Prelude to 20 Great Broadway Songs of the Past 10 Years

Broadway is dying. The shows aren’t as good as they used to be. There is no Ethel Merman for today.

As Penelope Pennywise says, “I’ve heard it all before.”

It always annoys me when, on the Tonys, all the songs played for entrances and transitions are classic Broadways songs—Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Kander and Ebb, and so on. It’s not that those aren’t great songs, but there’s a whole new generation of songwriters out there whose work will only get known by having their songs heard. It’s not 1950 anymore, and there is no Doris Day or Frank Sinatra of a current generation to put the hits of Broadway on the radio.

In celebration of the great talent of the current generation of Broadway songwriters, I’ll be highlighting twenty great Broadway songs from shows the opened on Broadway in the past ten years—from 1998-2008.

This will not be a comprehensive list because, while I do keep up with the current shows on Broadway, I have simply not heard all the scores of the past ten years. It’ll be a thorough and wide-ranging list, but it won’t cover every score of the past ten years.

That said, on with the celebration!

the Broadway Mouth
May 13, 2008