Angela Lansbury
“Acting is really understanding other human beings and trusting humanity. When you have learned this, the audience will get any message you want to send them. And when you feel that message has been received, it’s a heavenly sensation.”
– Angela Lansbury
Great Interpreters Goes Broadway! – Program 4: Angela Lansbury
Broadcast on Fine Music Radio on 26 June 2015.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:59:01 — 109.0MB)
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Unlike most other Broadway Babies, it is said that five-time Tony Award winner Angela Lansbury initially had no dreams of the musical theater and didn’t especially aspire to it. Her career began in film, and she appeared in more than 40 movies (including Gaslight, The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Manchurian Candidate) before making it to Broadway in 1957 with the play, Hotel Paradiso. But it wasn’t until 1964 that she had the opportunity to do her first musical. That show, Anyone can Whistle, was one of Broadway’s most legendary flops, lasting only nine performances, but it did give Lansbury the confidence to pursue a career as a musical performer, and it introduced her to Stephen Sondheim, a composer with whom she would go on to do a further three shows and of whose work she would become a noted interpreter.
It was the musical theater that allowed Angela Lansbury’s star to shine brightest: with her daffy comic skills and brassy pipes, she originated such landmark roles as Mame Dennis in Jerry Herman’s Mame, and Mrs. Nellie Lovett in Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, in addition to her star turns in Gypsy and The King and I. And then of course she also won the hearts of millions through her portrayal of mystery novelist and amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher in the hit television series Murder, She Wrote.
Admired by her peers and beloved by her fans, both young and old, Lansbury is, without a doubt one of stage and screen’s most treasured stars. In this special On And Off The Record podcast, part of the Great Interpreters Goes Broadway! series, we examine the life and career of the remarkable Angela Lansbury.
Podcast Track List
1) “By The Sea” from Sweeney Todd
Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
2) “Me And My Town” from Anyone Can Whistle
Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
3) “If He Walked Into My Life” from Mame
Music and lyrics by Jerry Herman.
4) “Bosom Buddies” from Mame
Angela Lansbury & Bea Arthur
Music and lyrics by Jerry Herman.
5) “I Don’t Want To Know” from Dear World
Music and lyrics by Jerry Herman.
6) “Substitutiary Locomotion” from Bedknobs and Broomsticks
Music and lyrics Richard and Robert Sherman.
7) “The Age of Not Believing” from Bedknobs and Broomsticks
Music and lyrics Richard and Robert Sherman.
8) “Some People?” from Gypsy
Music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
9) “The Worst Pies in London” from Sweeney Todd
Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
10) “Beauty and the Beast” from Beauty and the Beast
Music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Howard Ashman.
11) “Liaisons” from A Little Night Music
Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
12) “Send in the Clowns” from A Little Night Music
Music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim.
Videos
“Bosom Buddies” from Mame:
“The Worst Pies in London” from Sweeney Todd:
“By the Sea” from Sweeney Todd:
Angela Lansbury in Gypsy (1974 Broadway revival)
“Substitutiary Locomotion” from Bedknobs and Broomsticks