Going Bacharach: The Songs of an Icon

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Legendary composer Burt Bacharach died in 2023 and it has taken until now for there to be a fitting stage tribute to his 1,000 song output (mainly written with lyricist Hal David) which includes six Grammy Awards and three Academy Awards. Entitled Going Bacharach: The Songs of an Icon, the musical revue has been conceived by producer Jack Lewin along with Will Friedwald (who has been called “the poet laureate of vintage pop music,”) musical supervisor Tedd Firth and musical director Adrian Galante, who is also responsible for the arrangements and orchestrations as well as playing piano and clarinet in the show.

While Bacharach was best known for his mellow sound as sung by Dionne Warwick who recorded most of the songs in the show, the volume of this Going Bacharach is very loud, though this may be the fault of sound designer Matt Berman. Those of us who grew up with these songs won’t recognize the arrangements while younger people may be pleased to experience them for the first time. However, this musical revue does include all the Bacharach songs you would want to hear as well as some unfamiliar ones. 

Astutely directed by famed lyricist David Zippel, Going Bacharach has been conceived as a concert on mic for the theater but including some history and some patter mostly from Galante playing emcee. A trio of singers makes the most of their opportunities: Hilary Kole, Ta-Tynisa Wilson and John Pagano who for 26 years was a member of Bacharach’s touring show. Aside from the songs they sing together as a trio, Kole sings the pops, Wilson is assigned the more bluesy songs, and Pagano sings the easy listening songs originally sung by Tom Jones or Jack Jones. Except for one song sung by Kole, the songs are not acted out but sung presentational style. However, this may be due to the fact that hardly any of these songs were written for shows but were either pop songs or movie themes.

The show opens with some of the most iconic Bacharach/David songs: “Always Something There to Remind Me,” “Walk on By,” “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” and “Close to You,” all of which were hits for Dionne Warwick. Then Kole sings “Keep Me in Mind,” Bacharach’s earliest hit written with Jack Wolf before he met David, and sung by Patti Page in 1954. Act One includes two of Bacharach and David’s Oscar nominated theme songs: “What’s New Pussycat?,” made famous by Tom Jones, and the Oscar winning theme song to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.”

Next is an interesting footnote to the music. Kole and Wilson sing the original theme to the 1963 film Wives and Lovers, the first Grammy Award winner for Bacharach and David, whose lyrics were criticized as being misogynistic. Jack Jones who had a major hit with it received so many letters of complaint from women all over the country that he decided to write a new set of lyrics from the women’s point of view. Kole and Wilson then present the altered version which is quite different. The first half of the evening ends with a medley from Bacharach and David’s only Broadway score, the Neil Simon hit Promises, Promises, based on Billy Wilder’s film The Apartment, which gave them many song successes: “I’ll Never Fall in Love Again,” “Whoever You Are” and “I Say a Little Prayer” are divided between the three singers, and then all three join in on the catchy title song.

The second act which opens with an orchestral version of Promises, Promises’ “Knowing When to Leave,” offers three more of Bacharach’s Oscar nominated songs: “The Look of Love” from the James Bond spoof, Casino Royale, to lyrics by David; the Academy Award winning “Arthur’s Theme (The Best You Can Do)” to lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager and Peter Allen, and the Oscar nominated title song to the 1966 film of Alfie, whose Hal David lyrics Bacharach always described as the best lyrics written by anyone and his favorite song of his entire catelog.

This half of the show also includes Bacharach and David’s first song hit, “Magic Moments,” sung by Perry Como, and “Don’t Make Me Over,” inspired by a retort by Dionne Warnick in rehearsal when she felt he was pushing her too hard. It also includes some later title songs, “The April Fools” and “Promise Her Anything,” a big hit for Tom Jones. “God, Give Me Strength,” with lyric by Elvis Costello is one of the songs that Bacharach and Costello presented in their tour show, and one of the nearly two dozen that they wrote together covering two albums. In a hit medley, the trio presents “The World Is a Circle,” one of the songs from Bacharach and David’s only film musical, the unsuccessful Lost Horizon. The iconic “This Guy’s In Love with You” turns out to have been written for Herb Alpert to sing to his wife on a television special. The show ends with an encore of “That’s What Friends Are For,” another song Bacharach wrote with his then wife, Carole Bayer Sager.

Hilary Kole, John Pagano and Ta-Tynisa Wilson do a fine job interpreting Bacharach’s songs though one might wish all but the softer ballads were not so loud. As our genial emcee, Galante also accompanies them on either piano or clarinet. He is joined by Patrick Firth on keyboard, Derek Duleba on guitar, Nate Francis on bass and Jakubu Griffin on drums. Berman who is also responsible for the lighting beautifully bathes each scene in another set of colors, giving each song its own mood. Frank Cazares’ costumes, black and white for the first act, and gold and black for the second, are redolent of the era in which the songs were created. Christopher and Justin Swader’s design creates an attractive concert stage frame for this tribute show.

Going Bacharach (through February 15, 2026)

Amas Musical Theatre in association with Jack Lewin

The Marjorie S. Deane Little Theater, 10 West 64^th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.GoingBacharach.com

Running time: two hours and 30 minutes including one intermission