Oklahoma! and the integrated book musical -- Musical theater in nineteenth-century America -- Broadway at the turn of the century -- The teens -- The twenties -- The thirties -- The forties -- The fifties -- The sixties -- The seventies -- ...
Author: James Leve
Publisher:
ISBN: 0195379608
Category: Musicals
Page: 448
View: 730
American Musical Theater provides a chronological history of musical theater within a cultural context. Covering the major artistic trends, seminal works, and leading figures in the field, the text uses case study musicals in each chapter as a lens through which to explore themes and developments in the evolution of musical theater over time. In addition to exposing students to the musical theater canon, author James Leve encourages them to think across the disciplines, drawing on their knowledge of music, literature, popular culture, and history. For anyone from diehard musical theater fans to novices to the style, American Musical Theater offers a definitive guide to this inherently American art form.
Our Musicals, Ourselves is the first full-scale social history of the American musical theater from the imported Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas of the late nineteenth century to such recent musicals as The Producers and Urinetown.
Author: John Bush Jones
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
ISBN: 9781611682236
Category: Performing Arts
Page: 426
View: 630
Our Musicals, Ourselves is the first full-scale social history of the American musical theater from the imported Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas of the late nineteenth century to such recent musicals as The Producers and Urinetown. While many aficionados of the Broadway musical associate it with wonderful, diversionary shows like The Music Man or My Fair Lady, John Bush Jones instead selects musicals for their social relevance and the extent to which they engage, directly or metaphorically, contemporary politics and culture. Organized chronologically, with some liberties taken to keep together similarly themed musicals, Jones examines dozens of Broadway shows from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present that demonstrate numerous links between what played on Broadway and what played on newspapersÕ front pages across our nation. He reviews the productions, lyrics, staging, and casts from the lesser-known early musicals (the ÒgunboatÓ musicals of the Teddy Roosevelt era and the ÒCinderella showsÓ and Òleisure time musicalsÓ of the 1920s) and continues his analysis with better-known shows including Showboat, Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma, South Pacific, West Side Story, Cabaret, Hair, Company, A Chorus Line, and many others. While most examinations of the American musical focus on specific shows or emphasize the development of the musical as an art form, JonesÕs book uses musicals as a way of illuminating broader social and cultural themes of the times. With six appendixes detailing the long-running diversionary musicals and a foreword by Sheldon Harnick, the lyricist of Fiddler on the Roof, JonesÕs comprehensive social history will appeal to both students and fans of Broadway.
In The Secret Life of the American Musical, Jack Viertel takes them apart, puts them back together, sings their praises, marvels at their unflagging inventiveness, and occasionally despairs over their more embarrassing shortcomings.
Author: Jack Viertel
Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books
ISBN: 0374536899
Category: Literary Criticism
Page: 336
View: 853
A New York Times Bestseller Putting it together, bit by bit: an insider’s look at the anatomy of the Broadway musical For almost thirty years, Jack Viertel has been a major figure in the Broadway theater world—he’s helped create shows like Hairspray, Angels in America, and Into the Woods; served as dramaturg of the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles; and is currently senior vice president of Jujamcyn Theaters, which host such shows as The Book of Mormon and Jersey Boys. Not long ago, Viertel noticed that while colleges offer intensive classes on Shakespeare's plays, dissecting them line by line to uncover their structure and meaning, there was nothing that dealt with musical theater in the same in-depth way. And why shouldn’t there be? he asked. If Shakespeare is England’s national theater, aren’t Broadway musicals ours? In The Secret Life of the American Musical, Viertel gives musicals the Shakespeare treatment. The book draws on a range of examples—from Carousel to Wicked, The Music Man to The Book of Mormon—and personal encounters to paint a picture of how Broadway musicals are made, taking you through all the phases of a typical musical theater story, from opening numbers to finales. It’s a hilarious and compelling look at what Viertel has learned over the course of his career, full of observations about the egotists, geniuses, and workaday professionals who have sustained this unique American art form.
Award-winning music historian Jeffrey Magee's chronicle of Berlin's theatrical career is the first book to fully consider the songwriter's immeasurable influence on the Great White Way.
Author: Jeffrey Magee
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199381012
Category: Music
Page: 394
View: 719
From patriotic "God Bless America" to wistful "White Christmas," Irving Berlin's songs have long accompanied Americans as they fall in love, go to war, and come home for the holidays. Irving Berlin's American Musical Theater is the first book to fully consider this songwriter's immeasurable influence on the American stage. Award-winning music historian Jeffrey Magee chronicles Berlin's legendary theatrical career, providing a rich background to some of the great composer's most enduring songs, from "There's No Business Like Show Business" to "Puttin' on the Ritz." Magee shows how Berlin's early experience singing for pennies made an impression on the young man, who kept hold of that sensibility throughout his career and transformed it into one of the defining attributes of Broadway shows. Magee also looks at darker aspects of Berlin's life, examining the anti-Semitism that Berlin faced and his struggle with depression. Informative, provocative, and full of colorful details, this book will delight song and theater aficionados alike as well as anyone interested in the story of a man whose life and work expressed so well the American dream.
This text presents keywords and critical terms that deepen analysis and interpretation of the musical.
Author: Raymond Knapp
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199987368
Category: Drama
Page: 482
View: 99
The Oxford Handbook of the American Musical presents keywords and critical terms that deepen analysis and interpretation of the musical. Taking into account issues of composition, performance, and reception, the book's contributors bring a wide range of practical and theoretical perspectives to bear on their considerations of one of America's most lively, enduring artistic traditions.
The three analyses are extended with historical overviews of the American Musical. Marc Bauch is also the author of Themes and Topics of the American Musical after World War II (2001) also published by Tectum Verlag.
Author: Marc Bauch
Publisher: Tectum Verlag DE
ISBN: 382888458X
Category: American drama
Page: 175
View: 241
Although almost neglected in research and studies on American Literature, the American Musical is certainly the most interesting and the most popular genre of American theater and drama. It has been influenced by the necessities of a self-funding commercial theater system of a democratic country. The fact that it has developed in a country of democracy means that it should be a genre for everyone: the intellectual and the common man. Broadway has provided all these. In his study, Marc Bauch analyzes three American Musicals, namely South Pacific (1949) by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, West Side Story (1957) by Leonard Bernstein, Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim as well as Sunday in the Park with George (1984) by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. Special attention is paid to the themes and topics, the literary means and the dramatic dodges of the aforementioned American Musicals. The three analyses are extended with historical overviews of the American Musical. Marc Bauch is also the author of Themes and Topics of the American Musical after World War II (2001) also published by Tectum Verlag.
This comprehensive study of the career of one of Broadway's most influential director/producers discusses the quintessential elements of Prince's theatrical work and assesses his impact on both the American and British musical theater
Author: Foster Hirsch
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 0521336090
Category: Biography & Autobiography
Page: 187
View: 189
This comprehensive study of the career of one of Broadway's most influential director/producers discusses the quintessential elements of Prince's theatrical work and assesses his impact on both the American and British musical theater
Offers a history of American musical theater from the 1920s through to the 1970s, and includes such famous works as "Oklahoma!," "The Red Mill," and "Porgy and Bess."
Author: Ethan Mordden
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199892839
Category: History
Page: 346
View: 341
Offers a history of American musical theater from the 1920s through to the 1970s, and includes such famous works as "Oklahoma!," "The Red Mill," and "Porgy and Bess."
Presents a history of the Broadway musical theater, including summaries of the shows, photographs of the stars, posters, sheet music, production stills, and essays by theater luminaries.
Author: Laurence Maslon
Publisher: Applause Theatre & Cinema
ISBN: 1423491033
Category: Music
Page: 497
View: 594
Presents a history of the Broadway musical theater, including summaries of the shows, photographs of the stars, posters, sheet music, production stills, and essays by theater luminaries.
THE AMERICAN MUSICAL AS A CON SCIO US. ART. FORM,. The fifth act in this history of the American Musical Theatre was long, approximately as long as the first, three-quarters of a ... The coming fire had to be sparked by older Broadway ...
Author: Gerald Bordman
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 9780195130744
Category: Music
Page: 917
View: 765
Provides season-by-season, show-by-show coverage of the American musical, from 1767 to the present, giving a plot synopsis, an idea of the physical production, and principal statistics for each show.
Reveals how the theater musical emerged as a specifically American form of entertainment to become a powerful vehicle of popular and political collective expression.
Author: David Frederick Walsh
Publisher: Praeger Pub Text
ISBN: STANFORD:36105111913971
Category: Performing Arts
Page: 200
View: 640
Reveals how the theater musical emerged as a specifically American form of entertainment to become a powerful vehicle of popular and political collective expression.
For Surveys of Musical Theater, Music Appreciation courses and Popular Culture Surveys.
Author: Alyson McLamore
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9781317346333
Category: Music
Page: 336
View: 306
For Surveys of Musical Theater, Music Appreciation courses and Popular Culture Surveys. This unique historical survey illustrates the interaction of multiple artistic and dramatic considerations with an overview of the development of numerous popular musical theater genres. This introduction provides more than a history of musical theater, it studies the music within the shows to provide an understanding of the contributions of musical theater composers as clearly as the artistry of musical theater lyricists and librettists. The familiarity of the musical helps students understand how music functions in a song and a show, while giving them the vocabulary to discuss their perceptions.
Nathan Hurwitz uses these factors to explain the output of each decade in turn, showing how the most popular productions spoke directly to the audiences of the time.
Author: Nathan Hurwitz
Publisher:
ISBN: 0415715083
Category: History
Page: 260
View: 929
From the diverse proto-theatres of the mid-1800s, though the revues of the '20s, the 'true musicals' of the '40s, the politicisation of the '60s and the 'mega-musicals' of the '80s, every era in American musical theatre reflected a unique set of socio-cultural factors. Nathan Hurwitz uses these factors to explain the output of each decade in turn, showing how the most popular productions spoke directly to the audiences of the time. He explores the function of musical theatre as commerce, tying each big success to the social and economic realities in which it flourished. This study spans from the earliest spectacles and minstrel shows to contemporary musicals such as Avenue Q and Spiderman. It traces the trends of this most commercial of art forms from the perspective of its audiences, explaining how staying in touch with writers and producers strove to stay in touch with these changing moods. Each chapter deals with a specific decade, introducing the main players, the key productions and the major developments in musical theatre during that period.