So a fair question here would be: "How in God's name does the classic 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid relate to musical theater?" Well, I'm glad you asked, because there are four interesting connections.

I recently got the Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Special Edition DVD, which has a fantastic documentary from 1969 produced by Yale University, and narrated by Director George Roy Hill, the famous Academy-Award winning director of movies like The Great Waldo Pepper, The Sting, and Slap Shot.

Before I go any further, here are the first two connections. Firstly, George Roy Hill was also the Director of Thoroughly Modern Millie with Julie Andrews and Mary Tyler Moore, which of course became the multiple-Tony Award-winning 2002 musical (and star-maker for the fabulous Sutton Foster, who most recently starred in Little Women the Musical on Broadway).

Secondly, George Roy Hill was also nominated for a 1958 Tony Award as Best Director for Look Homeward, Angel.

Here's the third, really cool connection. In the documentary, George Roy Hill talks about one of the scenes in the movie:

The trip they made through New York on the way to Bolivia became one of our three musical sequences. Originally, it was to be done in live action like the bike sequence [Suzy: which popularized the BJ Thomas song "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head"] and I wanted to shoot it at the Fox Studio where they'd built a magnificent New York street for Hello Dolly!. But since our release date was before Dolly's, Zanuck didn't want us showing the street to the public before Dolly did. So I decided instead to make the sequence out of old still photographs of New York during the late 1890s. We took still pictures of our stars at various spots on the Dolly street, then we cut them out and we pasted them into old photographs so they would actually seem to be a part of the period pictures themselves.

We printed the whole sequence in sepia to give it the same kind of period flavor as the opening of the movie. We worked out all these moves for an animation stand, and we shot them one frame at a time.

How cool is that...Hello Dolly! and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid sharing the same set. I love it...musical theater is everywhere!

I think the fourth connection is obvious...the score is by Burt Bacharach, including the wildly popular BJ Thomas hit "Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head". Burt's connection to Broadway is of course as the composer of Promises Promises (check out the amazing CD cover art), which is the musical version of the classic 1960 Jack Lemmon movie The Apartment.

Whew...I'm going to bed now...

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