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    The Broadway Best of Charles Strouse

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    The composer’s musicals, including “Annie” and “Bye Bye Birdie,” captured essential elements of American culture. Here are five of his most memorable songs.“Bye Bye Birdie” and “Annie,” the composer Charles Strouse’s most popular musicals, were not just big hits that are regularly revived on professional and amateur stages. They captured essential elements of American culture, including a yearning for escape from an older generation’s shackles and a can-do spirit to overcome adversity.Strouse, who died Thursday at 96, wrote jingles, pop songs and movie scores, but he remains famous for his Broadway shows. In addition to those two blockbusters, three others help make up his career peaks.Here are five numbers that illustrate Strouse’s suppleness as a composer and his knack for instantly hummable melodies.1960‘Bye Bye Birdie’Few musicals showcase as many great numbers as this hit about the Elvis Presley-like star Conrad Birdie, who, as a publicity stunt, visits a Midwest family before shipping off to the Army. The movie version, from 1963, is one of Hollywood’s best musicals of that decade, even though it made big changes to the show. The most egregious was casting Janet Leigh in the role of Rose Alvarez, played by Chita Rivera on Broadway. But it is hard to nitpick with the focus being shifted to Kim, a teenager discovering her sultry side, because she was played by Ann-Margret in an explosive performance that made her a star — she was particularly electric in the number “A Lot of Livin’ to Do.”Bonus video: In 2024, Vanessa Williams performed that song at the annual Miscast event, keeping the pronouns originally sung by Conrad Birdie intact.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      At 81, Ann-Margret Is Finally Living Her Rock ’n’ Roll Dream

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      Ann-Margret has always spoken in a voice that falls somewhere between a purr and a coo. But at her home on a recent rainy day in Los Angeles, she broke up her usual gauzy tones with deep and gutsy growls. “One, two, three o’clock rock!!!” she half-bellowed and half-yelled over a video chat, echoing the opening line from “Rock Around the Clock,” Bill Haley’s raucous 1954 smash.A few minutes later, she snarled through the opening salvo of “Splish Splash,” the highly caffeinated 1958 hit by Bobby Darin, only to follow it with the outburst, “I love rock ’n’ roll!” Her tone was far more Joan Jett than Kim McAfee, the sprightly character she played in “Bye Bye Birdie,” the movie that simultaneously made her a household name and the hottest pinup of 1963.Ann-Margret — pronounced as one name, not two — has always been rock ’n’ roll adjacent, though that’s rarely talked about today given her long and varied career as an actress and a singer of lounge classics. She co-starred with Elvis Presley in one of his most beloved films, “Viva Las Vegas,” provided a flirty foil to a character meant to affectionately send him up in “Birdie,” and had a personal relationship with him of varying description.Ann-Margret and Elvis Presley on the set of “Viva Las Vegas.” “We looked at one another and all of a sudden, I would do a pose and he’d be doing the same pose. We connected that way,” she said.Silver Screen Collection, via Getty ImagesShe also commanded a lead singing role in Ken Russell’s gaudy movie version of the Who’s rock opera “Tommy,” and earned a Grammy nomination for best new artist in 1962 after scoring a Top 20 hit with “I Just Don’t Understand,” one of the first recordings to feature a fuzz-toned guitar. Her song inspired a Beatles cover on the BBC two years later and, in 2014, the band Spoon recorded a version of her take, not the Fab Four’s.Yet, it’s only now, at the improbable age of 81, that Ann-Margret is getting the chance to assert herself as a full-on rock ’n’ roll goddess — if a winking one. On Friday she will release “Born to Be Wild,” the first album in the star’s career of 60-plus years to focus squarely on rock standards, all of which she handpicked, including Steppenwolf’s biker anthem referenced in the title and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” which Elvis famously gyrated through in his own version.A host of legit rockers leaped at the chance to support her in this lark of a project, including the “Tommy” creator Pete Townshend, who sang and played whiplash guitar on her version of the Everly Brothers’ “Bye-Bye Love”; Steve Cropper, who added Memphis cred to “Son of a Preacher Man”; and Joe Perry, who shot stinging solos into her take on “Rock Around the Clock.” The album also features cameos from peers like Cliff Richard (82) and Pat Boone (88).“What she has done is extraordinary,” Townshend said by phone from London, adding an expletive for emphasis. “She picked up the silver thread that links her to the very genesis of rock ’n’ roll history. There’s a mischievousness to that, a light touch that’s perhaps necessary but also real.”Townshend compared receiving the invitation to play on her album to the time, in 1993, when he “was summoned to play with the Ramones. You know you won’t say no,” he added.“I feel the way I felt when I was 10 years old whenever the music plays,” Ann-Margret said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesFrom the dining room of the Benedict Canyon home she has lived in since 1968, Ann-Margaret said she’d long harbored hopes of making a record like “Born to Be Wild.” “Deep inside I’ve wanted to do this kind of album forever,” she explained. She alluded to her outfit — a black sweater, tight leggings and leather boots that rose past the knee: “This is what I’ve been wearing since I first came to Los Angeles,” she said. “This is what I’m comfortable in.”She’s just as comfortable with language that dates from the ’50s, peppering her speech with words like “gadzooks” and “egad.” Looking youthful with her trademark auburn sweep of hair, Ann-Margret has also retained the coquettish character that first made her a star, giggling often when she speaks and never giving away more than she wants to. It was her original image, more than her music, that inspired Brian Perera, the head of Cleopatra Records, which specializes in projects of a historical nature, to propose the album to her.“When you look at vintage photos of her, she’s wearing a leather jacket and riding a motorcycle, so the thought of her doing a rock ’n’ roll record really fit,” he said in an interview.The “Born to Be Wild” album cover drives that home. It reproduces a 1967 poster created for her first Vegas show that finds her in a form-fitting jumpsuit while straddling a Triumph Tiger motorcycle. “I don’t think I can get into that jumpsuit today,” she said, and laughed. “But I can sure try!”Ann-Margret has always been rock ’n’ roll adjacent, though that’s rarely talked about today given her long and varied career as an actress and as a singer of lounge classics. Bettmann, via Getty ImagesAnn-Margret has always been hot for motorcycles. Her father and uncle rode them when she was a child in Sweden, and when she saw Marlon Brando straddle one in “The Wild One,” “that was it. I had to have one,” she said. “I didn’t know many women who rode bikes back then.”She still rides a Harley specially designed for her in lavender. It makes a perfect complement to her Cadillac, finished in her favorite shade: “Hot pink!” she exclaimed.It could be a twin to Elvis’s famously pink Caddy. The relationship between Ann-Margret and E.P., as she calls him, has been the subject of gossip for decades, but she still won’t speak about the personal aspects of it — only their creative link. “We looked at one another and all of a sudden, I would do a pose and he’d be doing the same pose. We connected that way,” she said.Her record company tried to stress the connection by having her record “Heartbreak Hotel,” but she never had much of a career as a hitmaker. It was her acting in “Carnal Knowledge” — praised in a New York Times review from 1971 — that convinced Townshend that she could really deliver in “Tommy.” While he called the major male actors in the 1975 film — Jack Nicholson and Oliver Reed — “egomaniacal, whiskey drinking lunatics,” he said that Ann-Margret was a consummate professional. She even carried off the absurdity of playing Roger Daltrey’s mother though she was just two years his senior.“I’m just happy to be alive,” Ann-Margret said. “I have the same friends I’ve had for 60 years, and I feel the way I felt when I first met them.”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesOne of Ann-Margret’s most famous moments in “Tommy” involved geysers of baked beans being shot directly at her. “They came down a chute and then — pow! — it threw me about five feet back!” she said. “And it smelled!” She recalled that Russell said her character was meant to be experiencing a nervous breakdown during the scene, but to some viewers it looked more like she was having an orgasm. “That’s fine with me!” she added brightly.Townshend thinks the director, Russell, took a bit too much pleasure in having her do the scene repeatedly. “Ken loved to have a beautiful woman in his clutches covered in beans,” he said. “Let’s just do it again!”For the new album, he believes Ann-Margret made a perfect choice in having him perform with her on the Everly Brothers song. “My acoustic guitar style is loosely based on Don Everly’s,” he said.Pat Boone, who played Ann-Margret’s love interest in the 1963 musical “State Fair,” was at first taken aback by the song she chose for their duet, “Teach Me Tonight,” which he called “a love scene in a song.” “I thought, ‘What am I doing singing this?’” Boone said. “I’m 87 at that point and she’s got to be 80. I had to do it humorously.”So he ad-libbed the lines “I think we just wrote an octogenarian love song” and “I’ll have to turn up my hearing aid.” For the record, “I don’t wear hearing aids,” Boone added with a laugh.More saucy wit appears in a song Ann-Margret chose from her Vegas act, “Somebody’s in My Orchard,” which includes lines like “Somebody digs my fig trees/Somebody loves their juice.” “Oh, to see people’s faces when they finally realize what I’m singing about,” she said mischievously.Despite all the album’s humor, Paul Shaffer, who played piano on “The Great Pretender,” insists that her Vegas-style approach to music isn’t just camp. “She delivers the goods,” he said.When comparing her with young female entertainers like Taylor Swift and Demi Lovato, he added, “Aren’t they really doing Ann-Margret’s act?”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesLike all of the album’s guests, Shaffer recorded his parts separately from the star. He noted that her voice on the recording is lower and huskier than when she last cut an album, a gospel work reflecting her faith that was released 10 years ago. But Perera of Cleopatra Records believes Ann-Margret’s chestier tone works for the grinding sound of early rock. He added that “there isn’t a lot of new music coming from artists whose careers started in the ’50s and early ’60s. That makes it special.”The musicians who appear beside Ann-Margret on the album marveled over her ability, at 81, to convey a come-hither sexuality in her singing. To her, it makes an important point — that eroticism doesn’t have a cutoff date. At the same time, she made sure to deliver her sensuality with humor, and kept the tone of the music light.The only time she turned sad in our talk was when mentioning her husband, the actor Roger Smith, who served as her manager for much of their 50-year relationship and who died in 2017. Last year, she also lost her old friend and “Bye Bye Birdie” co-star Bobby Rydell, who died before he could finish a track he started for the album. Small wonder, when asked about how she feels about her upcoming 82nd birthday, she said, “I’m just happy to be alive. I have the same friends I’ve had for 60 years, and I feel the way I felt when I first met them.”Singing has the same effect: “I feel the way I felt when I was 10 years old whenever the music plays.” More

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      in Theater

      Book Review: ‘Blanche: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation,’ by Nancy Schoenberger

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      Playing Blanche DuBois is shattering, say the actresses featured in Nancy Schoenberger’s “Blanche.” But Tennessee Williams’s most indelible character is now a figure of sympathy.BLANCHE: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation, by Nancy SchoenbergerLast we saw of Blanche DuBois, the brittle antiheroine of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play “A Streetcar Named Desire,” she was being carted off to a state loony bin, uttering her famous line about relying on “the kindness of strangers” that can hardly be improved upon.So when Nancy Schoenberger, a biographer and poet, announced early in her new book, “Blanche,” that she planned to include a few sonnets written from the perspective of DuBois’s ill-fated, unseen young husband, as well as a hypothetical obituary in The Times-Picayune describing how her subject turned her life around after psychiatric treatment, I … yes, blanched.With rare exceptions, such as Jean Rhys’s “Wide Sargasso Sea” (a prequel to “Jane Eyre” that imagines the first Mrs. Rochester), messing with another writer’s characters tends to be tricky business. You have to love, for example, the sardonic headline The New York Times ran when it reviewed Susan Hill’s 1993 novel “Mrs. DeWinter,” a follow-up to Daphne du Maurier’s unimprovable “Rebecca”: “Still Dead After All These Years.”Was “Blanche” going to be a “Still Crazy After All These Years” situation? Or like the goofy-sounding off-off-Broadway attempt at a “Streetcar” sequel in 2006, wherein Blanche and Stella, her sister, were at least in passing represented by throw pillows?Fortunately not. Schoenberger, the author of books on the novelist-socialite Lady Caroline Blackwood and the Johns Wayne and Ford, has now written a lean but graceful character study of DuBois, giving Williams’s most indelible but also frequently misunderstood character her due.It seems incredible now that when “Streetcar” was first staged in 1947, directed by Elia Kazan and starring Jessica Tandy, audiences sympathized with her antagonist and brother-in-law Stanley Kowalski: the brutish factory-parts salesman most remembered for the muscles rippling over his “wife beater” T-shirt and his primordial bellow of “Hey, Stellllla!” (The sympathy was probably in part because young Marlon Brando’s performance was so dazzling.)Even before the #MeToo era, however, Kowalski was being re-evaluated as a domestic abuser, slut shamer and rapist. And as important a proponent of the play as Kazan, who also directed Vivien Leigh in the 1951 film, grew convinced, after his prolonged time with the material, of Blanche’s basic sanity.Schoenberger briefly explains her own fascination with “Streetcar”: Her parents were born in New Orleans, where the play is set, on either side of the Audubon Park Zoo, hearing the roar of the lions there. Her father was an itinerant naval officer — “so handsome in his white uniform!” writes the author, whose enthusiasm sometimes spills over endearingly into exclamation points — but she visited Louisiana often as a child, marveling at the Spanish moss and “dark scurrying cockroaches that seemed to lurk everywhere.” Her mother, a campus beauty queen in Baton Rouge, was an early fan of Williams’s work.If New Orleans and its “miasmal vapors” are pure nostalgia for Schoenberger, for Williams, a gay man who had been mocked as “Miss Nancy” by his cruel father, Cornelius, the sensual city was “liberation,” she notes. He was inspired more tragically by his sister Rose, whose erratic behavior, possibly exacerbated by Cornelius’s violations, led to her institutionalization and then lobotomization at age 26.The dysfunctional Williams family, chronicled extensively in more substantive books like John Lahr’s “Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh,” moves to the background quite quickly in “Blanche,” though, as readers get acquainted with a series of prominent actresses who have played her, a couple of whom Schoenberger has interviewed, all of whom were haunted by their experience. She also relies heavily, though with a light touch, on previously published material, of which there is no shortage. Talking to a journalist about playing DuBois can resemble a particularly wrenching therapy session.For women and not a few drag queens, Blanche is considered one of the plummest roles in all of show business, though its psychological complexities can prove debilitating. “Like climbing Mount Everest,” NPR called it. (Cate Blanchett, naturally, has scaled Everest twice, playing Blanche both onstage and, in Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine,” onscreen, in a modernized version for which she won an Oscar.) Jessica Lange and her partner, Sam Shepard — romantic couples often get oddly enmeshed in the production of “Streetcar” — believed it the equivalent of “Hamlet.” Rosemary Harris: “The loneliest part to live through that I’ve ever played on the stage.” Patricia Clarkson: “It destroys your life when you play that part, you never really recover from it, and everybody who’s ever done it knows.” Jemier Jenkins, one of a few Black women to play her, on the aftermath: “I was very actively trying to release, release, release.”Even the sturdy Ann-Margret found herself “twisted and shaking, confused, agitated, and staring ahead in a daze. I’d lost my grip on reality.” Most starkly Leigh, who turned out to have bipolar disorder, claimed that playing DuBois “tipped me into madness.” “Why has she entered our bloodstream?” wonders Schoenberger, a persuasive proponent of the play’s enduring importance despite its dated elements, most risibly that women hovering around 30 are past their prime. We have lived to see the antiquation of the word “nymphomaniac,” with which the critic Kenneth Tynan dismissed the character, and the reframing of prostitution as “sex work.” (DuBois’s seduction of a 17-year-old male student, regardless, keeps the mantle of moral ambiguity as settled around her shoulders as the “burden” of Belle Reve, the lost family estate, or one of her gossamer scarves.)Talking to Claire Bloom, who played the part on a London stage in 1974, Tennessee Williams once said he imagined Blanche persevering through her time in the asylum and ending up with a flower shop back in New Orleans; in her feminist faux-obit, Schoenberger gives her a co-ownership with Stella, who’s divorced Stanley. It’s a fanciful but satisfying little coda to this project, thankfully confined. (The sonnets, supposedly by Blanche’s doomed young groom, Allan Gray, are gilding the lily.)I’m not sure “Blanche,” which can waft and flit like the butterfly-like creature it chronicles, will satisfy true Williams junkies. But if you’re unfamiliar with this great American classic, or have perhaps let high-school memories of it lapse, this book is a hell of a gateway drug.BLANCHE: The Life and Times of Tennessee Williams’s Greatest Creation | By Nancy Schoenberger | Illustrated | 240 pp. | Harper/HarperCollins Publishers | $30 More