Illustrations above and below are from an online activity book touting the original print version of The Great American Mousical, by Julie Andrews, Tony Walton and Emma Walton Hamilton.

As in the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore film Bedazzled, the magic words at Goodspeed Musicals are…

Juuuuuuulie Annnnnndrews!

She’s primarily known for her one-two-three-four punch in the 1960s as Broadway’s Eliza Doolittle, cinema’s Mary Poppins and Maria Von Trapp and the concert foil for Carol Burnett. In the 1970s and ‘80s she became a prized film comedienne and character actress, especially in some of the films directed by her husband Blake Edwards.
Later on in her illustrious career, Julie Andrews established herself as a stage director—including for the Goodspeed, where she helmed a revival of another of her Broadway acting successes, The Boyfriend in 2006.
Today, in the midst of their weekend-long Festival of New Artists, the Goodspeed announced that Andrews has another directing project at the theater—an adaptation of a children’s book she wrote in 2006.

As rumored back in April, Goodspeed Musicals is turning The Great American Mousical into a full-fledged family friendly musical. We now know that the show will have a book by Hunter Bell ([title of show], Silence! The Musical) and music & lyrics by Zina Goldrich and Marcy Heisler, whose previous kid-style musical was the Lucille Lortel Award nominee Junie B. Jones (based on the beloved Barbara Park series).

The Great American Mousical will have its world premiere Nov. 8 through Dec. 2 at the Goodspeed’s Norma Terris Theatre in Chester.

Great American Mousical is a Julie Andrews family affair similar to the one which formed around her production of The Boyfriend. Julie’s daughter Emma Walton Hamilton is the co-author of the original Mousical kids’ book, and, as a co-founder of the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, NY, coaxed her mother to direct the Boyfriend there, a couple of years prior to the Goodspeed production and subsequent national tour. Emma’s dad and Julie’s first husband, the internationally renowned set and costume designer (and occasional director) Tony Walton, designed The Boyfriend revival. He also illustrated the book version of The Great American Mousical.

These are major talents, young and old. Comparable to the Great American Mousical’s own fictional rodent line-up of Adelaide the diva, Emil the director, Wendy the ingénue, Curly the comedian, Rose the soubrette, Sancho the choreographer, Pops the Stage Door Mouse, Charlemagne the set designer, Mrs. Anna the costume designer, Lycus the lighting designer, Raoul the sound designer, Maestro Maraczek the musical director, Don Q. the producer, Scud the rat, Henry the country professor, The Pharmacist and his nephew Ping, Little June the child actress, Fausto the restaurateur and Sky “the handsome male star.”

The Great American Mousical is a proper chapter book, full of detail about the process of putting on a big show, created by a couple of people who know Broadway in and out, Julie Andrews and Tony Walton. It’s a natural project for turning into an actual musical, and Goodspeed’s nabbed it.

ReWilding

Through Jan. 14 at the Yale Cabaret. Remaining performances are tonight (Saturday the 14^th) at 8:30 and 11 p.m.

By Martyna Majok. Direction and set design by Dustin Wills. Lights by Solomon Weisbard. Costumes by Seth Bodie. Sound by Ken Goodwin. Producer: Shane Hudson. Dramaturg: Tanya Dean. Stage Manager: Catherine Costanzo. Technical Director: Nicole Bromley.

The Yale Cabaret’s uncorked its spring semester. Always an exciting time in the school year, since the first-year acting students are now allowed (by their administrative protectors) to strut their stuff in open-to-the-public productions. A special culture forms at the Cabaret, with some ubiquitous talents of the past few semesters starting to ease away from the space (as thesis projects and the Carlotta Festival loom), relinquishing it to the new breed.

The overlap in reWilding between old hands (the radiant even when dirtied up Adina Verson, who’s practically lived in the Cabaret for the past few semesters and summers; the assured comic relief of Lucas Dixon) and new add immeasurably to the effect of reWilding. The play is about socializing in the most awkward situations. It investigates a culture of people who want to forget their pasts, formed in a backwoods swampland.

What makes the piece groundbreaking is the lack of community shown. This is about individuals finding their way but not necessarily connecting. The dramatic thrust is not about a revolution. It is about the instincts of escaping and of gathering.

There are so many metaphors to be found here, starting with the purposefully nonhierarchical and intriguingly scattered Occupy Movement. There are applications to college life, small town living, religious hermitages and historical settlements during the land grabs of past centuries. The people in reWilding behave as if they might as well be living in far-off lands. They have lost the strong connections to time and place that most of us take for granted. Their monologues—the whole show is a stream of vignettes, few of them involving more than one speaker—are vivid for their apartness. There’s music and liveliness, but neatly countered with oppressive darkness and director/designer Dustin Wills’ clever use of door/screens as dividers and obstacles.

I’m reminded to the Meredith Monk faux-documentary Book of Days, where an interviewer from modern times attempts to interview inhabitants of a medieval village. Only so much practical information can be divined, and the residents can be reticent and uncomprehending.

There are some melodramatic touches to ReWilding which skew the experience more toward a murder/suspense plot than the quiet, tense reflections which are its real strength. The sense of menace and disorientation is there without the need to provide such visceral hints of unhinged violence.

But overall, this is a profound journey into undocumented lifestyles and human directions, achieved with admirable balance, useful abstraction and a neat open-endedness, despite all the obvious temptations which threaten to turn this psychological thought piece into a slasher-film scenario.

This just in: Long Wharf Theatre has decided not to do the world premiere of a new stage adaptation of William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice, which was to star Carla Gugino and be directed by Long Wharf Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein.

Instead, the theater’s final mainstage production of its 2011-12 season will be a stage adaptation of a different Jewish-themed novel, Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev. The play version is by Aaron Posner, the famed regional director/playwright whose other script adaptations include Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion and  a whole other Potok novel, The Chosen. My Name is Asher Lev is an established script which has had a number of successful productions, including one at Barrington Stage Company in the Berkshires this past August.

According to the Long Wharf’s director of Marketing and Communications, Steve Scarpa, the Sophie’s Choice script “was in development for 18 months. Gordon didn’t feel the script was ready. The producers and Carla Gugino agreed.”

In a Long Wharf press release, Edelstein is quoted:

“I was looking for a play with gravitas, high literary content and seriousness of purpose. Happily, I found an adaptation of a much loved and much read novel by a distinguished writer. My Name is Asher Lev is a beautiful story about the coming of age of an artist whose God given gift is in conflict with his strict religious upbringing,” Edelstein said. “The play asks timeless questions about community, God, family and artistic talent.”

My Name is Asher Lev will play on the Long Wharf Theatre mainstage May 2-27. Gordon Edelstein will direct. No cast members have yet been announced.

Goodspeed Musicals’ 2012 Festival of New Artists kicks off tomorrow, a weekend of readings, screenings, cabaret performances, talks and other events which demonstrate the complex, fraught yet fun process of developing new musical theater projects.

Highlights include readings of three new musicals (Harmony, Kansas; Not Wanted on This Voyage; and The Dogs of Pripyat), Nancy Anderson doing a cabaret performance of Noel Coward songs; seminars with designer Tony Walton and a representative of Disney Theatricals, and a live preview of an unnamed musical “headed to Goodspeed’s Norma Terris Theatre in 2012.”

There’s some nice connections among the varied events this year. One of the staged readings is of Not Wanted on the Voyage, based on the fantasy novel by Timothy Findley. The show’s composer/lyricist, Neil Bartram, and book writer Brian Hill also created The Story of My Life, which had a pre-Broadway production at Goodspeed in 2008. The festival is screening a video of Story of My Life to kick on the festival Friday at 1 p.m., in anticipation of the Not Wanted on the Voyage reading Saturday night at 7:30 p.m.

The Goodspeed’s really achieved a remarkable balance of celebrating new works and new artists while acknowledging great historical theater traditions—not least of them the theater’s own extraordinary legacy of support for new musicals.

Here’s the updated sched just sent out by the Goodspeed. Bits in quotes are from the Goodspeed press release.

Friday, January 13

1:00 p.m.: Screening of the 2008 Goodspeed production The Story of My Life at the Scherer Library.

7:30 p.m.: Staged reading of the new musical Harmony, Texas (music by Anna K. Jacobs, book & lyrics by Bill Nelson) at Goodspeed Opera House. “A new musical with a lively, soulful score that follows Heath, a farmer in rural Kansas, and his city-born partner who talks him into joining a group of gay guys who get together to sing. Heath discovers a love for making music and unexpected kinship. But all that matters to him, including his life with the man he loves, is threatened when the group decides to perform in public.” Jacobs was the co-author of the Andy Warhol musical Pop!, which premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre a couple of years ago.

10:00 p.m.: Festival Cabaret at the Gelston House (next door to Goodspeed Opera House), “showcasing new songs by new artists.”

Saturday, January 14

10:00 a.m.: Tours of the Goodspeed Opera House.

Seminar Sessions at the Gelston House:

• 10 a.m.: There Is Life After the Festival! “The Harmony, Kansas creative team shares the ups and downs of creating a new musical, where their project is headed next and how Goodspeed’s Festival helped get it there.”

• 11 a.m.: The Disney Effect. “David Scott of Disney Theatricals will discuss Disney’s approach to the development of new musicals and the impact that Disney’s presence has had worldwide.”

• 12:00 p.m. Spotlight On: Tony Walton. A discussion with the great Broadway scenic designer, a longtime friend of the Goodspped.

1 p.m.: Screening of the 2008 pre-Broadway Goodspeed production of Jason Robert Brown’s 13, at Scherer Library.

2:30 p.m.: New Musical Preview at the Goodspeed Opera House. The show being previewed is apparently already a part of the 2012 Norma Terris Theatre season.

4 p.m.: Musical Theatre Symposium – Sponsored by The Noël Coward Foundation at Goodspeed Opera House, featuring Nancy Anderson performing Noël Coward: The Man and His Music, and discussing the great Sir Noel’s life and work.

Actress and cabaret star Nancy Anderson as she appeared in the recent Goodspeed Opera House production of City of Angels. Diane Sobolewski photo.

5:30 p.m.: Festival Dinner at the Gelston House

7:30 p.m.: Staged reading of Not Wanted on This Voyage (music & lyrics by Neil Bartram, book by Brian Hill, based on the novel by Timothy Findley) at Goodspeed Opera House. “A housewife, her husband, their three sons, and a talking cat – just an ordinary family living ordinary lives in the turbulent days before the Great Flood. Their ordinary lives are turned upside-down when they learn that they alone will survive the coming deluge. Filled with magic, mythology and, above all else, hope, Not Wanted on the Voyage is a provocative new musical about the first time the world ended.”

10 p.m.: Festival Cabaret at the Gelston House, featuring new work performed by Michael Kooman & Christopher Dimond and Jeremy Desmon & Jeff Thomson.

Sunday, January 15

11 a.m.: Tour of the costume collection at the Goodspeed’s Norma Terris Theatre

1 p.m.: Staged reading of The Dogs of Pripyat (music by Aron Accurso, lyrics by Jill Abramowitz, book by Abramowitz and Leah Napiolin, based on a play by Napolin) at Goodspeed Opera House. “USSR, 1986. As all humans are evacuated from Chernobyl, their pets are left behind to fend for themselves. This is the story of those animals. Boychik is a gentle mutt who pines for his masters’ return. But when a pair of alphas take control, Boychik learns how to hunt, kill and ultimately form a new kind of family. Based on true events, The Dogs of Pripyat is a story about hope and survival when they seem least possible.”

3:30 p.m.: Meet the Writers Reception at Gelston House

There’s also an exhibit, From Goodspeed to Broadway, in the Scherer Library on Friday and Saturday from 1-4 p.m.

Ah, January in East Haddam. Feels like Broadway in June, don’t it?

Yale Rep’s released the cast and details of Christina Anderson’s Good Goods, a play which blurs the natural and supernatural. The show plays Feb. 3-25 at 1120 Chapel Street.

Some of us were lucky to see the play when it was given an afternoon Yale School of Drama production, with a student cast, last year. Anderson was in the playwriting program at the time. Her contribution to the YSD’s Carlotta Festival of New Plays last spring was Blacktop Sky, about strangers who meet in the courtyard of an urban housing project.

Good Goods is a different kettle of fish. It has a fairly large cast (six), and deals with complex issues of bonding and escaping, mentally and physically. The title comes from the name of a nondescript storefront in a Southern town.

For this latest new work in a season burstin’ with ‘em, Yale Rep has enticed Tina Landau, a 1984 Yale grad and a prominent director of significant new plays for decades. Though she’s worked elsewhere in town recently, directing Paula Vogel’s A Civil War Christmas for the Long Wharf Theatre, and did a major production of Tarrell Alvin McCraney’s Brother/Sister plays at Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago, where Landau has been a company member since 1997.

Like their director, every member of the Good Goods cast is making their Yale Rep debuts with this show.  That doesn’t mean that a few degrees of separation from Connecticut theaters aren’t evident:

De’adre Aziza, who plays Patricia in Good Goods, was in the Broadway and Public Theater productions of Passing Strange, directed by Yale alum Annie Dorsen.

Kyle Beltran (who plays Wire) was in the first national tour of In the Heights, a show which originated at Wesleyan University.

Marc Damon Johnson (who plays Truth) was in the Long Wharf reworking of the Strouse/Adams/Gibson/Odets musical Golden Boy over a decade ago.

Angela Lewis (Sunny) was in a different Christina Anderson play, the one-act Inked Baby, at Playwrights Horizons in 2009.

Oberon K.A. Adjepong (Factory Folk, Waymon as Hunter Priestess) was in several regional productions of Ruined, by Yale grad Lynn Nottage.

Clifton Duncan (Stacey) was in the workshop of the new musical Clear (co-written by Passing Strange’s Stew) at the Eugene O’Neill Center in Wallingford in 2010.

James Schuette, who designed the sets for A Civil War Christmas, The Brother/Sister Plays and two dozen other Tina Landau productions, gets to do this one too. Good Goods’ lighting designer, Scott Zielinski, and costume designer Toni-Leslie James also worked on that Long Wharf premiere of A Civil War Christmas. Sound designer Junghoon Pi, who’s in his third year as a student at the School of Drama, is the guy who blended the hip-hop and blues so deliriously for James Bundy’s revival of The Piano Lesson at Yale Rep last season. The Rep’s Literary Manager Amy Boratko is Good Goods’ Production Dramaturg, as she was on so many recent Rep world premieres. The production’s other dramaturg is YSD student Alexandra Ripp, the current managing editor of Theater magazine who recently dramaturged the Rep premiere of Belleville.

Playwright Christina Anderson.

The New York City Opera logo. Fittingly, it's a big black hole.

New York City Opera musicians have been locked out, rehearsals have been cancelled and the the 2012 spring season may well be postponed.

Easy to understand the stand-off. The NYCO is millions of dollars in debt and had to pull out of its longterm home at Lincoln Center a couple of years ago.

Yet the unionized musicians are being asked to go from 22 weeks of guaranteed salaried work a year to no such guarantees, much less work, greatly reduced pay and a decidedly unrosy future for the company.

General Manager George Steel is at the center of the storm, being blamed not just for shoddy diplomatic skills when dealing with employees but for his programming of challenging new works that haven’t been able to build a wider audience for the strapped NYCO.

New York City Opera was built upon the discovery of new talents and countering the traditions of opera elsewhere. It must be horribly frustrating for everybody for the nearly 70-year-old company to lack the sort of patronage and foundational support needed to continue to blaze new trails.

This is one of the situations where all you can do is pray for people to understand each other’s difficulties.

I know it’s obvious, but the story’s like a Wagner opera, with the godly pronouncements from on high and the suffering among the people below.

The AP news story on the lockout is here.

Great commentary by Paul Pekonen from May 2011, on the NYCO financial struggle and how it mirrors that of fellow underdog New York institution The New York Mets, is here.

The Long Wharf’s announced the cast of its world premiere musical February House, a co-production with New York’s Public Theater. The new musical, with script by Seth Bockley and music/lyrics by Gabriel Kahane, is inspired by Sherill Tippins’ non-fiction book of the same title, about when a klatsch of major 20^th century artists all happened to live together in Brooklyn in the 1940s.

The cast:

• Julian Fleisher—who plays the head of the artists’ commune, novelist/editor George Davis—played The Cat in the MCC Theater production of the musical Coraline (based on the Neil Gaiman book, with score by Stephin Merritt) and wrote the score for John Cariani’s Off Broadway play Almost, Maine.

• Kristen Sieh (playing the writer Carson McCullers) has a recurring role on Boardwalk Empire and played Joan is a heralded production of Brecht’s St. Joan of the Stockyards at P.S. 122 in New York in 2007.

• Erik Lochtefeld (eminent poet W.H. Auden in the show) was in Amy Freed’s Salem witchcraft comedy Safe in Hell at Yale Rep and the new adaptation of Tom Sawyer at Hartford Stage. He was in Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses on Broadway.

• A.J. Shively was Jean-Michel in the Broadway revival of La Cage Aux Folles, and has done a lot of new plays and musicals Off Broadway. He plays the Brooklyn-born poet and translator Chester Kallman, who worked on many projects with W.H. Auden.

• Stanley Bahorek (Benjamin Britten) will have his work cut out for him, trying to convince Connecticut audiences that he’s eminent British opera composer Benjamin Britten when his last two roles in the state were as Ralph Malph in the musical version of Happy Days and Charlie in the Muppet musical Emmet Otter’s Jugband (both at Goodspeed). Bahorek also did the Broadway production, and several regional ones, of 25^th Annual Putnam Country Spelling Bee (as Leaf Coneybear) and the national tour of the Deaf West revival of Big River.

• Ken Barnett (who plays Peter Pears, Britten’s romantic partner and a star operatic tenor in some of Britten’s operas) was in workshops of February House at New York Stage & Film and at the Public. He’s had small roles in a slew of TV shows and movies, on both coasts, and played Calmon in Julie Taymor’s production of The Green Bird. His big Connecticut connection is that he attended Wesleyan University.

• Stephanie Hayes is a recent graduate of the Yale School of Drama, where she was in Chad Raine’s Craigslist-themed musical Missed Connections at the Yale Cabaret and Henri in Devin Brain’s production of Anouih’s Eurydice. She plays Erika Mann, the actress daughter of Thomas Mann.

• Kacie Sheik, who gets the showy role of Gypsy Rose Lee (yes, the one whose life has already been musicalized via Gypsy) spent four years with the Broadway revival of Hair, from the concert version to the New York, West End and touring productions. She’s also got a recording career.

• Ken Clark, who plays Reeves McCullers, husband of Carson McCullers, was Bobby Strong in Urinetown and Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls at Connecticut Repertory Theatre, and did a national tour of La Cage Aux Folles as Etienne. (That makes two La Cage vets in this production.)

Nearly the entire February House design team have previous Long Wharf credits… as well as Broadway, Off Broadway and major regional experience. Sets are by Riccardo Hernandez (who designed Donald Margulies’ Two Days at Long Wharf and The Evildoers at Yale Rep), costumes by Jess Goldstein (who has Long Wharf credits going back to the late ‘80s, including Pam Gems’ Camille), lights by Mark Barton (who lit Nilaja Sun’s No Child… at Long Wharf Stage II last year) and sound by Leon Rothenberg (who’s done a Cirque du Soleil show and a bunch of other stuff, mostly in New York).

Andy Boroson (Musical Director) was Assistant Musical Director for that cool new musical version of The Adding Machine in 2008, and was Music Director for the new musical Inner Voices at Primary Stages in 2010.

As for the shows’ authors, Seth Bockley is a playwright and director in Chicago whose previous plays include Comm Comm, Ask Aunt Susan and Jon. Gabriel Kahane, who previewed some of his February House score (on keyboards and banjo) at a Long Wharf season-announcement event last summer, has done musicals, song cycles and solo albums, and has worked with Chris Thile, Brad Mehldau, Sufhan Stevens, Rufus Wainwright and everybody else who’s cool. February House is directed by Davis McCallum, who did the musicals earlier workshop, has a lot of new-play directing experience, and teaches at Princeton University and NYC’s New School.

Every character in the show is between 19 and 34 years old. At the time the musical takes place (in Brooklyn Heights, 1940-41), some of the real-life characters had already established their careers, while others are still on the way up, or suffering setbacks.

“And their dreams were bright-colored brilliant,” as February House’s opening number goes.

February House will performed at Long Wharf Stage II from Feb. 15 through March 18. Tickets and details here.

Connecticut Heritage Productions has announced the submission deadlines and general rules for its third annual Connecticut Stories on Stage playwriting competition.

This is a fine project. We need more awards and contests which acknowledge the many writers who, in the overbearing shadow of New York, continue not just to live and work in Connecticut but actually write about the state.

I saw the readings of the second annual competition, last April. My non-review is here.

The plays sought for Connecticut Stories on Stage “must be set in Connecticut and/or deal with a Connecticut-related topic or personality in the past, present, or future. No musicals will be accepted. Playwrights must be Connecticut residents or students attending school in Connecticut.”

There are three categories you can enter: Ten-Minute Play, One-Act Play and Full-Length Play. There are cash awards plus the opportunity to see the winning read aloud by actors.

Now I’ve got your attention—A money prize! A public reading!—here’s the deadline: All the “original and properly formatted” scripts must be delivered or postmarked by June 1, 2012.

To find out who to deliver them to, and other details, visit http://www.chproductions.org or contact Connecticut Heritage Productions’ founder and Artistic Director Peter Loffredo at (860) 347-7771 or ptloffredo@att.net.

Paul McCartney, who’s been impersonated in a host of Broadway and Off-Broadway shows, from Beatlemania and Rain to Liverpool Fantasy, is releasing a “Songbook”-style album on February 7, covering early 20^th century pop standards.

It’s not a huge stretch for McCartney, who crooned Meredith Willson’s “Till There Was You” from The Music Man on the Meet The Beatles album and dabbled in big-band arrangements for his film Give My Regards to Broad Street (which has an old-school showtune reference right in its title).

The new album is called Kisses on the Bottom, after a double entendre found in the lyrics of the opening track, “I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.”

The full track listing has just been released, and while there are few bonafide showtunes, there are several numbers which rub close to Broadway.

The album’s songs, in order:

1. I’m Gonna Sit Right Down And Write Myself A Letter

2. Home (When Shadows Fall

3.  It’s Only A Paper Moon

4. More I Cannot Wish You

5. The Glory Of Love

6. We Three (My Echo, My Shadow And Me)

7. Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive

8. My Valentine

9.Always

10. My Very Good Friend The Milkman

11. Bye Bye Blackbird

12. Get Yourself Another Fool

13. The Inch Worm

14. Only Our Hearts

“I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter” and “My Very Good Friend The Milkman” are both associated with Fats Waller, though Waller didn’t write either. “…Letter” appears in the Waller musical Ain’t Misbehavin’. The George Melly music-hall novelty tune “Milkman” was once covered by Eric Clapton, The Beatles’ guest soloist on “My Guitar Gently Weeps.” Clapton plays on two songs on the Kisses on the Bottom album (“Only Our Hearts” and “Get Yourself Another Fool”), but strangely not this one.

McCartney previously covered Home (When Shadows Fall) as a member of The Beatles. The band had the Harry Clarkson/Jeff Clarkson/Peter Van Steeden song in their repertoire from 1957-1960. Louis Armstrong and Nat King Cole had recorded it by then, and Sam Cooke was to cover it in 1964.

“(It’s Only a) Paper Moon” was written by Harold Arlen & Yip Harburg (of Finian’s Rainbow and Wizard of Oz fame) with Billy Rose (lyricist, Broadway producer, Fanny Brice’s third husband) for the 1932 Ben Hecht/Gene Fowler melodrama The Great Magoo.

“More I Cannot Wish You” is the Guys & Dolls ballad. Given the circumstances of his break-ups with The Beatles and with his second wife, I guess it’s too much to ask for McCartney to cover “So Sue Me.

“The Glory of Love” acts like a rousing third-act show tune, yet wasn’t part of any show and had as great a success in the blues and R&B genres as it did with swing bands. Dennis Potter used it in his bittersweet nostalgia trip Pennies from Heaven.

“We Three” by Dick Robertson, Sammy Mysels and Nelson Cogane was a #1 hit for the Ink Spots in 1940.

The big-band staple “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive” by Johnny Mercer & Harold Arlen was used ironically in Dennis Potter’s negative-accentuated series The Singing Detective.

“Always” was famously written for the Marx Brothers’ first Broadway show The Cocoanuts, but nixed by the show’s co-author George S. Kaufman. It became one of Irving Berlin’s biggest hits. Groucho Marx mentions that, and sings a brief parody of “Always,” in his Carnegie Hall concert album. The Beatles’ friend Harry Nilsson covered “Always” on his groundbreaking songbook album A Little Touch of Schmilsson in the Night.

Ray Henderson & Mort Dixon’s “Bye Bye Blackbird” was a hit for Gene Austin in 1926. Bob Fosse used the Liza Minnelli TV special he directed, Liza with a Z, which led to the use of the number in the posthumous Broadway tribute show Fosse. (On a local note, Yale’s Whiffenpoofs a capella ensemble sings “Bye Bye Blackbird” in an episode of The West Wing).

“Get Yourself Another Fool” is a Charles Brown R&B hit from 1949, covered in the ‘60s by Arthur Conley and Sam Cooke and in the ‘80s by McCartney sometime songwriting collaborator Elvis Costello. (Costello’s version, originally released as a B-side in 1986, appears on the Out of Our Idiot and Singles Volume 3 compilations, as well as on the Rykodisc reissues of Goodbye Cruel World.)

“Inch Worm” is from the Danny Kaye film Hans Christian Andersen, a project overwhelmed with Broadway talent. The screenplay was by Moss Hart, punched up by Ben Hecht. The score was by Frank Loesser (Guys & Dolls). There’s an extraordinary version of this song by the TV comedian Ernie Kovacs, sung straightforwardly in a classroom setting. It was broadcast on The Comedy Channel in the early ‘90s but is not part of the new Kovacs box set released by Shout! Factory.

Two songs, “My Valentine” and “Only Our Hearts,” are McCartney originals. Stevie Wonder (whose love for pre-WW2 pop was demonstrated on his hit Duke Ellington shout-out “Sir Duke”) guests on “My Valentine.”

There are also a couple of bonus tracks on the “Deluxe CD” variation of Kisses on the Bottom:

• The Guy Wood/Robert Mellin composition “My One and Only Love,” popularized in 1953 by Frank Sinatra, in 1962 by Doris Day, in 1963 by John Coltrane, in 1991 by Rickie Lee Jones, in 1995 by Sting and in 2005 bny Chris Botti & Paula Cole.

• “Baby’s Request,” a cover of McCartney’s own song from Wings’ Back to the Egg album. The video for the Wings version has a WW2 atmosphere, and the song lends itself to elaborate harmony vocals.

The main backing band on the album is the same band which tours and records with Diana Krall (who, as it happens, is married to the aforementioned Elvis Costello). Interestingly, there doesn’t seem to be any duplication whatsoever between Krall’s own standards-heavy catalogue (which comprise over a hundred cover tunes spread over a dozen albums since the mid-‘90s) and McCartney’s selections here.

To sum up: Two of these selections are by Frank Loesser, two are by Harold Arlen, two were popularized by Fats Waller, and two were featured in Dennis Potter TV series. Several are songs not written for Broadway shows but which ended up in Broadway shows anyway. Some are from movies involving major Broadway talents. At least three (“Accentuate,” “Home” and “Another Fool”) were previously covered by Sam Cooke. Fully half of the 16 songs (everything except “Home,” “Glory of Love,” “Milkman,” “Another Fool,” “Inchworm” and the three McCartney originals) were previously covered by Frank Sinatra.

The latest Disney on Ice show, which was in Bridgeport this weekend and hits the Hartford XL Center for nine performances Jan. 12-16, goes by the title “100 Years of Magic.”

In fact, “100 Years of Magic” has been a steady slogan of a whole nostalgic subset of the Disney universe.

But how do they figure 100? “Join the celebration as 65 of Disney’s unforgettable characters from 18 beloved stories come to life in Disney on Ice celebrates 100 Years of Magic, reads a video come-on on the Disney on Ice page of disney.go.com. That clunky sentence might lead some to assume that Disney on Ice itself is a century old, which boggles belief. In fact, the skate-happy entertainment spectacle has been around since 1981. Thirty years of Disney on Ice Magic! A nice round number which Feld Entertainment, which produces the shows, chooses not to use.

“Celebrate the 100^th anniversary of Walt Disney’s birth,” says a different page on the Disney.go.com site, which is clearer. Yet Disney was born December 5, 1901. That means an additional decade of Disney Magic is not even being acknowledged.

And that’s only if you buy that the birth of Disney corresponds with the birth of Disney Magic. If that’s the case, then did the Magic die with Disney’s corporeal demise on December 16, 1966?

The equation in which we measure Disney Magic appears to be:

X (The length of the mortal Walt Disney’s life, in years) + Y (the number of years the Walt Disney company has outlived its founder) – any number which does not let X + Y add up to 100.

In any case, Disney On Ice, 100 Years of Magic wraps up its Bridgeport engagement today with a 5 p.m. performance, then slips over to Hartford for performances Thursday and Friday at 7 p.m., thrice on Saturday (at 11 a.m., 3 p.m. and 7 p.m.) and twice on Sunday (1 & 4:30 p.m.). Tickets run $17-$77.75. (And you know there had to be some guy in marketing suggesting “We should charge $100!”)

By the way, there was a previous On Ice show with similar anniversarial zeal. It was called Disney on Ice: 75 years of Disney Magic.

It toured in the year 2000.