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.