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The Great White Way
Broadway musicals are one of America's most beloved art forms and play to millions of people each year. But what do these shows, which are often thought to be just frothy entertainment, really have to say about our country and who we are as a nation?
The Great White Wayis the first book to reveal the racial politics, content, and subtexts that have haunted musicals for almost one hundred years fromShow Boat(1927) toThe Scottsboro Boys(2011). Musicals mirror their time periods and reflect the political and social issues of their day. Warren Hoffman investigates the thematic content of the Broadway musical and considers how musicals work on a structural level, allowing them to simultaneously present and hide their racial agendas in plain view of their audiences. While the musical is informed by the cultural contributions of African Americans and Jewish immigrants, Hoffman argues that ultimately the history of the American musical is the history of white identity in the United States.
Presented chronologically,The Great White Wayshows how perceptions of race altered over time and how musicals dealt with those changes. Hoffman focuses first on shows leading up to and comprising the Golden Age of Broadway (1927-1960s), then turns his attention to the revivals and nostalgic vehicles that defined the final quarter of the twentieth century. He offers entirely new and surprising takes on shows from the American musical canon-Show Boat(1927),Oklahoma!(1943),Annie Get Your
Gun(1946),The Music Man(1957),West Side Story(1957),A Chorus Line(1975), and42nd Street(1980), among others.New archival research on the creators who produced and wrote these shows, including Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, and Edward Kleban, will have theater fans and scholars rethinking forever how they view this popular American entertainment.
eBook
Weill's musical theater
In the first musicological study of Kurt Weill's complete stage works, Stephen Hinton charts the full range of theatrical achievements by one of twentieth-century musical theater's key figures. Hinton shows how Weill's experiments with a range of genres—from one-act operas and plays with music to Broadway musicals and film-opera—became an indispensable part of the reforms he promoted during his brief but intense career. Confronting the divisive notion of \"two Weills\"—one European, the other American—Hinton adopts a broad and inclusive perspective, establishing criteria that allow aspects of continuity to emerge, particularly in matters of dramaturgy. Tracing his extraordinary journey as a composer, the book shows how Weill's artistic ambitions led to his working with a remarkably heterogeneous collection of authors, such as Georg Kaiser, Bertolt Brecht, Moss Hart, Alan Jay Lerner, and Maxwell Anderson.
eBook
The Lively Arts of the London Stage, 1675–1725
Unlike collections of essays which focus on a single century or whose authors are drawn from a single discipline, this collection reflects the myriad performance options available to London audiences, offering readers a composite portrait of the music, drama, and dance productions that characterized this rich period. Just as the performing arts were deeply interrelated, the essays presented here, by scholars from a range of fields, engage in dialogue with others in the volume. The opening section examines a famous series of 1701 performances based on the competition between composers to set William Congreve's masque The Judgment of Paris to music. The essays in the central section (the 'mainpiece') showcase performers and productions on the London stage from a variety of perspectives, including English 'tastes' in art and music, the use of dance, the depiction of madness and masculinity in both spoken and musical performances, and genres and modes in the context of contemporary criticism and theatrical practice. A brief afterpiece looks at comic pieces in relation to satire, parody and homage. By bringing together work by scholars of music, dance, and drama, this cross-disciplinary collection illuminates the interconnecting strands that shaped a vibrant theatrical world.
Kathryn Lowerre is a musicologist and an editor of John Eccles’ collected works (A-R Editions). She has taught at Michigan State University, Colby College, and the University of Michigan, USA.
Contents: Introduction. Part I First, Music: Settings of Congreve’s Judgment of Paris: The singers of The Judgment of Paris, Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson; Harmonia Anglicana or why finger failed in ’the price musick’, Robert Rawson; The ’prize musick’ of 1701: a reinvestigation of the staging issue, Matt Robertson. Part II Mainpiece: The Lively Arts of the London Stage: Composing after the Italian manner: the English cantata 1700-1710, Jennifer Cable; Johann Pepusch, aesthetics, and the sister arts, Sean M. Parr; From Scaramouche to Harlequin: dances ’in grotesque characters’ on the London stage, Jennifer Thorp; Music, magic, and morality: stage reform and the pastoral mode, Timothy Neufeldt; Madness ’free from vice’: musical eroticism in the pastoral world of The Fickle Shepherdess, Amanda Eubanks Winkler; ’Let all be husht’: songs in praise of Anne Bracegirdle and Arabella Hunt, Anthony Rooley; Burning and stoic men: mad rants and the performance of passionate pain in the plays of Nathaniel Lee, 1674 to1678, Jennifer Renee Danby; Appreciating Bononcini’s Astianatte (1727): an Italian opera for the London stage, Suzana OgrajenÅ¡ek. Part III Afterpiece: Comedy, Farce, and Competition: The right to write; or, Colley Cibber and The Drury-Lane Monster, Melissa Bloom Bissonette; ’Quotation is the sincerest form of ...’?: signature songs as inter-theatrical references, Kathryn Lowerre. Bibliography; Index.
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Musical Theatre, Realism and Entertainment
Beginning from the passion musical theatre performances arouse and their ubiquity in London's West End and on Broadway this book explores the ways in which musical theatre reaches out to and involves its audiences. It investigates how pleasure is stimulated by vocal, musical and spectacular performances. Early discussions centre on the construction of the composed text, but then attention is given to performance and audience response. In doing this, the book challenges the conception of musical theatre as 'only entertainment'.
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The great tradition and its legacy
Both dramatic and musical theater are part of the tradition that has made Austria - especially Vienna - and the old Habsburg lands synonymous with high culture in Central Europe. Many works, often controversial originally but now considered as classics, are still performed regularly in Vienna, Prague, Budapest, or Krakow. This volume not only offers an excellent overview of the theatrical history of the region, it is also an innovative, cross-disciplinary attempt to analyse the inner workings and dynamics of theater through a discussion of the interplay between society, the audience, and performing artists.
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