For several years, every May Mel Larch would presente a special episode of Curtain Call devoted to the Tony Award Nominees for Best Musical.  Wednesday afternoon on The AIR, you can hear samples of the nominees for this year’s Tony Awards for Best Musical for the first time since 2019, as Broadway gets back to normal, and so does Curtain Call.  You can tune in at the website, or if you’re on a laptop or desktop, you could just stay on this page, and  listen to the convenient embedded radio player lurking over in the right-hand column of this blog. If you’re reading on your phone, scroll down and you’ll find the radio player hiding below the posts.

At 3 PM Mel Larch presents a new hour of great musical theater on Curtain Call. It’s our annual Tony Awards preview, with songs from each of the nominated musicals, which took a bit of doing since some of the shows aren’t releasing their Original Broadway Cast albums until next month.

In this show, you’ll hear four songs from A Strange Loop, three each from Paradise Square and  Girl From The North Country and two from Mr. Saturday Night, and then one each from MJ: The Musical and SIX. The song selection was dictated by what was available to use on the show.

A Strange Loop, written by Michael R. Jackson, who sings on the third song that you’re about to hear, follows Usher, a Black, Queer writer writing a musical about a Black, Queer writer writing a musical about a Black, Queer writer etc. The title refers to a cognitive science term coined by Douglas Hofstadter. It’s a funny and challenging show with incredible songs and a terriffic cast.

Paradise Square is a stage musical, with music by Jason Howland, lyrics by Masi Asare and Nathan Tysen, and a book by Christina Anderson, Marcus Gardley, Larry Kirwan and Craig Lucas. Set in New York City during the Civil War, the musical follows conflict between Irish Americans and Black Americans.

Girl From The North Country is a depression-era tale of a family in trouble, living on the shores of Lake Superior in Minnesota. The story, which is sort of a cross between The Grapes of Wrath and a soap opera, is carried by the songs of Bob Dylan.

Mr Saturday Night is a musical adaptaion of the 1994 Billy Crystal movie, with Crystal reprising his role as an aging comedian with a complicated family life.

MJ: The Musical is a jukebox musical that tells the story of the life of Michael Jackson, using his own music.

SIX is a British musical comedy with book, music, and lyrics by Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss.The musical is a modern retelling of the lives of the six wives of Henry VIII presented as a pop concert, as the Queens take turns singing and telling their story to see who suffered the most due to Henry and should, therefore, become the group’s lead singer. This is a great show, and Mel’s been playing songs from earlier productions of it on Curtain Call for years.

The 2022 Tony Awards will be broadcast on CBS and streamed on Paramount + on June, 12, so you can tune in and see who won this year’s prize.

Curtain Call can be heard on The AIR Wednesday at 3 PM, with replays Thursday at 8 AM, Friday at 10 AM, Saturday at 8 PM and Monday at 9 AM. A six-hour marathon of classic episodes can be heard Sunday evenings starting at 6 PM, and an all-night marathon of Curtain Call episodes can be heard Wednesday nights, beginning at Midnight.

If you wanna hear something funny,  tune in to The AIR Wednesday night at 11 PM where we will offer up a new episode of The Comedy Vault, this time featuring an hour of random comedy bits by Steve Martin.