First things first – special thanks to the Arts Club of Chicago, where the event was held, for serving red wine. Are you listening American Writers Museum?

If you like trivia and Broadway musicals (and who doesn’t, except one friend of mine), this was the place to be. We heard I Don’t Want to Go Over to Vietnam, from The Lieutenant, which holds the record for shortest run, nine performances, for a show with a Tony nomination for Best Musical. The show is a rock opera about the court martial of Lieutenant Calle. I prefer I Feel Like I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag.

The Magic Show was another play with which I was unfamiliar. But this vehicle for magician Doug Henning ran for four years on Broadway, and the music and lyrics were written by Stephen Schwartz, who, among other things, did okay with Wicked. A bit of trivia I discovered that they didn’t tell us – the show was produced by Edgar Lansbury, Angela’s brother.

My favorite among the songs I hadn’t heard before was Emily Senkowsky’s energetic rendition of Look What Happened to Mabel, from Mack and Mabel.

Among others, we also heard songs from the more well-known Chicago and A Chorus Line, the latter of which won nine Tonys to Chicago’s zero. But, although A Chorus Line also won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and became one of the longest running shows in Broadway history, it still takes a back seat to a show from that year that only lasted one month on Broadway – The Rocky Horror Show, the movie version of which is considered to be the longest-running release in film history. The performers led the audience in the Time Warp, which made sense since we were trapped in 1975.