Hal David

What could possibly have attracted Steve Martin to a 1911 German play, "Die Hose" ("The Underpants")? Martin's 2002 adaptation of Carl Sternheim's comedy about a woman whose bloomers fall down during a parade - in front of the royal reviewing stand, no...

"Once on This Island," a tale of love and redemption in the Caribbean, marks a new beginning for L.A.'s leading presenter of old musicals. "Island," which opens Wednesday at UCLA's Freud Playhouse, is the first show of Reprise Theatre Company's first...

SEPT. 12. La Cage aux Folles. Steve McCoy, fresh from his role in the Long Island premiere of "Grey Gardens" and a national tour of "Man of La Mancha," stars in this gender-bender Broadway classic that brought us such tunes as "I Am What I Am" and "The...

We really did belong to a club. There were degrees of membership, of course -- hey, nice asymmetrical haircut! -- but one thing was for certain: if you were lucky enough to have lived through the new-wave music invasion of the early 1980s, Long Island was...

Isaac Hayes, the musician, composer and producer whose innovative sound changed the shape of pop music and whose shaved head, bejeweled outfits and regal demeanor embodied African-American masculinity in the 1970s, has died. He was 65. Family members...

Song Man: A Melodic Adventure, or, My Single-Minded Approach to Songwriting By Will Hodgkinson Da Capo, 290 pages, $16.95 paper 'Stay uncommercial. There's a lot of money in it," said Jerome Kern, who did OK by himself when he added "Ol' Man River,"...

"Most of what follows is true." That's the opening of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," the 1969 movie about two bandits born as the sun was setting over the mesas and buttes of the old Wild West. Morally ambiguous, the movie struck a chord with...

With apologizes to Jackie DeShannon, Burt Bacharach and Hal David, what the world needs now is not love, sweet love. It needs buyers, sweet buyers. At least the housing world does. There are plenty of homes for sale, a record number nationally and...

Dolly Parton has been selected by the Songwriters Hall of Fame as this year's recipient of the Johnny Mercer Award. The award is presented to a songwriter "whose body of work is of such high quality and impact, that it upholds the gold standard set by...

Melissa Etheridge will be honored at next month's 24th annual ASCAP Pop Music Awards. Marc Shaiman will also be celebrated during the week of events -- including the "I Create Music Week" expo hosted by the American Society of Composers, Authors and...

IN the autumn of 1943, World War II raged. On Nov. 22, the cover of Life magazine featured a portrait of a GI, with the caption, "Foot Soldier." Here at home, however, the dreamers were busy planning for the boom that would come with peace. In the...

On its previous two albums, My Chemical Romance's ambitions have outstripped their execution - a good band striving for greatness by walking the line between bombast and grandeur. That doesn't really change on "The Black Parade" (Warner Bros.), since...