24 Facts about Musicals - mental_floss List Show Ep. 328 | Mental Floss

Hi, I'm Erin McCarthy. Welcome to The Salon

This is Metal Floss Video, and did you know that Mamma Mia wasn't the first show to bring ABBA's tunes to the theater world

Abba Cadabra was based on the songs of ABBA, starred Elaine Page, and was brought to life by the writing and producing team behind Les Mis

And that's just the first of many facts about musicals that I'm going to share with you today

Thanks to versions by Queen, Bette Midler, Ellen Griswold, and Homer Simpson, you're

probably familiar with the classic Broadway song Big Spender. Even Jay-Z sampled it in

his 2007 single Rockefeller Billionaires. In fact, most people probably know the song

but not the musical, Sweet Charity, a 1966 collaboration between Neil Simon and Bob Fosse

Speaking of the great choreographer, Bob Fosse won his first Tony, one of nine, for The Pajama

Game, the first show he ever fully choreographed. Winning a Tony award is obviously a pretty big deal, but when Dick Van won his Best

Actor award in 1961 for his role as Albert Peterson in Bye Bye Birdie, he didn't even know

Van was unable to attend the ceremony, and the awards weren't televised at the time. He was notified via telegram, but it somehow got stuck under the doormat

His maid discovered the good news three days later. Barbara Streisand might be practically synonymous with funny girl heroine Fanny Brice now, but

she didn't make a great first impression on the day of her audition. Even composer Jules Stein who wanted to cast her said Streisand looked awful in her thrift shop clothes And the producer wife who was the daughter of the real Fanny Brice stared at Streisand with quote obvious distaste on her face Babs got the part anyway

Inspiration for Broadway shows can come from many places. For Vinton Friedle, it came when

he was living on a boat in the Pacific, trying to evade creditors after the utter failure

of his 1933 musical Pardon My English. Luckily, the result, Anything Goes, did much better

Andrew Lloyd Webber's inspiration for Cats came from a collection of T.S. Eliot poems

called Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Elaine Page originated the role of former glamour

cat Grizabella, who sings Memory, the show's most famous song. But she wasn't the first

Grizabella. That would be Dame Judi Dench, who had to bow out after she injured her Achilles

tendon during rehearsals, a few days before previews were to start. Sometimes inspiration works the other way around. After writing for Evita, lyricist Tim Rice

was so taken by Argentinian politician Eva Perón that he named his own daughter after

Without Sesame Street, Avenue Q may not have existed. Rick Lyon, a cast member and puppeteer

who designed all of the original puppets, was once a semi-regular on the classic kids show

Want to give your musical a little extra credibility? Hire the most trusted man in America. That's

what producers did when they tapped former CBS anchor Walter Cronkite to record some

lines as the offstage narrator for the 1995 revival of How to Succeed in Business Without

Really Trying. Forget Break a Leg apparently the real bad luck Broadway curse is when the president comes to watch The night Gerald Ford took in a performance of a chorus line the lighting board went crazy Thankfully the crew managed to patch it with scotch tape paper clips and chewing gum It not often that the NFL crosses paths with musicals but 12 years after winning

Super Bowl III with the New York Jets, former NFL quarterback Joe Namath played the main

character in a 1981 production of Damn Yankees at the Jones Beach Theater in New York

Starting with Michael Crawford, every Broadway Phantom in Phantom of the Opera has sat in

the same makeup chair. The Phantom's makeup takes two hours to put on and 30 minutes to remove

While playing Wendela in Broadway's Spring Awakening, future Glee star Lea Michele had

to remove the top part of her dress at every show, unless her dad was in the audience

Her contract specified that she could keep her dress on when he attended. According to Steven Sondheim, Into the Woods features the only song he's ever written

that doesn't contain a rhyme. Jack sings I Guess This Is Goodbye to his best friend, a cow named Milky White, that

he has just sold for five magical beans. Many have said that Sondheim's Into the Woods was the first Broadway show to feature rap

but he likes to point to a much earlier instance, Rock Island, the opening song from the Music Man

The next time you see a performance of Wicked, listen closely to Unlimited, Elphaba's theme

The first seven notes of the song come from Somewhere Over the Rainbow from the original Wizard of Oz

West Side Story is full of slang like Cut the Frabba Jabba, Gassin, Crabbin, and Cracko

Jacko, but it was all totally made up by Arthur Lawrence, who wrote the musical's book

The first reviews of Les Miserables were pretty mixed After the first night the cast wondered if they should start looking for new jobs But they shouldn have worried Since then Les Mis has been seen by more than 60 million people and is currently the fifth longest Broadway show in history

Les Mis was inspired by another show about singing orphans, Oliver. Lyricist Alan Boubile

says he immediately thought of the Victor Hugo novel while attending a London revival of Oliver and could instantly see Jean Valjean, Javert, Cosette, Marius and Eponine singing

laughing and crying on stage. The truth behind the Sound of Music is much less exciting than the events of the musical

Instead of escaping the Nazis by crossing the Alps on foot, the real Von Trapp family

merely sneaked across a railroad track behind their villa and boarded a train to Italy. When Spamalot opened in 2004, Hormel Foods gave the first 100 ticket buyers cans of a

limited edition Spam flavor known as Golden Honey Grail. This musical was originally known as Away We Go, until the cast discovered that the audience

went absolutely wild for one particular song, Oklahoma. In A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder, cast member and stage veteran Jefferson Mays

had to play eight separate characters, which required several lightning fast costume and

wig changes. One full wardrobe transformation is time to take 21 seconds. On Broadway, they

say that the show must go on, but we're on YouTube so this one doesn't have to. That

does it for another episode made with the help of all of these lovely people. Thanks

for joining us. I'm Erin McCarthy. See you later