RPGG Ep. 21 - Show-stopping Show Tunes

Welcome to Show-stopping Show Tunes for a magical Saturday mid-summer night, brought to you by the Boys of the Runka Punka Go Go chorus. We hope you like our show. Herein we play random show tunes with the goal, not to instruct, but to get you, members of the audience, to hum a song you heard here as you leave this theatre, and we hope you will carry that tune in your heart over until the next day. If that happens then we’ll have done our jobs.

We have often complained that there are few memorable tunes coming out of today’s musicals, so tonight we will try to prove that, not by playing modern forgettable stuff, but by playing the opposite. The good stuff.

And a quick, obligatory note: Like many of the genres we approach on this show, this one is enormous. So many great songs, so little time.

This topic was inspired by a couple of things. My guest host Kevin Michael Grace reviewed the movie musical Singing In the Rain on his daily live stream The KMG Show, featured on his Theatre Thursday. And then, I was talking on the phone with another friend, a trumpet player by the way (apropos of nothing except it’s musical) and he asked me, when are you going to do musicals on Runka Punka Go Go? Here we are, the summer is winding down; I though I would have this done topic by the end of the summer, so let’s get on with it.

I tossed in the idea of the Great American Songbook for discussion because that’s a great thing to talk about when it comes to musicals and movie musicals and great composers and lyricists who worked on Broadway and Tin Pan Alley, If you’ve got Jerome Kern in there somewhere, Great American Songbook it is. Though the Great American Songbook is by no means the backbone of this show. The backbone is mostly my arbitrary taste. You can scold me in the chat for that.

I titled this episode Show-stopping Show Tunes, but that might be a bit of an exaggeration. We have on our playlist a pop song opening for a movie about musicals, as suggested by my guest host, who wrote to me noting it is very meta. And I wrote back, sounds like a great beginning. So we go with meta. Also on the playlist, we have a comical duet starring a beautiful woman whose singing is dubbed; the only thing stopping the show here is her breathtaking beauty, pause-for-effect And we have a wonderful song and dance sequence featuring a couple of major movies stars in a not-so-famous movie. The dancing is show-stopping; the song, maybe not so much. However, the second selection I’ll play tonight is a genuine show-stopper, even though it’s actually curtain-opener, hardly a place to stop the show, but I have it on the best authority that this song and this musical changed Broadway forever. So that counts as a show-stopper in my book.

SHOW NOTES

RPGG Ep. 21 – Show-stopping Show Tunes

The KMG Show

Samuel Smiths Brewery, Yorkshire’s Oldest Brewery – Est. 1758

The Criterion Collection: All That Jazz

IMdB: All That Jazz (1979)

MBP on YouTube, posted Aug 3, 2021: George Benson Wes Montgomery thumb technique

Revolver, Aug 13, 2026: The rise of the cosmopolitan chud…

Rodgers & Hammerstein YouTube, posted Mar 13, 2014: ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’’ | Gordon MacRae | Rodgers & Hammerstein’s OKLAHOMA! (1955 FIlm)

Audible on Amazon: Great American Music: Broadway Musicals, Bill Messenger (Narrator, Author), The Great Courses (Author, Publisher)

Discogs: Rodgers & Hammerstein – Oklahoma — Original Broadway Cast Recording

Wikipedia: The Great American Songbook