Charles Strouse
speaker
86 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Charles Strouse’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I think that tomorrow, with it, there's this beautiful simplicity to it. where you can hear it and then, you know, almost like sing along with it during each reprise.
That's what a popular song should do. It should sound as though it was always there, but it never was until you thought of it. And I think Tomorrow came to me that way. Ba-da-ba-dee-bee, ba-ba-da. It's a complicated melody. I'm looking at posters on my, and there's a lot of songs I've written that have not been classics like that.
I mean, I think that like fortunately and unfortunately, when a song gets as big as Tomorrow's gotten and has remained, it gets bigger than you, right? Your name in many ways is no longer associated with it. Has that bothered you in your career?
Not if I hear this song. No, not really. I mean, I never got what Lenny himself did. Irving Berlin did. No, I never had that luxury. And here's another Charles Strauss song. I never had that kind of reputation. It's a funny thing about composing. It comes from your heart in a way, but it really comes from nowhere. It's God-given.
I would think that's a God-given gift that I've been fortunate enough to get. I'm getting old, you know. Look how I'm walking. I don't play too well now. The sun will come out tomorrow Bet you bought a dollar That tomorrow There'll be sun Just thinking about Tomorrow Clears away the cobwebs and the sorrow. Till there's none. When I'm stuck with a day that's great and lonely.
I just stick out my chin and grin. And say, whoa, the sun will come down tomorrow. So you've got to hang on till tomorrow. Come what may. Tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.
I mastered that pretty well.
That's fantastic.
Thank you.
I have so much to say on this subject.
Well, that's really an interesting question because yes and no. The yes is a part of my musical background. I know what kids' ranges and sopranos and tenors are. The no part is that I wanted to squeeze a little bit more out of them because the emotional part of the music is when kids sing... Hi, they scream. You know, I did it in Bye Bye Birdie.
And in Bye Bye Birdie, they sang notes in the telephone hour that they didn't think they could sing. And actually, I had learned a lot of that. I used to work for Frank Lesser. I was his assistant for two years. And I remember when Frank was testing people for range, he would often have them sing dissonances. From Bushel and a Peck. From Bushel and a Peck.
And because he would put it in a key with the pianist, that it would be out of their range.
Could or could not hit it. Had you said sing that note legitimately in a song like, I don't know, If I Loved You or something, they would have said they can't reach it. But when they were playing these characters, they could. So I devised, it's not my own invention, or maybe it is, I don't know. These kids would come in, and I would just have them sing Happy Birthday.
Once they passed the other thing, I would have them sing a song that they didn't have to worry about anything. And so they would say, Happy Birthday. Happy Birthday! And very often, they found that they could reach notes which, on their resumes, they couldn't reach at all. And that was the sound I wanted.
So I did write for that, particularly in a song like Hard Knock Life and in Tomorrow, the song Tomorrow.
Yes, fortunately they do. It's a very, very much performed show. At the time, Lee Adams and Mike Stewart and I wrote it. We wrote it because it was offered us, you might say. We would have written, I guess, almost any show that was offered us. It actually wasn't even in that shape. It was just to be a show about teenagers.
But had we realized that it would have that kind of commercial clout, that is, that high schools and camps and... And prisons. I don't know. Everybody does it. It's incredible. And it keeps picking up in performances. I think we would have said, oh, let's do that show. But at the time, it was actually even a little strange.
It was a bit of an embarrassment in a funny way to me and to Mike because... Well, to me particularly, because I'd been in serious music all my life. I'd studied classical music. I was embarking on a serious music career. And that this would be the first opportunity that I'd have for a major public hearing. And then that we had this silly name, Bye Bye Birdie.
It was not the show that I wanted to write, which taught me something about myself, which is... I don't know where the hell I am half the time.
Showing 21–40 of 86 · page 2 of 5
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