This week, we explore the music of Charles Strouse.

Long-time listener, Sharon Kahn, made a generous contribution to the Sounds of Broadway studios and earned herself the right to create a playlist for our streaming radio station or serve as a guest host for this podcast.

She chose the latter and talks about the career of Charles Strouse. We play a generous number of selections from the musicals for which he composed the music.

My guest this week is Ethan Popp, a Grammy®, Olivier®, and three-time Tony® Award nominee, who is nominated this year for the Tony Award for Best Orchestrations for The Lost Boys. He is also the Music Director for the show.

He has worked with some of the biggest musical acts in the recording business, including Queen, Tina Turner, Elton John, Stevie Nicks, Bono, Alice Cooper, and Smokey Robinson.

In film, he was the Music Production Supervisor for the 2017 film “The Greatest Showman” and served as vocal coach for Academy® Award winner Rami Malek in the movie “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

For the theater, he has served as music producer, music supervisor, arranger, and orchestrator for such shows as Back to the Future: The Musical, Mrs. Doubtfire, Tina: The Tina Turner Musical, School of Rock, Motown the Musical, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Rock of Ages, and The Lost Boys, which is what we are going to talk about today.

I chat with Dr. Kristin Stultz Pressley, a Broadway historian and lecturer and the co-host of the Dr. Broadway Podcast. We talk about her new book - Jukebox Musicals: Crazy for You to MJ the Musical (Essential Musicals).

The book explores a style of show that's dominated Broadway for the better part of two decades.

Through a chronological look at the development of long-running hits, like Mamma Mia! and Jersey Boys, this book traces the Jukebox Musical from when it was an exception on Broadway to when it became the rule.

Dr. Pressley was a previous guest on the podcast, when we discussed her first book, I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby: Dorothy Fields and Her Life in the American Musical Theater, which was published in 2021.