Conventional wisdom is difficult to alter, but here goes: contrary to what has been widely written, Jesus Christ Superstar was not the first concept recording of a musical to spawn a wildly successful hit show. Sorry Andrew, sorry Tim.

It may well be that JCS was the first concept album to be the basis for a hit Broadway show, but the songs that formed the core of a hugely popular international success were first heard on vinyl in 1966 and landed on stage in New York in March 1967, for a run that would last for 1,597 performances, more than four years before the biblically-based musical. That show – and feel free to start singing the title tune now – was You’re A Good Man, Charlie Brown.

Composer Clark Gesner, who had previously written songs for television’s Captain Kangaroo children’s program, wrote the songs for YAGMCB with permission from Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz. According to Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis, Gesner’s first songs, the title track and “Suppertime,” kicked off conversations about a televised animated musical revue. Those plans were superseded by what became A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965, the first animated Peanuts special, with memorable musical soundtrack by Vince Guaraldi, but not a musical under any conventional definition.

Consequently, Gesner’s songs first reached the ears of listeners, predominantly young listeners and their parents, in the autumn of 1966 when the 10-track, 25-minute concept recording of You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown was released on King Leo, the children’s division of MGM Records, a major label at the time Records (later issues were on Metro Records). It was billed as “an original MGM album musical” on the cover. The cast was Gesner as Linus, Barbara Minkus as Lucy, Bill Hinnant as Snoopy, and as Charlie Brown, actor-comedian-raconteur Orson Bean. Bean was had already appeared in eight Broadway shows, his most recent credit at the time being The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd.

Part of the reason the King Leo release has likely been lost to time was how quickly it was supplanted by the original cast recording – there was less than six months between the two – and as they were both released by MGM, no doubt marketing focused on the latter as soon as it was on record store shelves. Yet the 1966 concept recording is a fascinating document for fans of the musical, because it reveals how fully formed much of the score was before a stage incarnation was actually in the works. As a note for those who own the CD reissue cast recording on Decca Broadway dating to 2000 with tracks featuring Gesner and Minkus, those are from the demo entitled Peanuts in Song, which were the recordings Gesner sent to Schulz to secure his permission.

All ten of the songs on the King Leo album, including “Happiness,” “Snoopy” and “Little Known Facts” were in the show, some renamed, with the most prominent additions being “The Book Report” and “The Red Baron.” What’s most unexpected about the 1966 recording is its more varied orchestration: horns, strings and a most insistent clarinet are in evidence, no doubt replaced by the simpler piano and percussion mix of the show for financial reasons. Not unlike The Fantasticks, which kept TAGMCB from ever breaking records despite its notably long run, the show’s success was in part due to its small and economical scale.

To be fair to Rice and Lloyd Webber, their JCS concept album was for all practical purposes the complete score and libretto of their show. The YAGMCB album did not have an accompanying book and it was not through-sung, although some of the material which toggled between speech and singing were in place, as were some the introductory dialogue to the songs. The musical itself was largely written during the show’s four-week rehearsal, or, more accurately, assembled using the songs and Schulz’s strips to date, which at that point, with daily and Sunday counted, would have numbered roughly 5,875 through the end of 1966.

When Charlie Brown opened at Off-Broadway’s Theatre 80 St. Marks on March 7, 1967, only Hinnant remained from the concept recording, joined by his brother Skip as Schreoder, Bob Balaban as Linus, Karen Johnson as Patty, Reva Rose as Lucy and Gary Burghoff as Charlie Brown. The director was Joseph Hardy and the choreographer was Patricia Birch. The shift from Bean to Burghoff may have been simply a case of a successful Broadway and TV actor not wanting to commit to a small Off-Broadway show, but it also made sense because Burghoff was 15 years younger than the 37-year-old Bean; the role launched Burghoff into a  career defining role as Radar O’Reilly in the film and TV versions of M*A*S*H. Minkus could have easily played Lucy on stage, but it appears she was otherwise committed when the show opened, as one of the standbys for the role of Fanny Brice in the Broadway production of Funny Girl.

Were there other concept albums that preceded YAGMCB? Perhaps. This post isn’t meant to be the final word on the subject. But it should lay to rest the idea that Lloyd Webber and Rice were somehow the first to bring a show to the stage in this way, and certainly not the first to have enormous success as a result. After all, per David Michaelis’s book, the original production yielded 13 touring companies in the US (though more likely some of those were sit-down productions) and 15 international companies. It has been a staple of the musical theatre repertoire ever since, notably revived on Broadway, with new musical contributions by Andrew Lippa, in 1999.

So step aside, Jesus Christ (Superstar). Just as he was anointed in the Schulz drawing that introduced the 1966 album, the musical theatre concept album crown belongs to Charlie Brown.

The complete 1966 recording can be heard here:

For those unfamiliar with my lifelong affection for the Peanuts comics, you can read about it in my post, A Man Named Charlie Brown, from 2013.

Andy Huntington Jones in Cats (Photo by Matthew Murphy)

In hindsight, the slogan ‘now and forever’ looks a bit less like marketing and a bit more like hubris. While it didn’t run forever, on the U.S. side of the Atlantic, the musical Cats maintains a formidable place in the annals of longest-running Broadway shows, surpassed only by The Lion King, the revival of Chicago and The Phantom of the Opera. While those latter three shows are all still chugging along, meaning they’re widening their lead over Cats, it’s going to take another four years or so before Wicked takes over the number four slot on the list – though that looks to be an increasingly likely achievement.

When the revival of Cats opens on Broadway on Sunday, in an open-ended run (in contrast to its recent limited-run engagements in the West End), it finds itself in a very different marketplace to the Broadway of the early 1980s, one that it helped to create through its success. The 1980s were a period when Broadway was in a slump, with theatres being demolished to make way for more lucrative real estate, and one even sold to a church. Now, musicals that run for fewer than five years can in some cases be seen as disappointments; 10-year runs are increasingly commonplace, if not exactly run of the mill.

The arrival of Cats, riding on a crest of acclaim from London back in 1982, was a big cultural event. Tickets for it in its first years were as dear as Hamilton tickets today, even if the secondary market was invisible to the average theatregoer in those pre-internet days. It’s important to remember how celebrated Cats was in its day, because as its 18 year run wore on, the show began to be perceived as a bit less groundbreaking and perhaps somewhat timeworn. For all of its enormous commercial success, its penetration into the popular consciousness and successful tapping of both the family and tourist markets, its then unprecedented run ultimately yielded jokes about the show having outlived its nine lives. The parade of animals that opened Julie Taymor’s production of The Lion King for Disney became the new standard for anthropomorphised animals on Broadway; the two shows overlapped for almost three years in New York.

While Chicago returned to Broadway in a production that echoed the Bob Fosse-directed original, it isn’t the same staging; no doubt the show benefited from a hiatus of some 20 years. Conversely, Les Misérables came back to Broadway for the first time only three years after the original run closed, in the same production, and lasted just 15 months. The Cats revival has the benefit of being gone from Broadway for almost 16 years, but it’s largely the same show (save for some new choreography and lighting). It remains to be seen whether ticket buyers embrace the show that may well have been their very first time at the theatre, seizing an opportunity to take their children to an experience they once loved as children, or whether the iconic production might have needed a full rethink for the digital era, for a generation raised on The Lion King and Wicked.

I have to confess that I am rather uniquely unqualified to hazard a guess as to what the fate of the Cats revival may be. Why? Are you sitting down? Because I’ve never seen it. Despite avid theatregoing that began in the late 1970s, I never did manage to see Cats on Broadway, on tour or even in a high school auditorium. I was already a collegiate theatre snob when the show opened, and, without children of my own nagging me to take them as the run continued, I never felt the feline lure of T.S. Eliot or Andrew Lloyd Webber during the ensuing two decades. When I worked on the US premiere of By Jeeves in the mid-1990s, I always feared Lloyd Webber turning to me and saying, “Do you remember that moment in Cats when…?” I would have been left sputtering for a response.

That’s not to say I don’t have a strong impression of the show, since numbers were performed in full on television back in the day, excerpted for Broadway histories and television ads alike, parodied frequently, and so on. The TV sitcom Caroline in the City featured an actor character who was – fictionally – a member of the Cats menagerie. It was such a cultural touchstone that I remember The New York Times critic Frank Rich panning a show I did press for, about illegal dog fighting (no animals were harmed), with a withering, “Anyone for Cats?”

Come next week at this time, I will no longer be a Cats virgin. Whatever I make of it, inevitably my response cannot be one of youthful wonder nor middle-aged nostalgia. The question for the producers is whether there are enough people out there who want to evoke one or the other of those sentiments, among the already initiated or those born too late to experience the original run. As much as I plan to watch the show at long last, I’ll be keeping an eye on the audience as well, to see who turns out for the reconstituted Cats, if not now and forever, than at least once and again.

Attendees at BroadwayCon (Photo by Howard Sherman)

If the sight of perhaps 750 theatre fans spontaneously breaking into a song from their favourite musical warms your heart, then the conference rooms of the New York Hilton on Sixth Avenue were the place to be on January 22. If the cast of that same musical, having heard about the impromptu singalong, asking some 3,000 theatre fans to sing to them is similarly inspiring, well you should have been in the Hilton ballroom that same afternoon.

From January 22 to 24, the Hilton was home to the first BroadwayCon, a fan convention for theatre buffs. Filled with events, performances and panels not just about Broadway, but about the theatre overall – though admittedly with a tilt towards musicals – BroadwayCon reportedly sold some 6,000 tickets, which had gone on sale 10 months earlier and cost $125 per day or $250 for the weekend.

I went to BroadwayCon with a mixed agenda: first, sheer curiosity, second, the intention to document it for this column, and third, because I had been invited to moderate a panel about production assistants who subsequently ‘made it big’ in the theatre business. I didn’t know quite what to expect, and one press representative I saw at the event confessed that when it was first announced, there was a feeling of uncertainty in their office.

On the eve of the event, The New York Times cited the demographics of the attendees, provided by the organisers: “Nearly 80% of the registrants are female; 75% are from outside the state of New York; and 50% are 30 or younger.” That’s a far cry from the general assumptions about theatre appealing to an increasingly older crowd, and while 6,000 fans certainly can’t sustain the field alone, the sight of multiple Elphabas, Phantoms, and Tracy Turnblads was evidence that theatre still holds a very strong appeal.

What was on offer? Among many options, there were cast conversations with leads from Fun Home, Spring Awakening, Hamilton and Fiddler on the Roof, and a reunion of cast members of Rent (just days before the 20th anniversary of Jonathan Larson’s passing and the show’s first Off-Broadway preview). There were fan meet-ups organised by affinity (a room that was packed by Sondheim fans at 10am was rather sparse by 11am, when the call was for Lloyd Webber buffs), conversations about diversity, design and marketing, as well as audience participation games and variety shows. Both singalongs I mentioned earlier were from Hamilton events.

I experienced a mild sense of deja vu throughout the weekend (I spent time at BroadwayCon on each of its three days) because it was 40 years ago, to the precise weekend, that I had attended my very first fan convention of any kind, the 1976 International Star Trek Convention, at the very same hotel. It is frankly remarkable that with the flourishing of fan conventions since that time, it was only this year that anyone managed to capitalise on the convention model for theatre and Broadway.

While there were occasional snafus with wrangling crowds into the largest and most popular events on Friday, a gigantic blizzard unfortunately prevented many fans – as well as guest speakers and performers – from reaching the hotel on Saturday, and even Sunday. But the organisers scrambled valiantly and effectively to insure a good experience for those who made it. So while the attendance never seemed as high as on that first day, and while the largest rooms may not have always been as filled, I sensed no lessening of enthusiasm among the die-hards who had either stayed over at the hotel or braved the elements to be there.

Like Broadway itself, access to BroadwayCon wasn’t cheap, and presumably there were countless fans who couldn’t attend because of the added expense of a flight and hotel tickets. But this first year should prove that there’s an enormous appetite among theatre fans to gather both with those they admire, and others who share their passions, getting out of social media and chat rooms and into real life interactions. As someone who began the weekend by adopting a slight distance and harbouring even a bit of cynicism, I was drawn back through heavy snow and puddles of icy slush because BroadwayCon successfully tapped into my inner fanboy, and because I was having a good time watching others have a good time. It gave them access to the world I’ve long been in. The theatre must do more of that.

WestEndCon, anyone?

This essay originally appeared in The Stage.

The White House

There’s been a song running through my head for the past week, prompted by a series of press releases I’ve received. Anyone on a press list will tell you, notices from publicists flooding your inbox don’t normally move one to song.

The tune in question is “Bobby and Jackie and Jack” from Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along. If you don’t know the song, it’s a cabaret number devised by the lead characters, spoofing the cultural array offered up by the Kennedy White House in the early 1960s. I’ve always been taken with the line, “We’ll have Bernstein play next on the Bechstein piano/And Auden read poems and stuff.” There’s lots of material like that.

The Sondheim wordplay is on my mind because there has been a steady drumbeat of cultural interest by the Obama White House in recent weeks, though not remotely for the first time. Without being political or trumpeting national pride, I have to say this makes me rather happy.

A number of Broadway shows were in Washington DC on Monday to tape Broadway at the White House for broadcast next week by TLC, one of our countless cable channels, on our Thanksgiving holiday. It features Michelle Obama as a special guest, with performances from several Broadway shows including On Your Feet, An American in Paris (in poignant timing), School of Rock and Fun Home. On Wednesday, the White House hosted a livestream salute to the Americans With Disabilities Act in its 25th year, which included a performance by the cast of Spring Awakening, which reached Broadway after being developed by the company Deaf West in a tiny theatre in Los Angeles.

This is all on top of New York City’s traffic-stopping special performance of the musical Hamilton two weeks ago, with the Obamas in attendance, in a high-price-ticket fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee. The event was widely known about and seen thanks to news reports about the president’s onstage remarks. And it’s worth noting that this was the second time the Obamas, who have visited Broadway regularly throughout his terms, have seen Lin-Manuel Miranda’s look at early US history (although Miranda’s alternate was on the first time they went).

Sondheim’s ribbing of the Kennedys notwithstanding, it’s incredibly affirming for every theatre geek in the country to know that the form of culture we participate in and love finds favour in the highest corridors of power. To be sure, some might make the charge that theatre is an elitist art if they’re trying to tear down the politicians who attend, but TLC wisely made the taping of their show part of a daylong event for students from arts programs in public schools around the country. Who can argue with that? As for Spring Awakening, the stream was free for all to see.

Diehards like me cling to moments when theatre is recognised by the wider culture. I’m happy to tell you that in the 1950s, the sitcom I Love Lucy sent Lucy and Ricky to Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, while more recently South Park featured Stephen Schwartz and Andrew Lloyd Webber in a brilliantly absurdist episode. There is symbolic power in politicians sitting in the dark watching the performing arts live, because it’s going to reach some portions of the population who might just decide to check this stuff out for themselves.

As Broadway is showcased before our political leaders and donors, it’s worth noting that even though some of the aforementioned shows originated with subsidised companies, there’s a vast array of theatre that isn’t defined by commercial success. Maybe before leaving office the Obamas might stop in at one or more of those companies. Or invite them to their home for the holidays.

This column originally appeared in The Stage newspaper in London.