GIVE OUR REGARDS TO BROADWAY
(page 35)
1. b. Carousel ran for 890 performances…Oklahoma! ran for 2,212.
2. d. Although West Side Story was nominated for Best Musical in 1957 (the year it opened on Broadway), The Music Man beat it out for the award.
3. d. John Guare is the American playwright of The House of Blue Leaves and Six Degrees of Separation.
4. b. Chicago opened on Broadway in 1975, and then again in 1996; the film came out in 2002.
5. a. The Sound of Music; b. My Fair Lady; c. Cabaret; d. Hello, Dolly!
6. d. So far, the longest-running one-word-title play on Broadway is Cats, with 7,485 performances.
7. c. All of these plays were also made into movies.
8. c. As of January 2011, The Phantom of the Opera had more than 9,500 performances and had been running on Broadway since 1988.
(page 136)
1. c; 2. b; 3. d; 4. b; 5. d; 6. b; 7. d; 8. c; 9. a
(page 205)
1. William M. “Boss” Tweed. The courthouse at 52 Chambers Street in Manhattan is better known as the Tweed Courthouse because “Boss” used his corrupt influence to embezzle millions via its construction. Ironically, Tweed’s 1873 fraud trial was held in one of the building’s courtrooms—he was convicted and sentenced to 13 years in prison.
2. Al Smith ran for president in 1928, giving up his job as New York’s governor, but Smith supported the man who ran for governor in his place: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Smith lost the presidential election to Herbert Hoover, but Roosevelt won the governor’s office and went on to his own successful presidential bid in 1932.
3. Rudy Giuliani. On the eve of 9/11, Giuliani’s approval rating had dropped nearly 32 percent since the start of his first term in 1994, the result of several public scandals—including alleged police brutality and the discovery that he had a mistress. But in the days after 9/11, he became a hero to many, inspiring a terrified public with comforting words like “Tomorrow, New York is going to be here. And we’re going to rebuild, and we’re going to be stronger than we were before.”
4. Fiorello La Guardia. Until 1939, there was no major airport serving New York City. Flights landed in New Jersey, and travelers had to cross the Hudson River to get to New York. La Guardia insisted that the city needed an airport of its own to make it more accessible to tourists and business travelers. But he couldn’t get much support for the project, so on his way home from a business trip, when his TWA flight from Chicago landed in Newark, the mayor refused to get off the plane. He insisted that he be flown to a small airstrip in Brooklyn…and on the way, he gave a press conference explaining that if New York had its own airport, the extra trip wouldn’t be necessary. The grandstanding worked: City officials and the public started talking about a New York airport, the federal government approved use of New Deal money for the project, and New York Municipal Airport (now LaGuardia Airport) opened in Queens in 1939.
5. Ed Koch was one of only four three-term New York City mayors (La Guardia, Robert F. Wagner, and Michael Bloomberg are the others), and his larger-than-life personality was well known to New Yorkers. According to former Daily News editor Michael Goodwin, “Mayor Koch was so in your face for so long that a whole generation of children grew up thinking ‘Mayor’ was his first name.”
(page 336)
1. i; 2. n; 3. h; 4. k; 5. f; 6. m; 7. a; 8. j; 9. e; 10. c; 11. g; 12. d;13. b; 14. l; 15. o
“You know what I like about Manhattan? No mosquitoes!” —Frank Costanza, Seinfeld