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1959,
Saturday Night
languished in the Land of Could-Have-Been. Forty years later, New York got its first full look at
Saturday Night,
at Second Stage off-Broadway. A youthful tale of idealism and friendship, it concerns a tight knot of twenty-somethings investing in the stock market, with that crazy Brooklyn Bridge linking them to their dreams. Several fine songs, including the clever “Love’s a Bond,” and the Whiffenpoof-junior “It’s That Kind of a Neighborhood,” gave a glorious look back through the hourglass into the early career of the Promethean career of Stephen Sondheim.
5.
BIG
    Penny Marshall’s hit 1987 film
Big
is a body-switch comedy about a Jersey boy who wishes he could be tall, then wakes up and finds himself in an adult’s body. The basis of the film is his quest to adapt to the adult-sized world and its attendant, adult-sized problems, while he searches for a return to his old self. Nine years later,
Big
was made into a musical of the same name. The film’s success, however, was not duplicated by the musical.
    An outstanding, fly-on-the-wall book by Barbara Isenberg,
Making It Big,
chronicled the show’s every step, from early rehearsals to post-Tony letdown. The musical seemed to ignore (or was unable to duplicate) the strong emotional pull the film had, and, like the film, its strongest moment (an extremely easy scene to musicalize) came in the famous scene at New York City toy store FAO Schwartz, in which man-boy and toy tycoon dance on the big piano on the floor, to David Shire’s clever variations on “Chopsticks.”
6.
GUYS AND DOLLS
    Perhaps the greatest musical ever written, the “Musical Fable of Broadway” scores on every conceivable level. A priceless adaptation of stories written by New York’s chronicler supreme, Damon Runyon (who hailed from another Manhattan—Manhattan, Kansas), particularly the short story “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown,” Frank Loesser’s score is one of the greatest ever and is more than matched by the hilarious book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows.
    Everything in this supremely coordinated musical screams “New York City.” Runyon’s dizzyingly colorful Broadway underworld (“Runyonland,” they called the opening sequence) was fleshed out brilliantly onstage by director George S. Kaufman and choreographer Michael Kidd, from the fictional Mindy’s restaurant to the sewers where Nathan Detroit’s crap game rages on, to the Save-a-Soul Mission with its window looking out on Broadway itself.
7.
RENT
    Tyro songwriter Jonathan Larson added his name to the canons of theater lore when he unexpectedly diedon the opening day of his musical,
Rent,
at the New York Theater Workshop off-off-Broadway. The buzz surrounding the show and the circumstances became deafening, and Larson’s adaptation of Puccini’s
La Bo-h
è
me
became a hit downtown, then moved virtually intact to Broadway, where it won Larson the Pulitzer Prize, posthumously, and the Best Musical Tony.
    Rent
takes
La Bohème
and puts a decidedly postmodern, downtown spin on it: Mimi is HIV-positive, the Marcello character (“Mark”) is an experimental filmmaker, landlord Benoit is a profit-hungry real estate developer, etc. The show’s success is largely due to a desire to see the pseudo-hip Alphabet City life onstage. This show is one of the first in a long time to have its own set of groupies, or “Rentheads,” who camp out for tickets and see as many performances as they can.
8.
LADY IN THE DARK
    This landmark 1941 show was among the first to seriously address the social and psychological problems facing women, and it was the first musical to use sessions of analysis as a plot device. Kurt Weill wrote the hauntingly brautiful music to Ira Gershwin’s brilliant lyrics. Moss Hart wrote the coded, subtext-heavy libretto.
    Gertrude Lawrence played Liza Elliott, high-strung editor of
Allure
magazine, in personal and professional crisis, unable to make decisions regarding her life, her loves,