So many stage musicals were destroyed by Hollywood when they were adapted into films. Often, entire scores were thrown out, and other times, two or three songs, and on this week’s Dress Circle (4/19 7:00 p.m.), we’ve put together a program of some of the songs that never made it Hollywood with the rest of the show.
Hollywood has an iffy track record when it comes to filming stage musicals. In the past, they interpolated songs from other sources and composers while dropping better songs from the score, or even, in the case of shows like “Fanny,” they jettisoned the entire score only to use snippets of the charming songs as background music. If you only know the film versions of some of these shows, you’ll have the chance to hear some songs you’ve missed or might have forgotten about this week.
This time, we’re including selections from the original scores to “Bye, Bye Birdie,” “Grease,” “The Sound of Music,” “Annie,” “A Little Night Music,” “Oklahoma!”, “Guys and Dolls,” “How to Succeed in Business…,” “Godspell,” and “The Wiz.”
We have no doubt that there’ll be more shows in this series in the future since Hollywood has given us, and ignored, ample material.
