Resting with Agnes

While taking a short rest in the sweet desert air of Palm Springs this week, I put together a post about the late choreographer Agnes de Mille and her wonderful series of memoirs that start with "Dance to The Piper."



You can get to Agnes by clicking here.



The post was for a San Francisco group called 42nd Street Moon that has been mounting rare musicals for the last 15 years. They have just started a blog and it should be fascinating, because the Artistic Director of the group, Greg MacKellan, is an encyclopedic musical history freak who is also a graceful writer.



The show that just closed was Kurt Weill's 1943 Broadway musical, "One Touch of Venus," which made Mary Martin into a star playing the title role. The entire score, from what I could gather from the piano reduction, is amazing and it's sad there's no recording of the piece other than a few songs like "Speak Low" and "I'm a Stranger Here Myself."

Another show is opening up next week, the 1918 Jerome Kern/P.G. Wodehouse farce, "Oh, Lady! Lady!!" Click here for more info.