The Notables

Fall 2009 Program--Show People

Program Notes

• Another Op’nin’, Another Show is the opening number from Cole Porter’s 1948 last and best musical show Kiss Me Kate, which is a back-stage story about putting on a play, in this case Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore are some cities where new shows are "tried out", or, as we might say today, "beta tested", before they are put in final form and open on Broadway in New York. The last lyric line "On with the show!" is taken from the song "There's No Business Like Show Business", which Irving Berlin wrote for Annie Get Your Gun.
• The Ballad of Sweeney Todd is the opening number from the 1979 show Sweeney Todd, with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, based on the legend of the London barber who murdered a series of clients.
  • Fleet Street is a street in the City of London, which originally connected the City with Westminster. At the boundary between the City and Westminster is the Temple bar; Fleet Street continues in Westminster as The Strand. Starting in the 1500s Fleet Street became the center of the London press. By the 1980s most of the news offices had moved elsewhere, but Reuters was there until 2005. Today Fleet Street is the location of the law courts and many barristers' offices.
• Cinderella is the only musical Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote for television. It was first broadcast live on March 31, 1957, on CBS TV, and starred Julie Andrews in the title role. Ms Andrews, who was playing Eliza in My Fair Lady on Broadway at the time, noted that more people saw her on TV in that one night than saw the entire run of  My Fair Lady. The production also featured Edith Adams as the fairy godmother, and Kaye Ballard and Alice Ghostly as the stepsisters. Afterwards the show was produced on stage. CBS made another production in 1965 which "introduced" Lesley Anne Warren in the title role. The story was altered somewhat. It was not broadcast live, but was recorded on video tape to be broadcast later. A third TV production was made in in 1997 starring Brandy in the title role and featuring Jason Alexander, Whoopi Goldberg, Whitney Houston, and Bernadette Peters. Ten Minutes Ago is the waltz the prince and Cinderella sing to each other as the dance at the ball. 
• Show Off is from the 1998 Broadway show The Drowsy Chaperone, called "a musical within a comedy". It is a parody of many Broadway clichés. The song "Show Off" concerns a lead chorus girl Janet Van De Graaff who wants to quit the chorus line to marry her millionaire fiancé. But her boss Mr Feldzieg hires some gangsters to prevent her marriage. The words the Broadway version are a bit racier than what we sing here. Feldzieg is a transformation of (Florenz) Ziegfeld, whose Ziegfeld follies was produced on Broadway every year from 1907 to 1927. The shows were elaborate revues without much plot and featured many beautiful chorus girls, known as Ziegfeld girls.
  • Page Three refers to British tabloids that feature a topless girl on their third page.
• The musical show Young Frankenstein is based on the film of the same name.
  • Transylvania is a region now part of Romania that had been a part of Hungary for many years. At the end of the medieval period, the area was inhabited by Hungarians, Romanians, and Germans (Saxons), but was politically attached to Hungary. When King Louis II of Hungary was killed fighting the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Mohacs, Ferdinand of Habsburg, the ruler of Austria, claimed the Hungarian throne. But the governor of Transylvania, John Zapolya, disputed this. At the end of the war, the wreck of the Hungarian state was divided: the Austrians got a strip in the west, the Turks took central Hungary, and Transylvania was made an autonomous principality under Turkish suzerainty, with John II, Zapolya's son, as prince. It was during this time that Transylvania acquired a reputation of being a mysterious land. Bram Stoker's Dracula was based on such legends. After the Battle of Vienna in 1683, the Austrians subdued all of Hungary, including Transylvania. After 1711, the Austrians replaced the prince of Transylvania with governors. (Thus there has been no separate Prince of Transylvania since 1711.) In 1867 the Austrian Empire was reorganized as Austria-Hungary. At that time, Transylvania became merely a region of Hungary, rather than a separate Austrian crown land. The Hungarians made efforts to impose their language and religion on the Romanians and Saxons. After World War I, Transylvania became part of Romania. Now the tables were turned: the Romanians discriminated against the Hungarians. In 1940, when Hitler was master of most of Europe, Transylvania was divided between Hungary and Romania, both Hungary and Romania being nominal allies of Nazi Germany. After World War II, the boundary reverted so that Transylvania became wholly part of Romania. 
  • Ruritania is a fictional country introduced in The Prisoner of Zenda, a novel by Antony Hope. It is supposedly located between Saxony (part of Germany) and Bohemia (part of the Czech Republic), but it is often identified with Montenegro. The name is also used as a generic term for a fictional country.
  • Albania is a real country, located on the Adriatic Sea just north of Greece. It had been part of the Ottoman Empire until 1913, when Austria-Hungary insisted it not be absorbed by Serbia. After World War II it was taken over by communists, who broke with the Soviet Union, considering the Soviets to be too "moderate", and looked to Mao Zedong's China for support. Today it is once again a free country, albeit poor.
  • A schlemiel is a clumsy person or oaf. The name is taken from the Biblical book of Numbers, chapter 1, verse 6, where it appears as Shelumiel.
  • Liths are inhabitants of Lithuania: this appears to be a reference to Cole Porter's "Let's Do It": "Lithuanians and Letts do it".
  • To raise some Cain is a softer version of "raise some hell". Cain is mentioned in Genesis 4 and 5 as the first son of Adam and Eve; he murdered his younger brother Abel, and then founded a line of humanity, which was presumably wiped out in the Flood.
  • Biarritz is a seaside city in the Basque country of southwestern France. It is popular with tourists and surfers, including the French and Brits.
  • Vladimir Samoylovich Horowitz (1903-1989) was a classical pianist and considered one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century. He was born in Kiev, and died in New York.
  • Puttin' on the Ritz is a song by Irving Berlin, written about the black people he used to see strutting down Lenox Avenue in their "Sunday best" in Harlem on Sundays. He revised the lyric to be about not just black people, and changed "Lenox Avenue" to "Park Avenue".
• Dancing Through Life is from the 2003 Broadway musical show Wicked, which tells a story of the land of Oz before the events in the story of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It is an adaptation of the novel Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. (Is her web site to be found at www.www.oz?) The music and lyric are by Stephen Schwartz, and this arrangement is by Audrey Snyder.
  • Rife means prevalent, common, abundant.
• The film Mary Poppins came out in 1964, the same year as the film version of My Fair Lady. Julie Andrews starred in My Fair Lady on Broadway, but she was not known as a film star, although she had starred in the Rodgers & Hammerstein's TV version of Cinderella. But Disney picked her for Mary Poppins. My Fair Lady went on to win all the major oscars that year (best picture, director, actor, &c) except best actress, which went to Julie Andrews for Mary Poppins. Disney also picked Glynnis Johns, who was a well-known film star, to play Mrs Banks. But she thought she was being cast as Mary Poppins. So when she came to Burbank to meet Walt Disney, he told her he had this great song for her, and that right after lunch, she would hear it. Disney then told his song team, the Sherman brothers, to write a song while he took Miss Johns to lunch. They had been working on their version of "Practic-ly perfect in ev'ry way" for Mary, but rewrote it as "Sister Suffragette". In 2005 Mary Poppins came out as a Broadway musical. New songs were written by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe, including Practially Perfect and Anything Can Happen, and other songs were rewritten, including Supercalifragilistic-expialidocious.
  • rococo-cocious is from rococo, a style of art and architecture from 18th century France.
• Show People is from the musical show Curtains.
  • analyst--chouch
  • Mack the Knife is the common name of the character Macheath, originally from John Gay's The Beggar's Opera. Bertold Brecht rewrote it as Die Drei Groschen Oper with music by Kurt Weill. In English it became The Threepenny Opera. Mack is a much more cruel character in Brecht's work; an anti-hero.
  • A barre is a handrail used in ballet exercises.
  • It has been said that there are no real waiters in Los Angeles: they are all actors waiting for their "big break"!
  • The feet in fifth position are turned out with the heel of one foot adjacent to the toe of the other, turned out as much as possible. There are two fifth positions, depending on which foot is in front. Fifth position is often difficult for adult beginners. (For the other positions, see this Wikipedia article.)
  • tree surgeon--bough--bow