The Bowery Boys Present: The First Broadway Musical

The Bowery Boys: New York City History

Tom Meyers

Society & Culture, History, Documentary, Places & Travel

4.8 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 6 July 2017

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

While Greg and Tom are away this week on life-changing adventures, please enjoy this very New York City-centric episode of the Bowery Boys spinoff podcast The First: Stories of Inventions and their Consequences -- The Black Crook is considered the first-ever Broadway musical, a dizzying, epic-length extravaganza of ballerinas, mechanical sets, lavish costumes and a storyline about the Devil straight out of a twisted hallucination. The show took New York by storm when it debuted on September 12, 1866. This is the story of how this completely weird, virtually unstageable production came to pass. Modern musicals like Phantom of the Opera, Wicked, and Hamilton wouldn’t quite be what they are today without this curious little relic. Featuring music by Adam Roberts and Libby Dees, courtesy the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. And the voice of Ben Rimalower reading the original reviews of the Black Crook. And our special thanks to Secret Summer NYC for sponsoring this episode. Please visit www.secretsummernyc.com for more information and to get tickets. boweryboyshistory.com Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/boweryboys

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's the Bowry Boys.
0:02.0	Hey!
0:03.0	Support for the Bowry Boys is provided by our listeners.
0:06.0	Join us for as little as a dollar a month by visiting patreon.com slash Bowry Boys.
0:16.0	Hi there, welcome to the Bowry Boys. This is Greg Young.
0:19.0	So this is not a normal episode. If you haven't figured that out already,
0:23.0	Tom is away in Ohio on Family Matters. Good ones, I assure you.
0:27.0	And I am actually moving to a new apartment in about two hours, actually.
0:35.0	Still staying in Brooklyn, but this is the last recording that I'll ever make here in the Cobble Hill studios.
0:41.0	So because of all of this, we had actually originally planned to skip an episode this week, just after the holiday.
0:50.0	But that just felt a little wrong to me. So instead, I'd like to introduce you to a very New York centric episode of the Bowry Boys spin-off podcast The First,
1:02.0	stories of inventions and their consequences.
1:05.0	Now this is an episode which ran about a month ago in the original podcast feed for the first.
1:11.0	So some of you have already heard this show.
1:13.0	The subject is a particularly important moment in entertainment history.
1:17.0	The unbelievable story of the stage production from 1866 that many considered to be the very first Broadway musical,
1:26.0	a show called The Black Crook.
1:29.0	Now this has actually popped up in a couple Bowry Boys episodes in the past, one that was recorded on Nibblo's Garden,
1:36.0	which is where the production takes place.
1:38.0	And also on our early history of the Broadway musical show, we did an entire survey up until the late 1920s.
1:46.0	But today's show focuses on just this one weird show.
1:51.0	I think you're gonna like this.
	...

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