When it comes to naming the best Broadway songs of all time, we could make a list ten times as big as this one and still not satisfy many aficionados. Let’s face it: Favorite show tunes are highly subjective. With that in mind, we've come up with these 50 tracks. The resulting lineup is a mix of classic musical-theater numbers from 1927 through 2015. A few come from; others are from shows that swept the decades ago. We've tried to go broad, with a deliberate balance of obvious and less-obvious choices and a desire to mix it up in terms of style. We gave ourselves a few basic guidelines: Only one song per musical was allowed, and we have not included many Great American Songbook standards that technically debuted in Broadway musicals, in the 1920s through the 1940s, but have largely been forgotten as Broadway songs. Unless you’re Broadway geek, many of these titles may be far less familiar to you than, say, the entries on our roundup. But maybe you’re not going to the right parties.RECOMMENDED: Full listing of. Throughout Gypsy, Mama Rose has pushed her children to be stars, even if it meant pushing them away from her.
But in the show’s shattering climactic number, she finally takes center stage herself, if only in her mind. Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s Show Boat was a prototype for the “integrated” musical that Hammerstein would later popularize with Richard Rodgers, and it also dealt centrally with the question of racial integration. In an African-American stevedore named Joe contrasts the travails of poor black workers with the indifference of the Mississippi River: 'I get weary and sick of trying / I'm tired of living and scared of dying / But Ol’ Man River, he just keeps rolling along.' Sung by a bass—rare for Broadway songs—the song has a rumbling gravity, as Kern’s stately music rises and falls like the swell and recession of water. The effect is at once tragic and soothing: It offers a cosmic perspective on the ups and downs of all the characters connected to the musical’s titular riverboat, tossed on the waves of fortune. —Adam Feldman. The tune so good Sondheim named his books after it.
From seeing Sunday in the Park with George, you know that this moody inner monologue is delivered by the Impressionist painter Georges Seurat as he leaves through his sketchbook and broods on the estrangement of his lover and model, Dot. “Finishing the Hat” is a proud but ultimately pained admission of emotional limits: how the true artist looks at life clinically and formally, missing out on love, perhaps, while seeing so much more. Sondheim expresses George’s obsessive pursuit of pointillist perfection through arpeggiating musical phrases and repeated lyrics: vamping as metaphor for pigmented dots. More than just a portrait of a romantically challenged hero, the song speaks to anyone who’s had trouble connecting or bonding with a lover.— David Cote.
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Even the title is too much. Look how it goes on, awkwardly long, as though refusing to go away. This is the big Broadway song, perhaps the biggest: the one that just won’t quit.
Effie White has been rejected by her lover and her Motown-style girl group, but she’s not too proud to beg. The lower she sinks into abjection, she higher she climbs up this mountain of a solo: Henry Krieger’s music pushes her to soul extremes (maximized by original Effie Jennifer Holliday), while Tom Eyen’s lyrics lay her heart out to be trampled. “You’re going to love me,” she insists, and even after she has been left alone onstage, she keeps repeating this futile demand in an aria of denial now sung to no one at all—except, perhaps, to her dressing-room mirror, and to us. —Adam Feldman.
Good music is onomatopoeia in reverse: sound formed from, and hence transmitting, meaning. That’s certainly the case with this swoony mini-aria, which wraps a pro forma romantic message in a creamy musical envelope; even without Hammerstein’s lyrics, typically delivered by an operatic baritone with a heavy European accent, Rodgers’s tune conjures ephemeral intoxication. And lest this song’s stand-alone hit status and oddly speculative second-person voice (“You may see a stranger”) make us forget: When this love bomb drops in South Pacific’s first scene, it effectively functions as a marriage proposal. Who says no to that?
—Rob Weinert-Kendt. The seductively upbeat title song of Cabaret exhorts listeners to loosen up, get down, live a little. It seems like fun, but there’s a catch: Sung late in the show by chanteuse and would-be star Sally Bowles in the waning years of Weimar Germany, John Kander and Fred Ebb's song is weighted with irony and pathos. Celebration (“life is a cabaret, old chum”) slips into nihilism (“it’s only a cabaret, old chum”) as Sally—in a frantic rush of showbiz delusion—commits herself to a blind, headlong hedonism that refuses to take anyone seriously, especially herself, even as the Nazi tide rises to her neck. —Adam Feldman.
In Finishing the Hat, Stephen Sondheim modestly describes this trembling torch song as “less an homage to, than a theft of” George Gershwin’s “The Man I Love.” Even so, it has become one of his best-loved and most concertized tunes. While the melody is definitely reminiscent of Tin Pan Alley pop standards, the lyric is a masterpiece of psychological probing and terse, imagistic writing. In 26 lines of 109 words, Sondheim guides us through a day in the life of Sally Durant, former Follies girl, now middle-aged and unhappily married. Verse by verse, we go from morning to afternoon and evening, each phase a snapshot of depression so deep she’s paralyzed: “Sometimes I stand / In the middle of the floor, / Not going left, / Not going right.” The madness simile in the lyric is drama-queen hyperbole; Sally is romantically deluded, but not clinically insane. Still, for anyone who has suffered obsessive love or self-loathing, the song is unbearably raw.
No surprise that generations of fans have lost their head over it.— David Cote. Pundits have called this freeform, tongue-twisting sermon a precursor of rap.
It was declaimed in The Music Man by con man Harold Hill, a huckster who rolls into an Iowa hick town in 1912 with a scheme to rob it blind. He warns adults that their kids are turning into street-tough “cigarette fiends”—and that only by paying him to form a marching band can morality be saved. In his Tony-winning performance, preserved in the 1962 film, Robert Preston delivered this daredevil piece as nimbly as a racecar champ on a collision course.
—James Gavin. After “I’ll Be Seeing You,” the most poignant of World War II goodbye songs might well be “Some Other Time.” It comes from On the Town, a madcap musical about three sailors on 24-hour shore leave in Manhattan. Once the hijinks end, two of the men and their short-term sweethearts look sadly at the clock and sing this ballad, written by Leonard Bernstein and Betty Comden and Adolph Green.
Its message is eternal: “When you’re in love, time is precious stuff / Even a lifetime isn’t enough.” —James Gavin.
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Poor Anton Chekhov. For some reason, lots of playwrightshave recently decided that the best way for them to write a new play is tocannibalize one of his old ones.That’s what Aaron Posner does in Life Sucks.(the period's included in its title), a snarky modern-dress riff on Uncle Vanya that had asuccessful run at The Wild Project earlier this year and is now playing in TheatreThree at Theatre Row through Sept.
And it’s what Halley Feiffer has done in hereven more annoyingly titled Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow, a punk version ofThree Sisters that is running at MCC Theater through Aug. It’s not that Posner and Feiffer aren’t talented. Posner’s MyName is Asher Lev, a sensitive adaptation of Chaim Potok's novel about anOrthodox Jewish boy who breaks away from his family to become an artist, mademy Top 10 list for 2013.
And although parts of it made me cringe withdiscomfort, I was ultimately moved by I'm Gonna Pray for You So Hard, Feiffer’s 2015 drama about a toxic relationship between a father and daughter that seemed to echothe one between the playwright and her father, the cartoonist andplaywright Jules Feiffer. This time out however, both writers seem more interested inshowing off how cleverly post-modern they can be. For the most part, thecharacters and the storylines in their updates hew close to the Chekhovoriginals.
Vanya, the central figure in Life Sucks. Is still a sad sack who hasspent his life managing a country estate for the pompous professor who is his brother-in-law and pining for the man’s younger second wife.
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The three sistersin Moscow are still living in a provincial Russian town and longing for whatthey believe will be a more fulfilling life in the capital. The entanglements with and among their relatives, friendsand other hangers on also remain in both plays. What’s different are theself-consciously colloquial and often profane language (“I look like shit, butwhat else is new? I've always looked like shit,” complains Olga, the oldest ofthe sisters in Moscow) and the self-indulgent meta-theatrics that often mar themost tiresome skits on 'Saturday Night Live' (at various points, the characters in Life Sucks. Lineup and dance awkwardly or quiz the audience about how sucky their lives are). There's no regular post today because, as the GIF above illustrates, I'm running out for a quick intermission while my husband K and I take some time off for a little vacation.
But I decided against putting out the ghost light I usually use when I'm taking a break because (1) this GIF is more fun and (2) I'm leaving behind some other things I've done for you to read and listen to while I'm away.For starters, Slave Play, the provocative meditation on race and sex, is moving to Broadway in September and I got to do a Q&A for BroadwayDirect with its playwright Jeremy O. Harris and its director Robert O'Hara. You can read our conversation by clickingI also interviewed the playwright Winter Miller about her moving new drama No One is Forgotten, which is playing at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater through next weekend.
It chronicles the struggle for survival by two women held in captivity in a small cell in an unidentified land. You can hear our discussion about it—and Miller's frank views about the way theater treats female playwrights—by clickingAnd finally, I've added a bunch of interesting stories from a variety of sources to the B&Me Flipboard magazine, which you can find by clickingI hope you enjoy all of them and I hope you'll come back to read the reviews of some of the many shows I'm panning to see and write about next week.