Free Republic

A New York-born playwright is at the center of a British political scandal that could decide the country’s next prime minister. Eve Leigh — the lefty 34-year-old daughter of famed Broadway composer Mitch Leigh — and her husband admitted Saturday that they called the cops Friday about the plate-smashing row between frontrunner Boris Johnson and his live-in gal pal, Carrie Symonds, and then tipped off the press. News of the spat — during which Symonds, 31, allegedly asked Johnson to “get off me” and “get out of my flat” — has dominated UK politics in the days since, with Johnson,...

One day in 1964, a New York advertising-jingle composer in his early 30s received an unlikely job offer. The composer, Mitch Leigh, the Brooklyn-born son of a Jewish furrier from Ukraine, had no theater experience to speak of. All he had ever done was compose incidental music for a couple of short-lived Broadway comedies — “Too True to Be Good” (1963) and “Never Live Over a Pretzel Factory” (1964). Now he was being asked to write the music for a new show that was going to try out at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam, Conn. A few numbers...