Ep 196 The Last Waltz — In Search of Lost Broadway, part 4
With special guest Albert Evans
This is the fourth and final episode in which Albert Evans and I go in search of the 1934 smash-hit musical The Great Waltz, one of the longest-running shows of the 1930s.
The goal of this occasional series of podcasts, In Search of Lost Broadway, is to try to rediscover big hit Broadway musicals from the past, which today are almost entirely unknown to us and forgotten.
This week, we explore several high-profile reincarnations of The Great Waltz in the 1960s and 70s, all of which stem from a heavily revised version, with new lyrics by the team Robert Wright and George Forrest, that was first produced by impresario Irwin Lester at his Los Angeles Civic Light Opera company in 1949 and then was revived and revised in 1953 and 1965.
The highly acclaimed 1965 version was announced several times for Broadway but never materialized there. It did, however, open in London in 1970, where it became a major hit, running more than 600 performances.
Then, in 1972, in the wake of the massive success of The Sound of Music film, The Great Waltz became a major motion picture starring Horst Buchholz and Mary Costa, again with new lyrics by Wright & Forrest.
Finally, we discuss the Walt Disney TV-movie version of the Johann Strauss story, titled The Waltz King, which aired on The Wonderful World of Disney in 1963.
If you missed the previous episodes in the series, you may want to catch up with those before listening to this one.
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