With the announcement by Encores! that Grand Hotel will be a part of their 2018 season, it has the wheels of my brain turning about a possible Broadway revival of this magnificent, but challenging, piece of musical theatre. It has been almost three decades since Grand Hotel premiered on Broadway. That production was, in itself a reimagining of a failed attempt to musicalize Vicki Baum’s 1928 novel (and subsequent 1932 film) called At the Grand (1958). That version of the show featured a score by Robert Wright and George Forrest, with a book by Luther David. Many of those songs and parts of the book made it into the 1989 Broadway production of Grand Hotel which would garner many Tony Awards and run for 1,017 performances.
