We’ve long complained about the treatment of stage musicals when they’re filmed because so many songs get lost “in translation,” and on this week’s Dress Circle (1/30 7:00 p.m.), we’ve put together a program of some of the songs that never made it to 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 while dropping better songs from the score, or even, in the case of shows like “Fanny,” they jettisoned the entire vocal 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 on this week’s program. 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 ample material.