start
Broken dates, broken nails,
Broken heart.
How did I ever?
Why did I ever?
What did ever?”
— “What Did I Ever See in Him?”
“How Lovely to Be a Woman” is another favorite that perfectly captures the transition from pre-teen girlhood to full blown teenager, especially a teenager with confidence:
"How lovely to be a woman
And have one job to do:
To pick out a boy and train him,
And then one day you are through.
You’ve made him the man you want him to be.
Life’s lovely when you’re a woman like me.”
I took a class with Adams in graduate school and remember him saying that the song “Honestly Sincere” was difficult to write at first because he wasn’t a pop song writer, and it had to be a pop song. But then he started to have fun with it:
”When I sing about a tree
I really feel that tree!
When I sing about a girl,
I really feel that girl,
I mean I really feel sincere!”
I can just imagine how delighted he must have been to write the lines, “Hug me! Suffer!” later in the song.
But of course the greatest lyric line is in “Put on a Happy Face”:
“Take off that gloomy mask of tragedy,
It’s not your style.
You’ll look so good that you’ll be glad ya’ de-
cided to smile.”
I wrote it out as broken down that way so the rhyme is clear, but who rhymes “tragedy” and “glad ya de” as a hidden internal triple rhyme like that? Lee Adams.
I’ve seen Bye Bye Birdie many times. After my camp production and the early 90s tour, I saw it at my high school, my township summer program, and the 2009 Broadway revival. It may not be done as much anymore—it did not make the Top 10 of 2023’s Most Popular High School Shows—but it will still always be done, not just because there are a lot of parts for kids, making it a good choice for schools and camps, but because it’s good.
There aren’t any Scene to Song episodes on Bye Bye Birdie (let’s change that soon!), but there are some discussions on Lee Adams’s work on It's a Bird... It's a Plane... It's Superman in episode 56 on Adaptations of Comics in Musical Theater and on Applause in episode 73 on Evil Characters in Musical Theater.
Also in August…
August 1: Happy Birthday, librettist Michael Stewart (1929), Director/choreographer/ actor/dancer Geoffrey Holder (1930), and Composer/lyricist/bookwriter Lionel Bart (1930)! What a day! Celebrate by listening to a discussion on the character Bill Sykes from Lionel Bart’s Oliver in episode 73 on Evil Characters in Musical Theater and a discussion of Michael Stewart’s musicals with Jerry Herman—Hello, Dolly! and Mack and Mabel—in episode 34 on The Musicals of Jerry Herman.
August 9: Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's Jesus Christ Superstar opens in London (1972). Celebrate by listening to episode 55 on The Musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber.
August 12: Happy Birthday, director/choreographer/dancer/actor Michael Kidd (1919)! Celebrate his work by listening to episode 75 on Marvin Hamlisch, David Zippel, and Neil Simon’s The Goodbye Girl, which he directed.
August 14: Happy Birthday bookwriter Thomas Meehan! Celebrate Meehan’s work by listening to episode 56 on Adaptations of Comics in Musical Theater, as well as episode 79 on Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Mark O’Donnell, and Thomas Meehan’s Hairspray.
August 15: Hairspray opens on Broadway (2002). Listen to episode 79 on Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Mark O’Donnell, and Thomas Meehan’s Hairspray.
August 20: The Mikado opens on Broadway (1885). Listen to a discussion of the song the song "Alone, and yet Alive" from The Mikado in episode 22 on Representations of Judaism in Musical Theater.
August 21: Happy Birthday, lyricist Carolyn Leigh (1929) and Jerry Herman and Harvey Fierstein’s La Cage aux Folles opens on Broadway (1983) ! Celebrate Leigh’s work by listening to episode 61 on The Musicals of Cy Coleman and La Cage by listening to episode 34 on The Musicals of Jerry Herman.
August 25: Happy Birthday, composer Leonard Bernstein! Celebrate by listening to episode 104 on Leonard Bernstein's New York City and a discussion of his song “America” with lyricist Stephen Sondheim in episode 27 on Latinx Characters in Musical Theater.
August 31: Happy Birthday, lyricist/librettist Alan Jay Lerner (1918)! Celebrate his work by listening to episode 15 on The Musical My Fair Lady.
Find more musical theater history for August at musicals101.com.
New Musicals!
While Scene to Song mainly looks at musicals already part of the canon, I definitely want to highlight new musicals and musicals in development.
The Myth of the Mountain
Creative Team: Book and Lyrics by Danielle Koenig; Music by Justin D. Cook
Synopsis: A distant voice travels through the window… Our hero is woken with a start… A journey begins… The Myth of the Mountain is a fable-esque coming-of-age story about triplets Mia, Mateo, and Mo who live cut off from the outside world in their own structured life after the disappearance of their parents. After a distant song similar to one their parents used to sing wakes Mo in the middle of the night, they set out to find their parents at the peak of a nearby mountain, forcing their siblings to follow and turning their rigid world upside down.
Development History: February '22 - Reading - NYU Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program - New York, NY; May '22 - Reading - OPERA America - New York, NY; December '22 - Workshop - UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television - Los Angeles, CA; March '23 - Residency and Reading - Syracuse University's New Works, New Voices - Syracuse, NY; April '23 - Reading - The Forge Series - Minneapolis, MN; March ‘24 - Reading - Illusion Theatre and The Forge Series - Minneapolis, MN; March ‘24 - Reading - Broadway Inclusion Project - New York, NY
Listen to “Better Off” from The Myth of the Mountain.
Find out more about The Myth of the Mountain.
Something Wonderful
Some additional recommendations for August:
Podcast: The Wrong Cat Died. As I prepped for this month’s episode on Cats, I listened to a lot of podcast host Mike Abrams’s show The Wrong Cat Died, which interviews Cats cast members, superfans, and haters, and explores the backstories of the Jellicle characters all to make a case for why they were more worthy to ascend to the Heaviside Layer than Grizabella. The summer, Mike has been interviewing cast and creative team members from the production of Cats: The Jellicle Ball at the Perelman Performing Arts Center.
Short Musical: “21 Chump Street.” Guest Andi Lee Carter mentioned the short musical “21 Chump Street” in the Get to Know Our Guest questions in the latest episode, and I had never seen it. It’s a fourteen-minute one-act musical with book, music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda. The show was based on the second act of episode #457 of This American Life, titled "What I Did For Love," in which a high school student, Justin Laboy, falls in love with an undercover police officer, and is ultimately arrested for selling drugs to the officer in an attempt to impress her. The musical premiered in a showcase put on by This American Life on June 7, 2014, and broadcast as episode #528, "The Radio Drama Episode."
Field Trip: The Oscar Hammerstein Museum and Theatre Education Center. Last month I wrote here that I was going to Highland Farms in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the former home of Oscar Hammerstein II. The site now offers guided tours of his estate, where he penned the lyrics to many of his most famous works. I hope many people will have the opportunity to visit. The docents do a nice job guiding you through the house and Hammerstein’s life there. You see the room he slept in and died in, the room he wrote in, the room Sondheim occupied, and more. It’s a wonderful history that’s finally being preserved and made accessible to the public. Here is a writeup of the house and tours in Town Topics. For more photos and info on my visit, check out the Scene to Song Facebook page or Instagram
Hosted by writer Shoshana Greenberg, Scene to Song brings on a guest to talk about a musical, musical theater writer, or a topic or trend in musical theater. The theme music is by Julia Meinwald.
You can write to scenetosong@gmail.com with a comment or question about an episode or about musical theater, or if you’d like to be a podcast guest. Follow on Instagram at @ScenetoSong, on Twitter at @SceneSong, and on Facebook at “Scene to Song with Shoshana Greenberg Podcast.”
Shoshana Greenberg is a lyricist, librettist, singer, and theater journalist. Her musicals include Days of Rage with Hyeyoung Kim and Lightning Man with Jeffrey Dennis Smith. She has also written the opera “The Community” with Kevin Cummines. Her songs have been heard at venues from Lincoln Center to the Duplex, where she performed her one-woman show Not Coming Back. She’s written for American Theatre Magazine, is a contributing editor for the publication Musical Theater Today, and created and hosts the musical theater podcast Scene to Song. She holds an M.F.A. from the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program at NYU and a B.A. from Barnard College.