A Class Act

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Under the impression that A Class Act had been quantifiably changed during its transfer from the Manhattan Theatre Club to Broadway's smallish Ambassador, and hoping that the changes represented improvements, I returned to see the musical built around songs written by the late Edward Kleban. The composer-lyricist was known primarily as the wordsmith of A Chorus Line, which was both a blessing and a curse for him, since his dream of composing a Broadway score by himself and not with Marvin Hamlisch or any other collaborator hadn't been realized at the time of his death, at 48, in 1987.

Well, the musical--with a book by director Lonny Price and long-time Kleban girlfriend Linda Kline--has [...]

Edward Kleban (1939-1987) is best known, where he is known at all, as having written the Tony-winning lyrics for A Chorus Line. But warm, witty, and amusing as his work for that masterpiece may be, he was also a composer eager to see and hear musical comedies for which he supplied both words and music show up in big Broadway houses. With that goal firmly set in his fertile mind, he wrote the scores for revues and book shows that, due to show-biz vagaries, were infrequently or never produced; his treatments of A Thousand Clowns and The Americanization of Emily were stalled when he was unable to obtain adaptation rights. (This is certainly a pity in the case of the later work, which I once [...]