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Original Cast Recording/Order Info

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"The Oil City Symphony Photo Album"

Upcoming and Recent Productions

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DRG Records has released "SHOW STOPPING PERRFORMANCES" - a 25th Anniversary collection of the best songs from its catalog of Broadway, Off-Broadway and touring company original cast albums. "Beaver Ball" from OIL CITY SYMPHONY is included. Selections from almost 30 shows are included in the 2 disc set, which also features the 1999 Tony Award-winning smash hit revival of Kiss Me, Kate, The Act starring Liza Minnelli, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s State Fair, the Forbidden Broadway & Nunsense anthologies as well as all seven recordings for the City Center’s Encores! series. FMI

Interesting profile of OCS from NYTIMES Archive

Clive Barnes of the NEW YORK POST said Oil City Symphony's "a gusher! Better than John Philip Sousa played on massed kazoos with free ice-cream and bubble gum." VARIETY called it "an endearing slice of nostalgic Americana that few will resist." And the NEW YORK TIMES wrote "more than a tinge of moon madness, "Oil City Symphony" is its own refreshment. A musical with charm and a sure sense of its own identity." full review by Mel Gussow

"In a pennant-festooned high school gymnasium in the imaginary Midwestern town of Oil City, four musicians who grandly call themselves the Oil City Symphony have come together for a reunion concert. There is Mark, the pianist and accordionist, with glasses and a white dinner jacket and purple slacks, who is also the minister of music at his church; Debbie, the drummer, an ex-prom queen in a strapless gown who exchanges one pink pump for a running shoe, the better to thump her bass drum: Mary the violinist, of stern Scandinavian stock, uptight, humorless, and "best remembered locally for her portrayal of Anita in West Side Story"; Mike, the gentle, wistful synthesizer player who found himself in the Summer of Love and once played with an acid rock band called Thursday's Grief. The Oil City Symphony is very funny indeed! Whether grimly trying to keep up with the quickening abandon of a mock Hungarian czardas, or haplessly seguing from Verdi's "Anvil Chorus" to Iron Butterfly's "In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida" or just getting down and funky with a little tune of their own called "Beaver Ball at the Bug Club" the Oil City Symphony lets the good times roll and in the process skewers every high school music program in the country... but fondly!".....................................................Michael Walsh, TIME Magazine -- full article