Last week we were too consumed by meat products to mark this momentous anniversary. On Sept. 26, 1957, West Side Story opened at the Winter Garden in New York, with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by a very young Stephen Sondheim. An item in the New York Times that day revealed that it dealt with “the timely subject of juvenile delinquency.” They might as well have said “Oklahoma! it ain’t.” The next day Times reviewer Brooks Atkinson showed that he got it: a score that captures “the shrill beat of life in the streets;” “Everything contributes to the total impression of wildness, ecstasy and anguish;” “This is one of those occasions when theatre people…are all in top form.”
The Mudd has the original cast recording, the full score, the 1961 film (on DVD) starring Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer, and the crazy, what-were-they-thinking 1985 studio recording with José Carreras as the Polish youth and Tatiana Troyanos as the Puerto Rican teenage girl. Give it a listen just to hear UW-Milwaukee’s own Kurt Ollmann.
On September 11, 1967 The Carol Burnett Show premiered on CBS. It was the first hour-long comedy-variety show to be hosted by a woman. When you think about it, the show produced theater (
On September 10, 1907 a new department store, 
Here’s what we’ll bet you don’t know about Freddie Mercury: he was born in Tanzania, his real name was Farrokh Bulsara, and today would have been his 61st birthday.
As far as we know, people in Finland don’t usually stand around in contorted positions and gesticulate wildly. But today it’s happening in Oulu, Finland. Yes, it’s the 
Anton Bruckner (1824) and Darius Milhaud (1892) share a birthday today. Austrian versus Frenchman. One old enough to be the grandfather of the other. One a composer renowned for symphonic works in the tradition of Beethoven and Schubert (with a Wagnerian twist) along with sacred compositions; devout Roman Catholic; virtuoso organist. The other an avant garde artist of the 1920’s who prodigious output spanned all genres and who, in the words of New Grove, was a “pioneer in the use of percussion, polytonality, jazz and aleatory techniques.” Couldn’t get much different. We’ve got tons of 
Forty-three years ago today if you were between the ages of, say, 10 and 20 and you were in Wisconsin, and especially if you were a girl, you were only thinking of one thing: tonight’s concert. You’d sent away for tickets the previous spring and were lucky enough to have gotten one. Good thing, too, because reports surfaced about tickets being scalped for as much as $20. Of course, back in the spring a lot of people thought no one would remember who The Beatles were come September. They were wrong. That $4.50 would prove to be about the best money you’d ever spent.