Ben Bagley

Born in Burlington, Vermont, Bagley moved to New York during the early 1950s, and in 1955, at age 22, he produced his first hit, Shoestring Revue, starring (among others) Beatrice Arthur and Chita Rivera (and, later, Jane Connell), and with songs by Charles Strouse, Lee Adams, June Carroll, and Sheldon Harnick.

It ran Off-Broadway from March 1965 to November 1965 for 273 performances at Square East (West Fourth Street), and starred Carmen Alvarez, Kaye Ballard, William Hickey, Harold Lang, and Elmarie Wendel.

According to Variety, the show "helped pave the way for later Broadway revues like Ain't Misbehavin' and Sophisticated Ladies, which surveyed the work of a single composer.

[5] The greater part of his record production consisted largely of the "Revisited" series, which promoted the body of work produced by the likes of Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Kurt Weill, Cole Porter, Leonard Bernstein, Harold Rome, Howard Dietz & Arthur Schwartz, Frank Loesser, Noël Coward, Harold Arlen, Vernon Duke, Alan Jay Lerner, and DeSylva, Brown, & Henderson.

These albums focused largely upon the composers' lesser-known songs, and contained performances by some of the leading jazz and the theatrical singers of the day (such as Bobby Short and Kaye Ballard), as well as many great theatre and film actors not generally known for their singing ability (among them Katharine Hepburn, Ellen Burstyn, and Laurence Harvey).