It’s rare that something you created 37 years ago is still admired decades later. The first LP Ken Bloom and I ever produced – Geraldine Fitzgerald in Streetsongs – was recently released on CD on The Musical Theater Project’s Harbinger label, and though it won raves back in the day from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, it appears to be a hit all over again.

When my father ran the Masterworks division of Columbia Records, the company released specialized projects under the “Legacy” label. They were boxed sets, elaborately and impeccably produced, and packaged with style and class including extensive notes.

Did you know that The Musical Theater Project has its own national record label? For 37 years many lovers of musical theater, cabaret and the Great American Songbook have considered Harbinger Records to be a kind of musical oasis.

As you know, Greater Cleveland lost an irreplaceable community leader and philanthropist on September 20 with the death, at 88, of Lainie Hadden. When we think of her, we think first of how Lainie, the Junior League and a visionary named Ray Shepardson saved the Playhouse Square theaters from the wrecking ball in the early 1970s.

Movie theaters nationwide are celebrating the 80th anniversary of The Wizard of Oz this week. Audiences young and old won’t want to miss this special showing. This beloved classic includes special insight from Turner Classic Movies.

Way back when (and you know how long ago that was!) the film The Cotton Club was in production. Bill Rudman and I knew for sure it was going to be a big hit. Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler were the most prominent composers for the Cotton Club shows and I knew Harold Arlen’s biographer, Ed Jablonski. I had produced and directed a Harold Arlen revue in Washington, D.C. that was a big success and which featured a lot of extremely rare songs from the Cotton Club.

“Try to Remember” a time when Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt weren’t doing exciting work in our musical theater. As all of us in a packed house heard on Monday, you’d have to go back even further than The Fantasticks to their work for revues in the late 1950s, and even to a college musical they wrote at the University of Texas in 1951.