Here are a few of the responses Howard got on his website from the article I printed last week.

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I would like everyone to stop using “community theatre” as a punch line or punching bag.

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By Steven LaVigne There are over 500 film adaptations of Charles Dickens’ writing.  At least 20 of these are based on his 1838 novel, Oliver Twist. Among them is a 1922 version starring Jackie Coogan as the title character opposite Lon Chaney, “the man of a thousand faces” as Fagin. Taking a look at this…

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By Steven LaVigne Films based on the work of L. Frank Baum have been made for over a century. The first Wizard of Oz film was made in 1910. The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1914) was a film before it became a novel, The first feature length version was released in 1925 starring Dorothy Dwan…

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My Fair Lady is one of the theater’s most phenomenal musicals.

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by Steven LaVigne It was Martin Charnin’s idea to transform Harold Gray’s comic strip, Little Orphan Annie, into a musical. However, when he first suggested it to playwright Thomas Meehan and composer Charles Strouse their response was negative. They gradually came around to the project. At the time, the United States had survived the Nixon/Watergate…

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by Steven LaVigne Although it didn’t happen often enough, several movie musicals managed to capture the brilliance of their stage beginnings. This production of Show Boat, brought to the stage in 1927 by Florenz Ziegfeld and considered the first great musical of the Twentieth Century is a perfect example. Released by Universal, the 1936 version…

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by Steven LaVigne As anyone who’s read about or taken a class in the history of musical theater knows, Oklahoma! was an innovative musical whose original production changed the genre forever. Prior to 1943, musicals usually opened with a chorus of pretty girls singing and dancing in order to draw in the audience, especially the…

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