Jule Styne

And after 30 years of competing over the same customers, the two finally joined forces and Tams-Witmark was born.

[upbeat music] They became a gatekeeper for what happened to many shows after they left Broadway, especially Golden Age musicals from the likes of Cole Porter, Jule Styne, and the Gershwins.

But by the 1960s and '70s, they also began acquiring more contemporary shows like Gypsy and A Chorus Line.

At the same time, high school drama programs were popping up all over the country, and it was Tams-Witmark that held the rights to exactly the kind of shows those programs wanted: big ensembles with familiar songs and stories.

So now we're gonna step up once again to our virtual turntable, spin another tremendous tune from Come Swing with Me, Sinatra's sublime 1961 Capitol LP.

This second featured song was written in 1942, music by Jule Styne and words by the inimitable Sammy Cahn.

Introduced in the 1942 film Youth on Parade, this song was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song, lost out to White Christmas.

So-

So check that out, but not right now.

Anyway, back to the song at hand.

The most popular version of this Jule Styne-Sammy Cahn tune from 1942 was done by Harry James and his Orchestra with Helen Forrest handling the vocals.

Now, this song, and I'm talking about that version by Harry James, it was done the last day before the start of a musicians' strike that ran from 1942 into 1944.

But I didn't know why.

So I went to see Julie Stein, who was a great, who wrote Gypsy, and he wrote Funny Girl.

The best, Funny Girl.

And I knew him.

Jules Stein passed away in 1994 at the age of 88 from heart failure.

Real name, Julius Kerwin Stein.

He was a British-American songwriter and Broadway composer.

He wrote the scores for Broadway shows like Gypsy, Funny Girl, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

So, apparently, not everybody was glad to see it.

And it was the first show Julie Stein did on Broadway.

Busby Berkeley was the, that's Julie calling now, Busby Berkeley was the choreographer, and it had a rough go in Philly, okay? During the first tryout stop, which was Philadelphia, the original leading man survived being hit by a truck, but he had to leave the show.

So it was an immediate replacement.

[laughs]

[laughs] This saying was introduced in a song written by Bob Merrill and Jule Styne in 1964 called Don't Rain On My Parade.

Don't Rain On My Parade.

They wrote it for a musical called Funny Girl starring Barbara Streisand.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and it was written by composer Jule Styne and lyricist Bob Merrill, and it was first performed and made famous by none other than Barbra Streisand in the 1964 musical Funny Girl.

Funny Girl.

Funny.

You know, you're not the first person to also bring up the comparison to Gypsy, which I do, the more I think about it, is, like, an interesting comparison point for many different reasons.

One, the time in which Sondheim actually wanted to adapt this would've been around the time he was working with Julie Stein on Gypsy.

Right.

But second of all, like, there is this undercurrent of, like, two siblings trying to uphold the directives of a parent [laughs]