This article extra is part of the feature article Give My Regards to Broadway in this issue.

Numbers

And the winner for most glisses per show goes to…Hello Dolly with 189 glisses per show! Second place goes to Phantom with 123 glisses per show. Rounding it out is Wicked with 102, My Fair Lady with 80, and Carousel with 70.

Since this revival of My Fair Lady is using the original parts from the 1962 production, it is technically the oldest harp part currently on Broadway, even though Carousel’s original production opened in 1947.

The current revival of Carousel is using new orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick, who recently received a Tony nomination for them. Tunick is one of only 12 people to have won all four major American show business awards: the Tony Awards, Academy Awards, Emmy Awards, and Grammy Awards. Know your orchestrators—they are a Broadway harpist’s best friends.

Carousel and My Fair Lady have both been nominated for a Tony for Best Revival of a Musical this year. Hello Dolly won this award in 2017. Phantom won the Tony Award for Best Musical in 1988. Wicked lost the Best Musical Tony Award to Avenue Q in 2004.

Ever wondered how many pedal changes there are in Broadway harp parts? Here’s the current count per show (Don’t forget to multiply each number by eight for weekly totals):

My Fair Lady 1,061
Carousel 1,043
Hello Dolly 1,040
Wicked 681
Phantom 454, or over 5.5 million pedal changes during the last 30 years of performances

When the stars aligned

There was one other recent time when there were five shows with harp on Broadway at the same time, but just for a total of four short days, between April 20–23, 2017. Here’s what happened: Hello Dolly (Stacey Shames, harpist) opened on April 20, and Sunday in the Park with George (Susan Jolles, harpist) closed on April 23. Also running during that four-day window were Amélie (Lynette Wardle, harpist; the show ran from April 3–May 21, 2017), plus Phantom and Wicked, making it a brief, but very good time to be a harpist on Broadway.

Try to remember

You may be asking, “What about The Fantasticks?” This might be the most familiar show to most harpists since the orchestra is only piano, drums, and harp. The show, which is billed as the “world’s longest running show,” opened on Off-Broadway in May, 1960 at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village. After 17,162 performances, the show closed in 2002. An Off-Broadway revival played at the Theater Center in midtown New York from 2006–2017 with Erin Hill as the opening harpist. Many harpists in the New York City area have played this show over the years. We were sad to see it close.