All tagged Cy Coleman

Playlist: Cy Coleman — A Broadway Celebration

Playlist: Cy Coleman — A Broadway Celebration

Mark Robinson
Music That Makes Me Dance

Cy Coleman was always one of Broadway’s most eclectic composers, working with many lyricists and employing musical styles that stretch from jazz to operetta, country to pop. Even with all this variety, his music always had that key ingredient of every great showtune: it told a story. This playlist is a celebration of some of Coleman’s best ditties, culled from the likes of Little Me, Wildcat, Sweet Charity, Seesaw, On the Twentieth Century, I Love My Wife, Barnum, City of Angels, The Will Rogers Follies, and The Life. I hope you’ll enjoy his songs as much as I do.

Remembering Seesaw

Remembering Seesaw

Mark Robinson
Music That Makes Me Dance

A musical that was plagued with troubles during its gestation, that seemed to solve most of them before officially opening on Broadway, only to fold after approximately five months, was the 1973 Seesaw. Adapted from the William Gibson play Two for the Seesaw, with a book by Michael Bennett and a score by Dorothy Fields and Cy Coleman, Seesaw originally had a book by Michael Stewart, direction by Edwin Sherin, and was to star Lainie Kazan. As the musical’s hit song exclaims, however, “It’s Not Where You Start, It’s Where You Finish” and the show would arrive on Broadway with a very different cast of characters involved.

Remembering I Love My Wife

Remembering I Love My Wife

Mark Robinson
Music That Makes Me Dance

Some musical are period pieces, written with the intention of telling a story in another and place. Other musicals are written as contemporary stories, starting out relevant and feeling edgy and new, only to become dated quickly. Their shelf-life is short for the reason that times change, attitudes change, vernacular changes, and what is relevant today could be irrelevant tomorrow. One musical that enjoyed popularity when it opened in the `1970s, but that hasn’t exactly held up against the test of time is I Love My Wife. 

Remembering Barnum

Remembering Barnum

Mark Robinson
Music That Makes Me Dance

Long before there was a film called The Greatest Showman, Broadway had its own musical version of the life of P.T. Barnum. This show, simply called Barnum, featured a score with music by Cy Coleman (Sweet Charity, City of Angels), lyrics by Michael Stewart (I Love My Wife) and a book by Mark Bramble (42ndStreet). Using the three-ring circus as the conceit for telling Barnum’s rise to fame as the King of Flim-Flam, much in the way Cabaret was set within a cabaret and Chicago within the confines of a vaudeville show, Barnum utilized its setting as a metaphor the risks that come with becoming a success, walking that proverbial tightrope known as “life”. 

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