“Mother Earth” Broadway Musical Soundtrack By Toni Tennille 
$
30
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Description
Mother Earth is a protest musical about saving our planet, a modern pop-rock performance piece presented on the heels of Hair that wanted to make audiences feel fired up about air pollution, species extinction, big business, and over-population. It played twelve performances at the Belasco in 1972.
The show played South Coast Rep and American Conservatory Theater out of town before coming to New York. It received nearly all rave reviews in California, with critics remarking that Mother Earth was fresh, exciting, and had something to say.
Mother Earth moved to Broadway, produced by Republican media consultant Roger Ailes; the man who would later become CEO and chairman of Fox News once produced a Broadway musical about the environment. His sole Broadway credit would always be Mother Earth, a show with anti-Vietnam sketches and jokes about fashionable gas masks and a song called “Save the World for Children.” Ailes, then thirty-two years old, even wrote additional lyrics for Mother Earth in addition to raising the money for it from Nixon supporters who were grateful he had helped Nixon get elected. Ailes’s Playbill bio was all about his previous work in television and politics and many critics pointed out that Mother Earth would be better off on public television than at the Belasco.
Mother Earth has music by Toni Shearer, later known as Toni Tennille. When the show was still in its out of-town phase, the keyboard player moved on to another gig, and a man named Daryl Dragon came in to sub on keys for Mother Earth in between Beach Boys gigs. That’s how the duo later on known as Captain and Tennille met.
The cast includes Patti Austin, and the musicians include Hal Blaine, Joe Osborne, Larry Carlton and Larry Knectal — All incredibly famous Hollywood session players.
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