Broadway Born ... Jackson Bound. It's an intriguing title for the JSO's final concert of the season, and it promises to be a most enjoyable evening! The Broadway musical is one of the great success stories of our time, and in the future it seems highly likely that many of these great songs from the Broadway stage will rank high on the list of "classics" of the 20th century.

The overture to Gypsy is a perfect opener for the program. Gypsy opened on Broadway in May of 1959, and proceeded to run for 702 performances. The show was based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee, and it was a perfect star vehicle for the formidable Etheyl Merman who played Rose.

Kurt Weill (1900-1950) was an opera conductor early in his career, and wanted to popularize opera. "I have never acknowledged the difference between 'serious' music and 'light' music," he once said, "There is only good music and bad music." He is best known for his Three Penny Opera, for which he wrote the often-recorded Mack the Knife. The songs on tonight's program are from his 1943 show One Touch of Venus, which was written with Ogden Nash.

Cole Porter (1891-1964) was born in Peru, Indiana, and began writing songs before he was a teenager. He attended Yale and Harvard, where he first studied law. Fortunately, he was soon advised to turn to his first love, music. His earliest shows opened and closed quickly, but by the 1930s he was writing hits one after another. You Do Something To Me and What Is This Thing Called Love are from a 1929 show called Wake Up and Dream. Just One Of Those Things, from Jubilee is one of many Porter songs that has proven popular even though it came from an unsuccessful show. Later Porter wrote many songs for films, including Don't Fence Me In, which first appeared in the 1944 movie Hollywood Canteen.

The Broadway stage played a very important role in the stellar career of Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) In 1943 he wrote his ballet Fancy Free. The ballet proved so popular it was adapted into a Broadway show called On the Town, which included the songs Lonely Town, and I Can Cook, Too. Make Our Garden Grow is the finale from Bernstein's daring Candide, written in 1956.

Comic strips provided the inspiration for several shows, including You're a Good Man Charlie Brown, which celebrates Charles Shultz's lovable characters from Peanuts. Clark Gesner wrote both the words and the music for this charming show that captures Schultz's childlike take on some of life's deepest questions.

Two shows have become virtually synonymous with the very idea of the musical in recent years. They can be called blockbusters if any show can! Andrew Lloyd-Webber's adaptation of Gaston Leroux's famous tale of the Phantom of the Opera opened in London in 1986. Les Miserables, with music by Claude-Michel Schoenberg and words by Alain Boublil, premiered in Paris in 1980. Both have been performed to packed houses around the world ever since.

The program ends with a tribute to two of the greatest writers of musicals: Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) and Oscar Hammerstein 11 (1895-1960). If I Loved You is from one of their first collaborations, Carousel, written in 1945. Mary Martin sang Cockeyed Optimist in South Pacific which had over 2000 performances beginning in 1949. We Kiss In Shadow was written in 1951 for The King and I All these musicals were successful as movies as well as on the stage, but none was more successful than The Sound of Music. This musical from 1959 is still staged hundreds of times each year. Climb Every Mountain is only one of several songs from the show that are instantly recognizable.