EGOT Winners - The Grammys Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Sound of Music

The original Broadway production of "The Sound of Music" opened in November 1959 starring Mary Martin as Maria and Theodore Bikel as Captain von Trapp. At the 3rd Grammy Awards, held in April 1961, the show's original cast recording was awarded the Grammy for Best Show Album (Original Cast), one of a number of awards given to "The Sound of Music" during its original run.

The Grammy was awarded to Rodgers and posthumously to his writing partner Oscar Hammerstein, who had died in August 1960, nine months after the show originally opened.

Answer: Bill of Rights

As part of the celebrations of the United States' Bicentennial in 1976, Columbia Records produced "Great American Documents", an album featuring a group of famed American actors reading out some of the documents that formed the basis of the country and how it is run.

In addition to Helen Hayes, who read out the text of the Bill of Rights, the record featured Orson Welles reading the Declaration of Independence, James Earl Jones reciting the Emancipation Proclamation, and the three, together with Henry Fonda, reciting the full text of the United States Constitution. One final track saw Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra playing "The Star Spangled Banner".

The four readers together were awarded the Grammy for Best Spoken Word Recording in 1977.

Answer: Bill Cosby

"The Electric Company" was a children's series produced for PBS by the Children's Television Workshop (the producers of "Sesame Street"), which debuted in 1971. The show was a mix of live-action and animation, and featured a cast of performers used to doing stage, repertory and improvisational work. Of the original cast, Rita Moreno and Bill Cosby were perhaps the best known, as both were already well-established screen stars.

Answer: The Book of Mormon

In 2003, Trey Parker and Matt Stone were in the process of scripting the film "Team America: World Police" when, while discussing the project with their regular production collaborator, Scott Rudin, he advised them to go and see the musical "Avenue Q", then playing on Broadway.

The writers of that show approached Parker and Stone and discovered that each pair had separate ideas of writing something based on Joseph Smith, the founder of the Latter Day Saints. Following several years of development, during which producers Scott Rudin and Anne Garefino initially planned to premiere the show Off-Broadway, it opened at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre in March 2011. An immediate success, "The Book of Mormon" won nine Tony Awards in 2011, as well as the Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album.

Answer: Maurice Ravel

In 1992, in one of her final projects, Audrey Hepburn recorded an album of fairy tales for children under the title "Enchanted Tales". Rather than simply reading the stories, on the record Hepburn plays the daughter of the Polish sculptor Cyprian Godebeski as an old woman, recalling the days of her childhood when the composer Ravel wrote "Ma mère l'Oye" (the "Mother Goose Suite") for her and her brother.

She then reads the five stories that are suggested by Ravel's suite - "Sleeping Beauty", "Tom Thumb", "Empress of the Pagodas", "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Fairy Garden".

In 1994, Audrey Hepburn became the first winner of the Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album for Children, winning the award posthumously following her death in January 1993.

Answer: Scott Joplin

In 1973, Marvin Hamlisch produced and arranged the score for the George Roy Hill directed movie "The Sting". This featured new arrangements by Hamlisch of a number of ragtime works by Scott Joplin, most notably the piece used as the film's main theme, "The Entertainer".

Originally written as a piano piece, for the film Hamlisch arranged a full orchestral version to serve as the opening theme. This version was released as a single, and reached number three on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in May 1974. For this piece, Hamlisch won both the Best New Artist and Best Pop Instrumental Performance awards at the 1975 Grammy awards, alongside two other awards he received at the same ceremony for "The Way We Were".

Answer: Carl Reiner

"The 2000 Year Old Man" first originated on the 1950s TV variety programme "Your Show of Shows", which featured Carl Reiner as a featured performer, while Mel Brooks was one of the team of writers. The skit, which saw Brooks playing a Methuselah like figure commenting on the modern world to a journalist, played by Reiner, was initially just something that the pair did at parties, to which Reiner started bringing a tape recorder, as Brooks would never say the same thing twice. Eventually, the pair were persuaded to record an album of skits, which was released in 1960.

Another two were released in the following two years, and a fourth in 1973. Following a twenty-five year gap, a fifth release, "The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000" came out in 1997. For this release, Brooks and Reiner won the Grammy for Best Spoken Comedy Album, 36 years after the original album was nominated for the same award.

Answer: Elaine May

Nichols and May were an improvisational comedy double act. Having met as students at the University of Chicago, they began working together as part of a company called The Compass Players. In 1958, having left Compass, they gained an agent in New York, which almost immediately led to appearances on "Omnibus" and "The Steve Allen Show".

In October 1960, the pair opened their show "An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May" at the John Golden Theatre on Broadway, which ran for 306 performances. The recording of this show won them the Grammy for Best Comedy Performance in 1961, while the following year they were nominated a second time for "Mike Nichols & Elaine May Examine Doctors", a collection of sketches originally broadcast on the "Monitor" program on NBC Radio.

Answer: Whoopi Goldberg: Direct From Broadway

In 1983, Whoopi Goldberg first came to prominence with "The Spook Show", a one-person piece in which she performed a number of different comedy monologues, and which toured throughout both the United States and Europe. In 1983, film director Mike Nichols attended a performance of "The Spook Show" in New York, and offered Goldberg the opportunity of doing her own show on Broadway.

This eventually debuted as "Whoopi Goldberg" in October 1984, running for 156 performances, with the recording winning the Grammy for Best Comedy Recording.

It was while performing her Broadway show that Goldberg came to the attention of director Steven Spielberg, who subsequently cast her in the lead role in his film "The Color Purple".

Answer: Requiem

Although Andrew Lloyd Webber had had major success with his musicals, in 1984 he began work on his first attempt at a serious, contemporary classical composition. Choosing a requiem, he wrote the piece as a tribute to his father, who died in 1982. Lloyd Webber's "Requiem" was premiered at St Thomas Church in New York City in February 1985, with Paul Miles-Kingston, Sarah Brightman and Placido Domingo as the soloists.

The best known part of the piece is the penultimate section, "Pie Jesu", which combines two separate elements from the Catholic Church's Requiem Mass.

In 1986, the "Requiem" won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Composition.