on broadway: a modern song book

Compiled by Trinity Bird and Charles Burr

About The Show

A new musical revue featuring Broadway’s best from the past 25 years.  The show will include songs from the modern  classics such as Les Miserables, Miss Saigon, Starlight Express, Cats and Phantom of the Opera.

Songs from these shows are under consideration: Aida, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Producers, All the Disney Shows, Jekyll and Hyde, Wicked, Sunset Blvd, Curtains, Avenue Q, The Full Monty, Grand Hotel, Ragtime, Rent, Tommy

Notes from Artistic Director Charles Burr

So what am I to do?  When we survey our audience, some of the most requested productions are the recent Broadway shows, which the Tibbits is unable to produce for a variety of reasons.  Musicals nowadays have to run longer and longer to recoup staggering overheads and that means they aren’t available to us until the last gasp of a tour is done.  (“Chicago” falls under that category—it’s been 15 years –and still going strong--since that revival began.)  Or there are the shows that are HUGE.  I mean so much scenery that we can’t trim it back for our purposes (“Phantom of the Opera,” “Sunset Boulevard” and especially “Miss Saigon” with that climatic helicopter….).  Then there are the shows that are so new and have never toured, so that our audience has never heard of them.  (Never mind that “Next to Normal” just won the Pulitzer Prize….It’s not on everyone’s lips in Coldwater and the surrounding area….)

But never fear.  If we can’t do the complete show, we can sing some of the great songs from their scores.   “On Broadway” is a revue of those very shows, which have been written in the last 25 years or so.  The Director, Trinity Bird, and I have been pouring over Original Cast albums, talking to the actors and listening to the ideas of countless people before we began to winnow down the vast amount of material.  One of our main criteria was to make sure that we covered the wide scope of shows in this time frame and to make sure that the songs make sense on their own—without the story surrounding them.  And we didn’t want an evening of nothing but Andrew Lloyd Webber power ballads.

What we found was a much more diverse evening of song than we thought possible.  Webber became tempered by the two Mel Brooks send ups of “The Producers” and “Young Frankenstein.”  The contemporary sounds of Frank Wildhorn (“Jeckyll and Hyde”) was in counter point to the deliberately old fashioned nostalgic sound of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (“Hairspray”).  We have great love songs from “Chess” and “The Scarlet Pimpernel” and then proceed to make fun of them with the hilarious send up of those very songs from “Spamalot.”  And we’ve taken a couple of the incredibly familiar songs and put a slightly new spin on them.

Please join us for a terrific sampling of the Broadway musical.  “On Broadway” will jump start the 2010 season with a cornucopia of fabulous songs from June 24 thru July 3.

Presented with the generous support of: