My Favourite Things: The Rodgers & Hammerstein 80th Anniversary Concert (Stage 2 View Productions, Concord Originals, Concord Theatrical, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, December 31) PBS ran a couple of big music shows that were actually from a year or two ago. One had the awkward title My Favourite Things: The Rodgers and Hammerstein 80th Anniversary Concert, taped in 2024 at the Drury Lane Theatre in London, which is now owned by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Lloyd Webber co-produced the show and even appeared on it, whereupon he declared that the song “Some Enchanted Evening” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific was the greatest song ever written. (I’d disagree: though I think the whole concept of naming one song as “the greatest ever written” is silly, if I were pressed I’d probably name the Harold Arlen-Yip Harburg masterpiece “Over the Rainbow” as the greatest song ever in that genre.) My Favourite Things (the British spelling of “Favorite” is appropriate for a concert that took place in London) combined stars of contemporary Broadway and London’s West End, and the only problem with it is the long shadows being cast over their performances by the greats who introduced these songs or have performed them over the years. There was also a whopping bit of “first-itis” in the narration in that it proclaimed Rodgers and Hammerstein’s first show as collaborators, Oklahoma! (1943), as the first musical that ever tackled the darker sides of human existence. As I so often do, I yelled back at the TV and said, “Does the name Show Boat mean anything to you?” In fact, both Rodgers and Hammerstein had pushed the limits of the musical form separately well before they started doing it together, Hammerstein in Show Boat (1927) with Jerome Kern and Rodgers in Pal Joey (1939) with Lorenz Hart.

I’ve often thought of the odd critic who said that the proof that Rodgers and Hart were a better team than Rodgers and Hammerstein lay in the fact that far more great jazz records have been made of the Rodgers/Hart songs than the Rodgers/Hammerstein ones. This writer argued that the only truly great jazz record of a Rodgers and Hammerstein song was John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things.” I’d disagree with that – there’s another “My Favorite Things” by J. J. Johnson, which while hardly at the level of Coltrane’s is a great jazz record in its own right, and others I’d name include Nat “King” Cole’s “The Surrey with the Fringe On Top” and Cecil Taylor’s awesome “This Nearly Was Mine” (but then don’t get me started on the chronic underrating of Cecil Taylor generally!) – but it’s true that the Rodgers and Hammerstein songs are generally more sentimental than the Rodgers and Hart ones. (One exception is “The Gentleman Is a Dope” from a Rodgers and Hammerstein flop called Allegro from 1947, a minor blip between Carousel and South Pacific, which was largely a follow-up to the Rodgers and Hart song “The Lady Is a Tramp” and was quite good and properly acerbic.) I actually grew up on the Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals – either I, my mother, or my friends had the original Broadway cast albums or film soundtracks to Oklahoma!, The King and I, Flower Drum Song (a show oddly unrepresented on last night’s show, despite the presence of at least one card-carrying Asian on the talent roster, Daniel Dae Kim), and The Sound of Music – and though the heavy-duty sentimentality of the material was getting to me in the first segment (like all too many PBS music shows, this was divided into four acts with those interminable “pledge breaks” in between, and we can expect PBS’s ongoing begging for money to get even worse now that Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans have finally achieved their long-term goal of totally eliminating federal funding for PBS), beginning with the second I was hooked.

The talent list included Daniel Dae Kim (who seems to have been the first genuinely Asian performer to play King Mongkut in The King and I); Maria Friedman, who co-starred with him in that production; the mega-talented Audra McDonald; the quite remarkable Marisha Wallace (I wasn’t sure whether she was African-American or African-British, and it turns out from her Wikipedia page that she’s both; she was born in North Carolina but now lives permanently in London); Josh Lakey, whose spirited tap dancing in “Kansas City” from Oklahoma! was one of the highlights of the show; along with Aaron Tveit, Lucy St. Louis, Julian Ovenden, and Joanna Ampil, a decent-looking woman with a quite nice voice for the ingénue parts. The show featured between 21 and 23 songs, depending on whether you count the instrumental introductions and outroductions as separate songs, though we were told that the two-CD set we were being offered as a promotional thank-you for PBS donations contained 42 tracks. It’s become one of the most annoying aspects of PBS’s eternal money-begging to boast that if you give them money you’ll get to hear songs you won’t see on TV, but twice as many is getting to be a bit too much even for them. That appears to be what happened to the Allegro material, since we were promised songs from this very interesting show (it was Rodgers’s attempt to do a full-length musical telling the story of one man’s life literally from birth to death, though since Hammerstein was getting tired of writing scripts in which the protagonist died the final show only took him into his late 30’s) but none was delivered.

The show’s highlights included Audra McDonald’s stentorian renditions of “My Favorite Things” and “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” from The Sound of Music; Marisha Wallace’s quite cheeky versions of “I Cain’t Say No” from Oklahoma! and “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair” from South Pacific; Aaron Tveit’s well-phrased renditions of “Carefully Taught” and “Younger Than Springtime” from South Pacific (“Carefully Taught” was prefaced with a brief segment on how much heat Rodgers and Hammerstein took for writing so specifically anti-racist a song, to the point where they had to threaten to pull the entire show if that song were not included; but anyone who’s seen Show Boat will know that Oscar Hammerstein II was anti-racist well before anti-racism was cool); and Joanna Ampil’s versions of “If I Loved You” from Carousel (in duet with Tveit, I think) and “We Kiss in a Shadow” and “I Have Dreamed” from The King and I. In the middle were Michael Ball’s “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from Carousel and “Some Enchanted Evening” from South Pacific; Julian Ovenden’s version of “This Nearly Wasn’t Mine” from South Pacific (just as McDonald’s “My Favorite Things” had me thinking, “Well, you’re not Julie and you’re not John,” so Ovenden’s “This Nearly Was Mine” had me thinking, “Well, you’re not Ezio and you’re not Cecil”); and Lucy St. Louis’s renditions of “A Wonderful Guy” from South Pacific and the title song of The Sound of Music. (St. Louis sang them well enough but with little of the spunk they need to work.) The evening’s lowest point came with Maria Friedman’s version of “Hello, Young Lovers” from The King and I; she sang most of it decently but for some strange and inexplicable reason, when she got to the last eight bars of the chorus she decided to belt it out fortissimo à la Ethel Merman instead of singing the last high note diminuendo as Rodgers wanted – and got from Gertrude Lawrence in the original cast album (you can hear it for yourself on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8JEDLiAcR4w&list=RD8JEDLiAcR4w&start_radio=1). Overall My Favourite Things was a quite nice tribute to two of the most famous and influential figures in the Broadway musical theatre, though ironically one of the songs performed was by Rodgers but not Hammerstein. It was Maria Friedman’s “Something Good” from the movie version of The Sound of Music, written at the behest of the film’s producers (who wanted a replacement for “An Ordinary Couple” from the stage version), and since Hammerstein had died right after the stage musical premiered, Rodgers wrote both words and music himself.

Joni Mitchell: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song (Ken Ehrlich Productions, Library of Congress, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Rodgers and Hammerstein tribute My Favourite Things on Wednesday, December 31, PBS then showed Joni Mitchell: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. My husband Charles, who had returned home from work during the last set of the Rodgers and Hammerstein tribute, joined me to watch the Joni Mitchell tribute. Joni Mitchell (born Roberta Joan Anderson, by the way) is a Canadian-born singer-songwriter and the kind of artist I’ve respected rather than loved. I acknowledge that she’s written some of the greatest songs of the last half of the 20th century, but I’ve never been more than a sporadic fan. Ironically, the music of Joni Mitchell I like best was what she was doing in the middle to late 1970’s, beginning with Court and Spark (1974) and ending with Mingus (1979), when she started working with jazz musicians and incorporating jazz elements into her mostly folk-driven style. I remember grabbing the Mingus album as soon as it came out, and while I was a bit disappointed that she’d used an electric bassist (Jaco Pastorius) instead of an acoustic one given that the album was a tribute to one of the greatest acoustic bassists of all time, I still loved the album even though it wasn’t the direct collaboration both Mitchell and Mingus had intended. Mitchell and Mingus planned to make an album together, and they got as far as co-writing three songs for it (“A Chair in the Sky,” “Sweet Sucker Dance,” and “The Dry Cleaner from Des Moines”) before Mingus died. The final album consisted of those three songs, one old Mingus piece to which Mitchell added new lyrics (“Goodbye Pork-Pie Hat,” Mingus’s tribute to Lester Young), and two new songs Mitchell wrote after Mingus’s death, “God Must Be a Boogie Man” (taken from the opening lines of Mingus’s autobiography, Beneath the Underdog) and “The Wolf That Lives in Lindsey.” “The Wolf That Lives In Lindsey” remains my all-time favorite Joni Mitchell song even though it’s pretty elliptical – more so than many of Mitchell’s songs.

It was ironic that PBS ran a tribute to Joni Mitchell just after they showed one to Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II that had included a sound clip from an archival interview with Hammerstein in which he said that the lyrics of a song need to be as clear-cut and obvious as possible because the listener only gets one chance to hear them and you can’t go back and re-read them the way you can with a printed poem. If there were any great songwriters who proved that you can write deathless songs while keeping the imagery obscure and oblique, Joni Mitchell would be Exhibit B (Bob Dylan would be Exhibit A). Charles noticed that the show was probably a few years old because a surprising number of the audience members were wearing face masks, and the age of the show became quite apparent when the politicians presenting the award to Mitchell were presented – and they included Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House before McCarthy was removed from that position in a palace rebellion in the House Republican Caucus and replaced with Mike Johnson. As it turned out, we could date the show precisely when one of the announcers during the interstitial segments said it had occurred the day before the death of saxophonist Wayne Shorter, who worked with Mitchell on some of her more jazz-influenced albums. Since Shorter died on March 2, 2023, that would date the concert as March 1, 2023. (There’s a clip from Mitchell here inexplicably claiming that Wayne Shorter was the greatest saxophonist who ever lived. He was certainly a great one, but the greatest who ever lived? Not in a universe that included Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, Charlie Parker, and John Coltrane.) Many of the songs were from Mitchell’s album Blue (1971) – of the 12 songs included, five (“Carey,” “California,” “Blue,” “A Case of You,” and “River”) were from Blue. Mitchell’s songs were frequently about her romantic relationships, including affairs with Graham Nash (whom she’d just broken up with when she recorded Blue) and James Taylor (whom she caught on the rebound after she and Nash split), though there was a brief vacation in Europe she took in early 1970’s. During that trip she met a man named Carey Raditz, who was living in a cave on the southern Greek island of Crete. Raditz taught her to play the four-stringed dulcimer, and she wrote “Carey” as a tribute to him and to show off her skill on that instrument.

“Carey” led off the Gershwin Prize tribute concert, performed by Marcus Mumford of the folk-rock band Mumford and Sons. After that Annie Lennox, looking even more like death warmed over than Mitchell does (Mitchell had a life-threatening brain aneurysm in 2008 and she’s now considerably more heavy-set and less mobile than she was in her glory days, though she fought back and at the 2023 Newport Folk Festival she performed a 13-song set), played Mitchell’s biggest hit, “Both Sides Now.” Actually Judy Collins had the hit version in 1968, and by the time Mitchell herself recorded it on an album called Clouds, it sounded like she was saying, “O.K., you know I wrote this song so I’m going to record it, but I’m pretty bored with it by now.” Lennox slowed it way down and made it sound even more like a dirge for lost years than it did in the late 1960’s, but then time has had that effect on a lot of Mitchell’s age-related musings from her 20’s. After that Angélique Kidjo did a stunning version of “Help Me,” the lead track on Court and Spark and one of Mitchell’s at once exuberant and doubtful love songs. Then James Taylor came out to do a plaintive version of “California” from Blue, and Brandi Carlile – one of my favorite modern-day singers – not only MC’d the show but did a quite beautiful version of “Shine,” the title track from Mitchell’s last studio album of new material in 2007. Its politics were a bit confusing – Mitchell’s lyrics asked us to shine a light on both creative and destructive phenomena – but then, aside from a handful of songs like “Big Yellow Taxi,” Mitchell was not known as a political songwriter the way Joan Baez was. Speaking of “Big Yellow Taxi” – a song which will always remind me of the gig at which I interviewed Anne E. DeChant for Zenger’s Newsmagazine, which took place at the big Borders bookstore in the Gaslamp District; I loved the audacity of DeChant singing Mitchell’s anti-gentrification song in the middle of a monument to gentrification! – it was the next item on the program, performed by Ledisi with help from Lennox, Carlile, Cyndi Lauper, and others. Ledisi introduced it as the sort of song that makes you want to sing along. Then Lauper came on solo for her rendition of “Blue.” Afterwards Graham Nash came out with an acoustic guitar doing, ironically, the song Mitchell wrote about their breakup, “A Case of You,” with the video screens on the backdrop showing photos of them taken during their relationship.

The next artist up was jazz pianist Herbie Hancock playing “River,” another Blue song and the title track of the 2007 album River: The Joni Letters, which he made as a tribute to Mitchell (it consisted entirely of Mitchell’s songs except for Duke Ellington’s “Solitude” and Wayne Shorter’s “Nefertiti,” which he and Hancock had played with Miles Davis in the so-called “Second Great Quintet” of 1964-1968). Hancock played it with singer Corinne Bailey Rae on the River album (with beautiful soprano sax interjections by Shorter), and with Ledisi on the Gershwin prize tribute. Then Diana Krall came out and played the title track from Mitchell’s 1972 album For the Roses, which I remember largely from the argument I had about it with my old high-school friend Michael Goldberg. I thought it was deathly dull, while he acclaimed it as the best album of 1972 (an honor I thought should have gone to David Bowie’s career-making masterpiece, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars). Creem magazine published a loathsome review of For the Roses which was basically an attempt on the basis of each song to guess which L.A. rock scene male Mitchell had been having an affair with when she wrote it. (Later they printed a caricature record label of an alleged Mitchell LP in which each song was called “Crosby,” “Stills,” “Nash,” and “Young,” reflecting the rumor that she’d had sex with all of them, and the label logo was an ejaculating penis.) I’m not sure what I’d think of For the Roses today – fortunately, after it Mitchell made one of her best albums, Court and Spark – but Krall’s creep through its title track made me guess I’d find it as boring in 2026 as I did in 1972. After that it was time for Joni Mitchell to take the stage – I was about to write “in her own defense” – and she startled me by singing, not one of her own songs, but a masterpiece by the namesakes of the award she was there to receive.

The song was “Summertime,” from the opera Porgy and Bess by George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward (author of the novel and play Porgy on which the opera was based), and Ira Gershwin, and she did a beautiful version closely modeled on the famous one Miles Davis recorded in the late 1950’s for a Porgy and Bess album stunningly arranged by Gil Evans. After that Mitchell joined the other singers on stage for “The Circle Game,” another song of mock world-weariness Mitchell wrote in her early 20’s and which, like “Both Sides Now,” comes off quite differently when she’s 79 (her age when this show was taped). Overall, the Joni Mitchell tribute on her winning the Gershwin prize (the other honorees are Paul Simon in 2007, Stevie Wonder in 2008, Paul McCartney in 2009 – nice to know that it’s not limited to Americans – Burt Bacharach and Hal David in 2011, Carole King in 2012, Billy Joel in 2014, Willie Nelson in 2015, Smokey Robinson in 2016, Tony Bennett in 2017 – even though he was a singer and not a songwriter – Gloria and Emilio Estefan in 2019, Garth Brooks in 2020, Lionel Richie – hand me my barf bag – in 2022, and Elton John and Bernie Taupin in 2024 – and why, oh why, has Bob Dylan not won? Do they think his Nobel Prize for Literature is honor enough? And what about Bruce Springsteen?) was stronger than most of these shows, at least partly because her songs are ambiguous enough both musically and lyrically they lend themselves to different interpretations and aren’t tied to their creators’ renditions the way most singer-songwriters’ songs are.

New Year's Rockin' Eve 2026 (Dcik Clark Productions, ABC-TV, 2025-2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Joni Mitchell tribute my husband Charles and I watched a bit of the New Year’s Rockin’ Eve show on ABC so we could see the Times Square ball drop heralding the New Year. There were a few major musical guests in the segment we watched, including Diana Ross, Pitbull, Ciara, Demi Lovato, the Goo Goo Dolls, Post Malone, and Chance the Rapper. While the music was inevitably a major comedown after the Joni Mitchell material, the big frustration with the parts we watched was that all too many of the singers did medleys. Ross pieced together her stint from “I’m Coming Out,” “Upside Down,” “The Boss” (no, you’re not; Bruce Springsteen is!), “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” (one of her best early records even though the original by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell was even better), and a song that appeared to be called “If We All Change.” Charles thought the sheer amount of makeup she was wearing made her look like Michael Jackson (whom she actually discovered: M.J.’s first album was called Diana Ross Presents the Jackson 5). Pitbull’s set was similarly pieced together from various songs, including ones I think were called “Love in the Air” and “Feel Tonight” – or were those parts of the same song? It’s hard to tell from a rap performance when one song ends and the next begins, though at least Pitbull, like Chance the Rapper later in the show (whose song appeared to be called “On and On and On,” which is also a good description of how it goes), worked with actual live musicians on stage and had backup singers adding genuine musical content. I was really looking forward to Ciara’s performance, but it was just another medley of songs that judging from the snatches (a regrettably appropriate word in this context) of lyric I could decipher seemed to be presenting her exclusively as a sex object: “Level Up,” “Bet You Want a Body,” “Put Your Hands Up,” “I’ll Let You Take Me,” “Way to Party,” “With Your Body,” and “What’s Up?” At least Demi Lovato, the Goo Goo Dolls, and Post Malone only did one song each instead of those damnable medleys, though Lovato’s song, “Heart Attack,” was not one of her better ones. (I suspect she co-wrote the song as fallout from her near self-destruction with alcohol and drugs, since the gravamen was that indulging in those substances now would just give her a heart attack.) The Goo Goo Dolls, whose lead singer, John Rzeznik (one of only two original members left), is surprisingly well preserved, did “Iris” (the tag line of which is “I just want you to know who I am”) from 1998. Post Malone did a song called “Working at Chicken Express,” which the band’s leader (and sole member: like St. Vincent, Post Malone is one person rather than a group), Austin Post, actually did in the 2010’s before he was fired. He returned there in 2025 to promote his Post Malone Croc shoes by doing a giveaway, and it was a genuinely charming neo-country song.