Pod Insights Stuff You Should Know Give My Regards to the Broadway Episode! About this episode Broadway is a street in NYC, but more than that it's a term for the NY theater district. They say the neon lights are bright there. Who knows?
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1:04 Speaker 00 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.
1:14 Josh Clark? Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too. And this is a good old fashioned toe tapping, feel good event of the century that we like to call Stuff You Should Know.
1:27 Speaker 02 I cannot stop singing. They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway.
1:36 Josh Clark? It's one of my least favorites. Is that from a chorus line?
1:38 Speaker 02 I don't know. I was singing that earlier. I was singing, give my regards to Broadway.
1:44 Josh Clark? Wow. You haven't been singing the one I've been singing.
1:47 Speaker 02 What have you been singing?
1:49 Josh Clark? There's no business like show business, like no business I know.
1:56 Speaker 02 That's great. I do not know the neon lights one. I should have looked that up, but I do know give my regards to Broadway is from Little Johnny Jones from 1904, written by George M. Coohan.
2:08 Josh Clark? Neon Lights is a Kraftwerk song. You're way off.
2:11 Speaker 02 Oh, oh, well.
2:14 Josh Clark? Little Johnny Jones is the most like 1920s play title or musical title I've ever heard.
2:21 Speaker 02 I didn't know Kraftwerk, "They Say the Neon Lights Are Bright." Is that how theirs goes?
2:27 Josh Clark? It's a little different.
2:28 Speaker 02 Okay.
2:29 Josh Clark? It's really good, though. I think it's actually the best song about neon lights.
2:33 Speaker 02 Oh, that's a bold statement.
2:36 Josh Clark? I know, I'm with you.
2:39 Speaker 02 By the way, this is a listener's suggestion, so big thanks to Sarah Nagy for sending this in.
2:44 Josh Clark? Ooh, nice. Thanks, Sarah. We should probably say, for anybody who didn't bother looking at the title, we're talking about Broadway today. Broadway, as in the American home of musicals, the Great White Way. You know, where musical theater goes to live and thrive and give it a shot at stardom.
3:06 Speaker 02 That's right, and non-musical theater.
3:08 Josh Clark? True, true. I'm more of a play guy than a musical guy myself. I remember going to see La La Land in the theater and being like, I had no idea this is a musical. Luckily, it turned out really well, but at first I was like, you gotta be kidding me. Kind of like, you know, when you go to drink, take a sip of water and it turns out to be Coke? And it's really shocking, but then you're like, oh, okay, Coke's fine. It was a lot like that, the movie version of that.
3:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think I've detailed this a little bit, but I've gotten more into musicals and I enjoy musical theater in Broadway. And we try to go to a show when we're in New York. And now we're doing an annual Broadway-only trip, like where we go see a few of them.
3:51 Josh Clark? That's a pilgrimage, is what they call that.
3:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, pilgrimage. But I do love the plays, and we are in fact going to see Glengarry Glen Ross in May.
3:58 Josh Clark? Haven't you seen the movie?
4:00 Speaker 02 I have, but this has got that killer cast on Broadway. I don't know if you heard about it or not.
4:04 Josh Clark? No, I haven't. Honestly, I haven't kept up with Broadway lately.
4:08 Speaker 02 Yeah, this has got Glengarry Glen Ross with Kieran Culkin and Bill Burr and Bob Odenkirk and others.
4:16 Josh Clark? Wow, that is a killer cast.
4:18 Speaker 02 So I grabbed tickets for that right when they went on sale, and I'm going. And my friends are like, how'd you get tickets, man? You're so lucky. I'm like, I just logged on and got them when they went on sale.
4:27 Josh Clark? You logged on to your internet.
4:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, you know, just get on a, if you're into that kind of thing, you just jump on a little, like a Broadway direct email list, and then you'll get the haps on all the haps.
4:39 Josh Clark? So you mentioned a T, is it TKT?
4:44 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, the TKTS booth.
4:48 Josh Clark? Yes, are they online too, or is that like a physically stand there in person kind of thing?
4:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, that is the ticket service run for the not-for-profit theater development fund. And that is if you're in New York and you're like, man, I wish I could go to a show, but I don't want to jump on a resale website and pay a ton of money. There are booths in Times Square and satellite booths at South Street, Seaport and Lincoln Center, where you can get day of, you can go get day of tickets for people that are like, I can't go Broadway, can you help me sell these?
5:19 Josh Clark? Yeah, and apparently if you go with like an hour or so before the booth opens, the line, once it does open, will only be about an hour. That's how long it takes to clear out typically. And people who are in line know what they want to see and they want the best seats. And that's what they're going for, that's why they're standing in line. But if you're like, hey, I'm in New York, let's catch a show. I don't care what show. You can just show up like a couple hours after the thing opens and walk right up and pick a show.
5:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, and I gotta say, and you know, we'll get to this, or I might as well say it now, the largest Broadway theater, if you've never been, you might be used to like Broadway in your hometown at like the 5,000-seat theater or something like they have here at the Fox.
6:00 Josh Clark? At the Performing Arts Center?
6:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, or the Performing Arts Center. But in New York, they're, they're pretty small. The largest one is the Gershwin Theater at 1,933 seats. The smallest of the, how many theaters is it total?
6:14 Speaker 02 Forty-two?
6:16 Josh Clark? Forty-seven.
6:17 Speaker 02 Forty-one theaters.
6:18 Josh Clark? Forty-one.
6:19 Speaker 02 The smallest is the Hayes at 597. So, you know, if you're in town, you want to check out a show.
6:26 Speaker 02 In most of those theaters, most of the seats are pretty great and it's fairly intimate.
6:30 Josh Clark? I don't know much about it lately. Like, I left off with Phantom of the Opera. That was probably the last musical I was ever really into. So, but I know that since I've been into it, like, they've become blockbuster productions.
6:45 Speaker 02 Yeah.
6:45 Josh Clark? Very much along like the Marvel Cinematic Universe movie franchise stuff, where it's like, just put a ton of money into it.
6:52 Speaker 02 Yeah.
6:53 Josh Clark? And people will come from all over and you'll make 10 times what you put into it.
6:57 Speaker 02 Yeah.
6:58 Josh Clark? And that, I mean, that's, that's fairly, a fairly new development. Is, is it like that basically across the board now? Or surely that's like a handful of powerhouse shows and the rest of them are more normal? And hence, ticket prices are more normal, do you know?
7:13 Speaker 02 Uh, I mean, from my experience, stuff, you know, if you go to see some of the classics, they're, you know, they're big productions, but they're not, uh, maybe not as like special effects heavy. They definitely, I feel like, have jazzed them up a lot more in more recent years with more sort of jaw-dropping moments of like, kind of, I can't believe they did that live, kind of stuff.
7:34 Josh Clark? Like when, uh, the salesman from Death of a Salesman flies out over the crowd at that one scene?
7:40 Speaker 02 But like, for instance, last time we went, we saw the...
7:43 Josh Clark? This is my dad.
7:45 Speaker 02 Uh, we saw, um, one of the ones we saw was the new-ish, um, Death Becomes Her, which is, I can't recommend enough. It is one of the funniest musicals you will ever see. But it wasn't some lavish production, but they had a couple of very well-placed sort of special effects that were very fun. And so, I think you, you need to sort of wow the crowd a little bit more these days.
8:10 Josh Clark? Okay, so you're not going to find like a 1950s, 60s-style musical comedy that isn't relying at all on special effects there anymore?
8:19 Speaker 02 Hmm, nah, I mean, but maybe not special effects, but the sets are still very big and there's a lot of money poured into it. But your plays are, you're gonna be a little more like stripped down.
8:30 Josh Clark? So, okay, last question. Ticket prices, from what I've seen, are like eye-popping.
8:35 Speaker 02 Pretty expensive.
8:35 Josh Clark? Like 200 bucks?
8:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think Wicked was the most expensive. It was 2.90 average price.
8:40 Josh Clark? Man, ouch, so, um...
8:43 Josh Clark? There's gotta be tickets that are like, that the normal person can afford, right?
8:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, I mean, that's the average ticket price. So the cheaper seats for like, a show like Wicked are, I don't know, probably in the, in the hundreds and something. Which is, I mean, that's a lot of money, but I don't know that you can go like, if your question is, can you go see a Broadway show for like, 45 bucks?
9:04 Josh Clark? Yes, that's my question.
9:06 Speaker 02 I don't know, and I doubt it.
9:09 Josh Clark? Yeah, alright, well, that's a bit of a shame, I have to say.
9:12 Speaker 02 Although, I'll have to look at my Glengarry tickets. I don't know that those were like, crazy expensive, but I'll check while you talk.
9:19 Josh Clark? Okay, well, I'm gonna start talking about the history of Broadway.
9:22 Speaker 02 Let's do it.
9:23 Josh Clark? So, Olivia helped us out with this. Kudos to her, because this was a huge, huge topic, and she wrangled it greatly.
9:31 Josh Clark? But, the, the street itself, Broadway, is really, really old. It's actually built on an old Lenape tribe trail that connected the tribes along the 13 miles of Manahatta. So this is like, pre-contact.
9:46 Speaker 02 Yeah.
9:46 Josh Clark? Broadway was already in existence. When the Dutch showed up, and they said, "This is New Amsterdam, eventually we'll rename it New York."
9:57 Speaker 02 Yeah.
9:58 Josh Clark? They called it De Heerstrat.
10:02 Speaker 02 Yeah.
10:02 Josh Clark? Which is gentleman's way. So apparently, "heer" with two e's in the middle, means gentleman in Dutch, if you wanna impress people at your next party.
10:10 Speaker 02 Yeah.
10:10 Josh Clark? But they just called it Bredeveg, or Broadway, Broad Road, in the English. So we're just gonna call it Broadway from now on.
10:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, so that's the street. Broadway, the theater district, is between Times Square to 53rd Street, and then the side streets from 6th to 8th avenues. And like I said, it's 41 theaters. And with that smallest one, the haze being 597, they're all at least 500, almost 600. I mean, can you squeeze three more seats in there? Haze?
10:40 Josh Clark? Maybe standing room only.
10:42 Speaker 02 And like I said, the Gershwin is the largest at 1933. And, you know, that's where theater happens. And we're gonna talk a little bit about sort of the early theater days, because if you're talking New York theater, you're gonna have to go back to 1732 to see the first, or at least the first record of a performance of a play there. It was called The Recruiting Officer. And that was some Londoners traveling through town, and it was at the New Theater on Nassau Street, but that was- Near Broadway, but not anywhere close to the theater district. It was way, way downtown in what would now be the financial district.
11:17 Josh Clark? You're not going to mention the name of the owner of the new theater building?
11:21 Speaker 02 Governor Rip Van Dam.
11:23 Josh Clark? Which is a really great hotel check-in name.
11:26 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's good. Include it just with the governor?
11:29 Josh Clark? Yeah, governor.
11:30 Speaker 02 Like, okay.
11:32 Josh Clark? It gives you special treatment.
11:34 Speaker 02 Yeah.
11:35 Josh Clark? So, yeah, you said that was what in what is now the financial district. So slowly but surely, it started to kind of move to what was called the Longacre Square.
11:46 Speaker 02 Yeah.
11:46 Josh Clark? But before that, there was a lot of theaters that had opened up sporadically away from what we now consider Broadway. And the, I think the first, I don't know if we said it or not, because you corrected me when I said like musicals. You're like, well, plays too. But most people, when they're talking about Broadway, think they're thinking about musicals, right? So the first musical, as far as anybody can tell, that was performed in New York was called The Beggar's Opera. It was about thieves and sex workers. It was a musical comedy. It sounds like it was somewhat like one of the plays that would come in the 19th century or one of the musicals, where there were like kind of breaks in between where they, some stand-up comedian would come out
12:29 Josh Clark? or a juggler maybe, or somebody would perform a song. But the songs didn't have much to do with the story, if anything at all.
12:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, and we'll get to that. That was sort of the way it went for a while. It was sort of like songs and sketches and stuff like that, as that was what a musical was.
12:46 Speaker 02 But we wouldn't have any of this stuff if it hadn't been for some pretty notable people. The first one, well, he's actually the first Oscar Hammerstein of what would be two notable Oscar Hammerstines.
12:58 Josh Clark? Yeah, this is Oscar Hammerstein I.
13:01 Speaker 02 That's right. He moved from Germany, of course, to New York City in 1864 and was a cigar factory floor sweeper until he invented a cigar machine and made quite a bit of money doing so, such that he could start funding the opening of his passion, which was opera. So he opened the Harlem. Opera House first in 1889. And then that very first one in Longacre Square, which will be notable in about a minute and a half because you will learn what that became. Hammerstein's Olympia Theater at Broadway and 43rd and 44th. And then after that, the Republic Theater was in 1899, which is still there, but is now the new Victory Theater.
13:46 Josh Clark? Gotcha, which I think is for young audiences, right?
13:49 Speaker 02 Is it?
13:49 Josh Clark? Pretty sure. Yeah, I'm almost positive it is.
13:52 Speaker 02 Like really bawdy kids plays?
13:54 Josh Clark? Yeah, like Avenue Q.
13:56 Speaker 02 Yeah, exactly.
13:58 Josh Clark? So within like a decade, Oscar Hammerstein the first built like three major theaters in New York City. And he helped pretty much establish this theater district or the concept that New York had a theater district.
14:13 Speaker 02 Yeah.
14:14 Josh Clark? Or it was a theater town, I guess. Plus, and this is probably a fairly overlooked component of it, the inner borough rapid transit system, the train, helped too because it could get people around New York much more easily than before. So with those two things, Hammerstein and the IRT converging, New York suddenly had like everything it needed, all the ingredients to become like a world-class theater destination.
14:40 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. So the writing was on the wall. He opened those theaters. Other people are like, hey, we can invest money in this now that it's becoming a thing. The New Amsterdam Theater and the Lyceum Theater were both built around the same time in the early 1900s. And then, oh, boy, we're probably more than a minute and a half after I promised it. But in 1905, Longacre Square was renamed for the newly relocated New York Times offices, and thus it became Times Square.
15:09 Josh Clark? Ta-da. That's it?
15:12 Speaker 02 I was like, was it New York Times Square? And I was like, no, dummy.
15:16 Josh Clark? Just Times Square.
15:17 Speaker 02 Just Times Square. And it was around the same time that these three brothers, Lee Samuel and Jacob Schubert, very popular theater name to this day, they opened up a bunch of theaters in New York and elsewhere. And the Schubert Organization still owns and operates 17 of those 41 theaters.
15:34 Josh Clark? That's a bunch. That's almost half of the theaters on Broadway.
15:38 Speaker 02 They got it locked down, baby.
15:40 Josh Clark? So all of this hubbub and activity of building theaters and attracting like really good performers and plays and musicals, by the time World War I rolled around, like New York was on the map for theater and Broadway was the theater district for New York by this time. And one of the things that really helped things along, kind of picked up where Oscar Hammerstein I and the IRT left off to really like give things a real goose, was the Ziegfeld Paulies, which I know we talked about in our episode on Vaudeville in November 2022. We talked about that a lot. But the idea that like you could
16:22 Josh Clark? go to the theater and you could see some amazing performances and hear some funny comedy and see some crazy dances or great dances, like that drew people to theaters, like everyday people who might otherwise not have gone to the theater.
16:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, for sure. And you know, some of the, some of the songs that you, you know, even if you're not a fan of this kind of thing, just kind of leaked into the public consciousness, like "Give My Regards" to Broadway from George Cohen. He also wrote "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and, and "Over There" during World War I. This is when Irving Berlin came around. One of the, as you'll see, kind of a series of poor Jewish immigrant families that came to New York and the children of those families ended up being like these amazing Broadway writers and composers. He wrote things like "Annie Get Your Gun" and "There's No Business Like Show Business," your old favorite.
17:17 Josh Clark? That's right. He also wrote "White Christmas," which I read as the best-selling Christmas song of all time.
17:22 Speaker 02 Which was not on Broadway.
17:24 Josh Clark? No. Well, it ended up on Broadway. It was in the movie Holiday Inn and then they retro-created a musical based on the movie.
17:32 Speaker 02 They retconned it?
17:33 Josh Clark? Right. Another pair that were really huge at this time were George and Ira Gershwin, brothers, another Jewish immigrant family. They created Funny Face, Girl Crazy, Porgy and Bess. And some of these, as we'll see, were pretty kind of groundbreaking, especially at the time, but they also launched some stars' careers like Ethel Merman, who you think of when you, when you think of somebody singing "There's No Business Like Show Business." I think Ethel Merman.
18:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, and the movie Airplane.
18:03 Josh Clark? Right, exactly. That's where I first learned about it. Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire.
18:08 Speaker 02 Of course.
18:09 Josh Clark? Greta Garbo, Dance on Air.
18:11 Speaker 02 And it wasn't just musical theater at the time. This sort of post-World War II era also had some pretty legendary plays, like The Iceman Cometh from Eugene O'Neill, and Lorraine Hansberry's Raisin in the Sun, of course. But it was Times Square after all. So in World War II, that's when you started seeing some, you know, the usual thing that would happen was like burlesque theater, eventually peep show, maybe regular movie theater, and then porn theater.
18:42 Josh Clark? Yeah, and you better know the difference.
18:44 Speaker 02 Yeah.
18:46 Josh Clark? I say that we take a break and we come back and we talk about the establishment of Broadway shows as we know them.
18:54 Speaker 02 Let's do it.
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21:30 Josh Clark? Okay, so One Hammerstein did some amazing stuff with Broadway, creating Broadway. But this family was showing off, and they produced Oscar Hammerstein II, who's the grandson of Oscar Hammerstein I. And he got together with a composer named Jerome Kern, and they just started making some amazing, groundbreaking, for the time especially, new kinds of musicals that just gave us Broadway as we know it today.
22:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, like if you go to a musical today, you're not assured to, but more than likely you're going to be seeing what's called a book musical. And that is when the musical, when like the songs are central to the plot and the storyline and moving things along. It's not just like, "And here's a song to add to this musical review" kind of thing.
22:20 Josh Clark? Right.
22:20 Speaker 02 They still have those sometimes, but it's kind of a throwback. Like these days, the book musical, as a direct descendant of Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern, is sort of the way to go.
22:34 Josh Clark? Right. They came up with Showboat together, which was an enormously groundbreaking show. It combined both white and black performers on the same stage, which if you remember a Harry Belafonte episode, that was a no-no well into the 50s and 60s. These guys made this show in 1927.
22:54 Speaker 02 Yeah. I mean, people were not doing that at the time. They also had blackface in that review because that was something they were also doing at the time. But it was also pretty, you know, progressive in some ways by like having an integrated cast.
23:10 Josh Clark? Yeah. And I mean, a lot of the themes were about racism and it just kind of took it head on. It was a serious, dramatic story. It wasn't like, you know, feel good, forget your troubles, come on, get happy kind of thing.
23:25 Speaker 02 Yeah. And just to be clear, it was truly integrated. I wasn't saying the blackface was integration. It had real integration and also blackface, which I don't quite understand.
23:35 Josh Clark? I don't either.
23:36 Speaker 02 Yeah. I don't know how they were doing things in 1927.
23:38 Josh Clark? Like when a woman is in an episode of Monty Python. It's like, why are you guys in drag then?
23:45 Speaker 02 Exactly. So Hammerstein is doing his thing, doing pretty well. Jerome Kern's great. But all of a sudden, a dude lopes onto the scene named Richard Rogers and Hammerstein said, Rogers and Hammerstein. That has a nice ring to it. They're old buddies, old former classmates from Columbia years earlier. And Rogers approached Hammerstein and said, hey, there's this play, Green Grow the Lilacs from Lynn Riggs. Why don't we turn that into a musical? And why don't we do a little different? Like, why don't you write the words to this thing first? I'll write the music. And I don't know, let's use an exclamation point in the title. Let's just call it Oklahoma.
24:23 Josh Clark? Oklahoma. Right?
24:26 Speaker 02 Sure.
24:28 Josh Clark? So this show, this established Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein, like this is 1943. It set a record for the most performances at the time. It's long since been just totally demolished, but it had a record performance total of 2,212. That was just unheard of back then. So imagine like, you know, you've got some pretty cool stuff under your belt, but all of a sudden you get together with this new collaborator and you create the show that has the longest running or the largest number of performances ever, just right off the bat. That's kind of like what these guys became. Like they were just the stars of Broadway productions.
25:07 Speaker 02 Yeah. I mean, giants to this day of the industry, South Pacific, The Sound of Music, The King and I. I mean, it's, it's their, their names are basically synonymous with musical theater.
25:17 Josh Clark? I read Chuck also that one, at one point they had three of the longest running plays or shows on Broadway at the time and three other shows in production to be adapted to films, all at the same time.
25:33 Speaker 02 Giants.
25:35 Josh Clark? Giants. Yeah. We could have just left it at that now that I think about it.
25:38 Speaker 02 So there were some like huge, huge shows of the late 20th century that sort of helped redefine Broadway. West Side Story was one. This was what kind of, where the idea of the triple threat came along because they didn't have, you know, for a while there, there was like a separate chorus and that like did the dancing and stuff. And West Side Story was one of the first ones in 1957 to be like, hey, you're the lead actor. You're also singing. You're also dancing because that's all part of it. And all of a sudden the triple threat was a thing. And that was the real start of another giant of Broadway, Stephen Sondheim.
26:17 Josh Clark? Yeah. Who would go on to direct Contagion, which we mentioned recently, too.
26:22 Speaker 02 No, he wrote the lyrics. And then another name you might have heard of, Leonard Bernstein, was a composer for West Side Story.
26:28 Josh Clark? Yeah, he's great, too. Cabaret was another one. By this time, this was 1966. Today, you think of Cabaret, and it's just a cult classic musical. But at the time, it was groundbreaking in that it introduced a new kind of musical to Broadway, which is actually kind of a throwback to how it used to be. It's called a concept musical. And rather than, you know, a through-line story where the songs advance the story and everything, this was more like there was a theme. The theme was, the show was set at the Kit Kat Club in Berlin, I think in Weimar-era Berlin.
27:05 Speaker 02 Yeah.
27:06 Josh Clark? And through the songs that all kind of have this, share this kind of same theme, this concept is created. I think the theme was, I've not seen Cabaret, but I believe that it was a meditation on the rise of Nazism during the Weimar Republic's kind of swinging days.
27:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah. I always wanted to see Cabaret.
27:28 Josh Clark? Yeah, well, let's go see it together for the first time, then.
27:30 Speaker 02 I don't know that it's, is it running? Is there a revival going on?
27:34 Josh Clark? Oh, man, I'm gonna get myself killed. I'm talking about the movie. There's movies for all of these, pretty much, so we can just see the movie.
27:41 Speaker 02 There really is. There's two West Side Stories, in fact.
27:44 Josh Clark? Yeah, Steven Spielberg did one.
27:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, it was good. Hair, we have to talk about Hair from 1968. This is a musical that,
27:53 Speaker 02 and Olivia points this out, it wasn't just commenting on what's going on in history at the time, it really helped kind of shape it in real time. It was the first rock musical, something I'm a big, big fan of.
28:03 Josh Clark? Oh, yeah?
28:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, like, the jukebox, jukebox, I have such a hard time with that. Musicals are okay, not my favorite, but those 70s, Jesus Christ Superstar, and Joseph and the Amazing Technical Dreamcoat, and Hair, like, that stuff is so groovy and so cool, because it's like 60s and 70s.
28:25 Josh Clark? Yeah, no, it is super groovy. Hair, if there's one word to describe hair, it's groovy.
28:31 Speaker 02 Yeah.
28:31 Josh Clark? If the other, if you want one more word, it would be nude.
28:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, or merkin, because there was an all, the whole cast was nude very famously in one scene. But it did help launch the careers of Diane Keaton was in that original production, as was Meatloaf, a man whose house I have been at.
28:51 Josh Clark? Oh, of course. So I have no follow-up questions whatsoever to that. Instead, well, okay, what were you doing at Meatloaf's house?
29:00 Speaker 02 I'll tell you offline.
29:01 Josh Clark? Okay, cool. So Stephen Sondheim, who you already mentioned, he was, he made a name for himself by writing the lyrics to West Side Story. But apparently his big breakout was something called Company, which was a bunch of vignettes about romantic relationships. I have not seen that one either.
29:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
29:19 Josh Clark? Kind of feel like a rube talking about all these things that I haven't seen, but I did read about it. And I read that the, if the whole thing starts at the main character's 35th birthday party, he walks into the birthday party. And then these vignettes start, and then the thing ends, I think with him walking into the 35th birthday party to make it like, this all took place in just a moment in time, all of these vignettes did.
29:45 Speaker 02 Super cool. Have not seen it either. Sondheim also very well known for Sweeney Todd, the demon barber of Fleet Street.
29:52 Josh Clark? I have seen that.
29:53 Speaker 02 I have not seen that, but friend of the show Scott Aukerman highly recommends it, said it's like one of the best shows he's ever seen.
29:59 Josh Clark? It's great.
30:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, I gotta check it out.
30:02 Josh Clark? A Chorus Line, another movie. That one was kind of meta. It was another concept musical where the, the whole thing takes place in an audition. And so the whole thing is about theater life, about theater people, but it's actually a musical show. It's pretty cool.
30:18 Speaker 02 Yeah, and that began a run in 1975 of like a dozen years where some of the, some of the giants of all time were launched. Chorus Line, Chicago in 1975, Les Mis in 1987.
30:32 Speaker 02 Cats in 1982, which we'll talk about that a little more in a sec. And then Phantom in 88. But Cats, very famously, was a very, very long-running show that like, some people love, some people hate, some people think it's brilliant, some people make fun of it. But lyricist Tim Rice got together with composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Webber Rice team. They did the amazing technical dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar, Evita. And then they said, hey, let's turn this T. S. Eliot Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats into a musical and have real people dressed up as cats.
31:09 Josh Clark? Some people say like, if you could build a time machine, what would you do? I would go back and prevent Andrew Lloyd Webber from having that thought.
31:16 Speaker 02 I've never seen any iteration of Cats. I want to see something.
31:20 Josh Clark? It's the only time outside of an airplane where I tried to make myself go to sleep in public.
31:28 Josh Clark? It was that bad. I was like, I can't, I can't even just sit here. Yes, it was at a performance. Like, I can't just sit here. Like, I have to not be conscious for this.
31:36 Speaker 02 Oh, boy.
31:37 Josh Clark? And I was too young to leave. I don't think I was driving at the time, I was with my family.
31:40 Speaker 02 Oh, no. You couldn't go, like, fake sick or anything?
31:45 Josh Clark? No. I think I don't have a recollection of the show after a certain point, so I think I might have been successful in falling asleep.
31:51 Speaker 02 Your dad would have been, "Throw up in this bag, you'll be fine." And then Phantom, Phantom was 88, and I think that's another Andrew Lloyd Webber show. But I think that was one of the first ones to really ramp up. Got real designy and included some special effects. And I think that kind of started that trend of making things a little bigger.
32:12 Josh Clark? Yeah, for sure. That one I can sing along with basically from start to finish. I love that one.
32:20 Josh Clark? Exactly. I knew exactly what you were doing just then, because I'm so familiar with it.
32:24 Speaker 02 We tried to see Phantom at the Fox Theatre here in Atlanta. And I actually just joined the Broadway season for next season. The seasons run from May to May, I think, on regular Broadway.
32:37 Speaker 02 I'm not sure about the Fox, though. I think it may be about the same. But we tried to go see Phantom years ago, but we're both so distracted. It was when we were trying to buy our first house. And we were obsessed with this house. We were trying to get a bid on... And we were, it was just one of those deals where we were not there. Our head was elsewhere and we finally just looked at each other and we were like, we need to get out of here.
32:59 Josh Clark? No, you should definitely see it again. It's a really great show, the music, the lyrics.
33:03 Speaker 02 I know, I gotta see it.
33:05 Josh Clark? There's like a one ton chandelier that falls to the stage. Like it's a good show and I think you're right that it did kick off kind of the mega productions. It ran for 35 years and as far as I know, it holds the record still for the most performances at 13,981.
33:25 Speaker 02 Wow.
33:26 Josh Clark? Remember Oklahoma set something at like 2,200 before.
33:31 Speaker 02 Oh yeah, that's, I mean impressive at the time, but yeah, that's 35 years is impressive.
33:36 Josh Clark? It's pretty amazing. So yeah, I love that show. I'm just gonna say it probably five more times throughout this.
33:43 Speaker 02 So we gotta talk a little bit about Times Square. Even before the seventies came along, it was a pretty rowdy place. In the early teens, there was a 1 a.m. curfew because it was such a rowdy place. There were speakeasies there during prohibition, burlesque in the thirties. And then from the sixties and into the nineties, I think I've mentioned this before, when I first started going to New York in the mid nineties, there were still peep shows there. It was right before the final cleanup happened, thanks to a few different mayors. But Mayor Ed Koch, certainly David Dinkins, and then eventually Giuliani would finish up the work of cleaning up Times Square.
34:24 Josh Clark? Yeah, David Dinkins was the one who I think maybe had the biggest impact. Or we should mention John Lindsay in the early seventies. He created a tax incentive where if you built in Times Square, a new building, you could get a pretty good tax break, but you had to build a theater on the ground floor. To try to bring the theater back to the area, I thought that was a pretty ingenious idea. But to me, David Dinkins probably had the biggest impact, good or bad, by making a deal with Michael Eisner, who was running Walt Disney at the time. And he said, just do your thing here, Disney. Like we got a lot of perverts running around here. We need some Disney to counterbalance this stuff and maybe even overwhelm it.
35:06 Josh Clark? And it worked. Like if you pour enough Disney onto an area, the perverts just turn and run.
35:13 Speaker 02 So they started, they dipped their toe in the pond with renovating and renting out the New Amsterdam Theater, which at that point, New York City had acquired in 1992 as part of the 42nd Street Development Program, because it was one of those that followed the burlesque theater, then movie theater, then porn theater model. I don't know if that was an official model. And then, as they were remodeling that, in 94, before they were finished, Disney opened Beauty and the Beast at the Palace Theater. Of course, the adaptation of the 91 animated film. And it was almost a $12 million budget, the most expensive musical ever at the time, and ended up running for about 13 years to total grosses of about 430 mil.
35:58 Josh Clark? That's just insane. Even today, but this was the mid 90s.
36:03 Speaker 02 Yeah. I mean, the returns on Broadway, if you can get a smash hit going, you know, it's not like you have to sink $200 million into it like you do a big budget movie.
36:12 Josh Clark? Yeah, there's a lot of front-loaded costs, but then, yeah, after you get it up and running and it's going, it can just go by itself, basically.
36:20 Speaker 02 For sure. Should we take our second break?
36:25 Josh Clark? Oh, jeez, I wasn't expecting that, but sure, let's do that.
36:28 Speaker 02 All right, we'll be right back and finish up on Broadway right after this.
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37:48 Josh Clark? Hey, everybody. The best pieces in your closet are the ones you can count on, whether you're heading to work or going out or keeping things casual. And this time of year, Quince makes finding something great for everyone else just as easy. This holiday season, it's where you want to shop for yourself and everyone on your list.
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39:07 Speaker 02 All right, so Broadway, you can go for Escapist Fair. You always have been able to, you still can. But starting in the mid-'90s with Rent, people really started tackling some heavier topics. Jonathan Larson's rock musical talked about addiction and suicide and poverty and AIDS. About, Rent was another one I left. It was fine, but it was another situation where I was with friends and everyone... I can't remember. There was some weird distraction where everyone was like, "Do you want to leave? I think our seats were bad or something." And it just wasn't happening. But I want to see Rent again. Larson very tragically died. At thirty-five years old, I've been aortic aneurysm the night before it premiered off Broadway.
39:52 Josh Clark? I know, that's insane.
39:54 Speaker 02 Just a brutal, brutal story.
39:55 Josh Clark? Yeah, because it's such a legendary show to just have this show that you probably, I'm sure he was like, I think this is gonna be big. And then he dies right before, even seeing it performed once, that's just sad to me.
40:08 Speaker 02 Very sad.
40:09 Josh Clark? And then another thing that kind of came along, there were plenty of escapist shows, we should say, and there still are. And a really good example from fairly recent times is Mamma Mia, which is one of those jukebox, it is hard to say, isn't it? A jukebox musical, which is, it takes existing songs everybody knows and loves and then puts, creates like a musical around them. And Mamma Mia did that back in 2001 with ABBA songs.
40:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, and you know, I haven't seen many of those, but they did one of like the eighties rock, the Billy Joel's had one, Bob Dylan had one.
40:45 Josh Clark? Don't forget Dee Snider from Twisted Sister had Rock of Ages.
40:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's what I meant, the eighties rock one, that was Rock of Ages, right? But you know, it's a thing. I prefer something with, I mean, they have stories built around the songs, like you said, so they can be okay. But I prefer something a little more straight ahead, not based, like, original music, I guess, is what I'm trying to, to ultimately get out.
41:11 Josh Clark? Yeah, there's some good ones. There's a Carole King, basically bio musical that features hers. I didn't either. I didn't either.
41:22 Speaker 02 Big fan of Wicked, still recommend it, finally saw it last year on Broadway. Unfortunately, it was not the wickedly talented Adele Dzeem, but that's where she made her name, along with, who was the original? Was it Kristin Chenoweth, I believe?
41:37 Josh Clark? Yes, it was.
41:39 Speaker 02 Yeah.
41:39 Josh Clark? I always loved her in Putching Up Daisies. Do you remember that show?
41:45 Speaker 02 I do, but I did not see that.
41:48 Josh Clark? Oh, you should go back and watch it. I saw it not too long ago and it really holds up. It is a very charming show.
41:54 Speaker 02 We should call this episode Josh and Chuck Haven't Seen This.
41:57 Josh Clark? Yeah, pretty much. Just put a colon before it and we can add that, okay?
42:02 Speaker 02 Uh, Hamilton is one I did not see, but we would be remiss if we did not mention it because it was such a landmark play. Lin-Manuel Miranda.
42:10 Josh Clark? I've not heard of that one.
42:12 Speaker 02 Hip-hop into historical context on Broadway, which is huge smash hit. And I saw it, uh, the, you know, the TV version of the film, the musical, so, and listened to it quite a bit, but I never saw it live.
42:25 Josh Clark? That's okay Chuck. I'll let you off the hook.
42:28 Speaker 02 It was too expensive.
42:29 Josh Clark? Uh, yeah, it really was, wasn't it? Those were some high-priced tickets for a while because everybody was talking about that show.
42:35 Speaker 02 Well, and it was all sold out, so the only way to get tickets was to pay like 1,200 bucks at the time. It would probably be even more now, but now you can go see it and I bet you can get tickets for regular price.
42:45 Josh Clark? Sure. Uh, I gotta mention this one. I've not seen this, believe it or not, everybody. It's called Dear Evan Hansen. It's from 2016. But I did read a couple of articles on it and it sounds totally off the wall where the title character is mistaken for the best friend of a teenager who's just died by suicide. And so he suddenly becomes very popular and like, um, everybody wants to know what this kid was like and, um, he uses it to basically become popular and liked, whereas otherwise he was just kind of overlooked, you know, kid on the sides.
43:23 Josh Clark? And there's all this horrible stuff that starts to happen and it unravels and I think he's publicly unmasked at some point.
43:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, I need to, that's on my list. A couple of good friends have seen it and said it's great. So I'm gonna go see that soon, I hope. Um, these, these make a lot of money. Like I said, Wicked set a weekly record in December of this past year, obviously buoyed by the popularity of the movie. But the first ever show to have a $5 million week.
43:53 Speaker 02 And last season, the 23, 24 season again ran from May to May. Total grosses of $1.54 billion, more than 12 million attendees, over 71 productions, with an average occupancy of 89.9. So that they're, you know, the average Broadway show isn't even sold out. It's at close to 90%.
44:15 Josh Clark? Wow.
44:18 Josh Clark? Can we talk about a few flops?
44:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'm gonna pick out a couple of these. I'm gonna pick out Moose Murders from 1983. It is a farce, obviously, but it was bankrolled by an oil heiress named Lily Robertson and directed by her husband and starring the oil heiress Lily Robertson who bankrolled it, which should tell you it's not headed toward a great thing also because it's called Moose Murders. And it closed after one single performance and New Yorker art critic Brendan Gill said that it would insult the intelligence of an audience consisting entirely of amoebas.
44:58 Josh Clark? Yeah, I read about that. It seems like it was just a completely amateur production from start to finish, like everybody was basically, had no idea what they were doing. And if you want to just be delighted, go read articles about the flop that was Moose Murders because it's widely considered like the worst show that ever hit Broadway. In a lot of ways, though, it's tough to qualify that because there's plenty of bad shows out there and some have been forgotten, but for some reason Moose Murders just became like the symbol for the worst shows on Broadway.
45:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, there's different ways to qualify it, like is it just bad, bad? Or is it notoriously a flop because of how much money it cost and it flopped? That was the case with a couple of them, but Carrie, an adaptation of the Stephen King horror novel, as a musical in 1988, closed after 16 previews and five regular performances at an $8 million budget. So it's widely considered one of the biggest sort of just expensive flops of all time.
46:02 Josh Clark? Yeah, there's a song about killing a pig in it, I think to get the blood to pour on her. And the lyrics go, "It's a simple little gig, you help me kill a pig."
46:13 Speaker 02 Yeah, and believe it or not, that was, it wasn't like an amateurish production. It was directed by Terry Hands, who ran the Royal Shakespeare Company for 13 years, and was choreographed by Debbie Allen. So it was, it was a big money thing that just was, sounds like not a very good idea.
46:28 Josh Clark? It was a terrible idea, and I'm sure it was terribly executed, too, in the end. That just, you know, they really tried, though. I think that's the difference.
46:36 Speaker 02 Well, it has been revived with cult status off-Broadway, like, in the 2010s. So it's one of those.
46:44 Josh Clark? I would go see that. I would go see that. And then I think the biggest flop, as far as money goes, is Spider-Man Turn Off the Dark from 2011. That's another one that just, anybody who has anything to do or any interest in Broadway, they know about this flop.
47:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, that had all the right ingredients, too. Broadway legend and film director Julie Taymor, who directed The Lion King on Broadway. They got Bono and the Edge to write the music. It was huge special effects, and it was just problem after problem after problem, all like, you know, kind of front page, or at least, front page of the arts, headline kind of problems.
47:27 Josh Clark? Yeah, so when you're performing a show or putting on a production, you have what are called previews, where people can come, the critics are not allowed to see it yet, but normal people can come and watch it, but under the understanding that they're going to be stopping in the middle of a performance, taking notes, maybe giving notes, there's going to be technical glitches, and it's, they're working it out still in front of an audience. And I think the first preview of Spider-Man went three and a half hours for the first act alone. And there were, it holds the record for the largest number of previews. The more previews you have, the more problems you have, obviously. It had 182 preview shows before it ever opened.
48:11 Speaker 02 Yeah, and I've been to some previews. I saw Sarah Jessica Parker and Broderick do the... Oh, which one was it? The Neil Simon one a couple of years ago? And that was in previews. Don't let, like, the idea of a preview turn you off, because, like, usually, they just go straight through and it's just like a regular performance. Like, I've never seen a preview that, where anyone stopped and did anything weird. And critics do actually see those, because they will review the show before opening night, because they have seen the preview.
48:43 Josh Clark? I, okay. I thought I've read somewhere that critics are not allowed, so maybe there's, like, a special preview for the critics?
48:49 Speaker 02 There may be a window or something. Yeah, that would be my guess. I'm not sure how that works, but I know it's always, I'm not sure if it's like movies. I know movies, sometimes, they won't let the critics see it before it's released, and that always means it stinks.
49:02 Josh Clark? Yeah.
49:03 Speaker 02 So I'm not sure if Broadway does that or not, actually.
49:06 Josh Clark? Well, Chuck, that's Broadway. We could keep talking about this for hours and hours and hours, but I feel like we, we probably haven't seen most of the stuff we would talk about.
49:14 Speaker 02 I've seen quite a few in recent years, and I'll be going to more and more. So maybe we'll revisit this in 10 years, and I'll, I'll be more up to speed.
49:21 Josh Clark? Okay, fair enough, sounds good. And we'll have seen Carrie together by then.
49:25 Speaker 02 I hope so. And before we end, I think we would be remiss if we didn't mention that we recently learned that we have, like, for sure, literally inspired, not one, but two Broadway shows from this show, right?
49:40 Josh Clark? Yeah, it's pretty amazing, Chuck. I think we first learned about it in Town and Country magazine. They did an article called "How a Secret British Spy Mission Became a Broadway Hit", and I think someone sent it to us, and I was like, "Oh, that's interesting." And as I read a little deeper, I found that they mentioned us specifically as the inspiration for this hit musical.
50:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's amazing. And the other one, we, we found out from the producers of the show. They emailed us. The one, I think, is it Off-Broadway on Tacco and Vanzetti, right?
50:11 Josh Clark? That's right. Yeah, so, big thanks to those guys for letting the world know that we helped inspire that, because that is quite an honor. And I think we would also be remiss to not say "break a leg."
50:24 Speaker 02 That's right.
50:24 Josh Clark? Do you have anything else?
50:26 Speaker 02 I have nothing else.
50:27 Josh Clark? Okay, well, since Chuck said he has nothing else, and neither do I, I think it's time for listener mail.
50:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'm gonna call this rare shout out. We don't do shout outs much just because we get a lot of requests too, and it would just be shout outs every week. But this one touched me. And this is from Cody in Raleigh, North Carolina. Hey, guys. In 2018, my dad passed away, leaving behind my mom, who, after 54 years of marriage, had never lived alone. She struggles with grief and anxiety-induced insomnia as a result. So I suggested she listen to Stuff You Should Know for middle-of-the-night companionship to help her get her mind off her troubles. She did, and she's been a huge fan ever since. She calls you "my guys," and this parasocial relationship has been a true lifesaver for her. When I call her up, day or night, the podcast is off and on in the background, keeping her company while she does dishes or rests.
51:19 Speaker 02 Y'all are about the same age as me and my brother, so she feels like an, she feels an auntie-like affection for you. Her 80th birthday is in April, and I believe we've already missed it by the time this would come out. But I've been struggling with what to do for her as a fun surprise outside the party she's having this week. And Cody asked for us to send like a video or something, but I said, "How about this? We'll do a rare shout out and say hello to your wonderful mother on her 80th birthday, Bonnie Nichols. Bonnie, we love you, and we feel like you're our Auntie Bonnie as well. And it makes me feel really happy to know that you're out there with us, listening to us. So that parasocial relationship goes both ways. So happy birthday, Auntie.
52:02 Josh Clark? Yeah, happy birthday, Bonnie. You can't see me right now, but I'm making a heart out of my hands.
52:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, that's lovely.
52:09 Josh Clark? That's really great. Seriously, thanks for listening to us, Bonnie. I'm glad we could help and keep you company. And if you want to be like Bonnie, wait, who was it that wrote in? Her son?
52:19 Speaker 02 Yeah, it was Cody.
52:20 Josh Clark? Cody. If you want to be like Cody and tell us about the Bonnie in your life, we'd love to hear that kind of stuff. You can send it via email to [email protected] .
52:34 Speaker 00 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
52:49 Josh Clark? Buy smart, drive for less and trade for more. That's Toyota Fordability and it starts with a great deal on an off-road ready Tacoma or half-ton Tundra, two of Toyota's longest lasting trucks, combining power for work, tech for adventures and style in between. And they're built on a reputation for quality and reliability, which is why Toyota trucks are known for holding their value, which could mean big savings when it's time for your next Toyota. So get a great deal today and a great value tomorrow. Shop toyota.com for more. Toyota, let's go places. Introducing Voices of Vivgard. Vivgard is also known as its generic name, Fgard Tigamod Alpha F-Cab. And this new show features firsthand stories from people living with a rare disease.
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