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"Rodgers and Hammerstein"
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Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel
\"Following the success of their first collaboration, Oklahoma! (1943), composer Richard Rodgers and librettist Oscar Hammerstein II worked again with producers Theresa Helburn and Lawrence Langner, director Rouben Mamoulian, and choreographer Agnes de Mille to put on a very different kind of show. Based on the play Liliom (1909) by Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnâar, Carousel (1945) took Broadway musical theater in a far darker direction than it had gone before with its gritty plot, anti-hero protagonist, and extensive music that critics claimed came close to opera. Carousel transplants the themes of Molnâa's play into a new setting on the New England coast, telling the story of two social misfits struggling to survive harsh economic times : Julie Jordan defies the conventions of small-town America in her choice of a husband, and Billy Bigelow--unemployed and prone to domestic violence--dies in the course of committing a robbery. Author Tim Carter examines how this troubling subject matter fits into the context of a country moving through the end of World War II to an uncertain future, and how Carousel transformed the American musical on stage and screen.\"--Back cover.
Book
The Musical as Drama
Derived from the colorful traditions of vaudeville, burlesque, revue, and operetta, the musical has blossomed into America's most popular form of theater. Scott McMillin has developed a fresh aesthetic theory of this underrated art form, exploring the musical as a type of drama deserving the kind of critical and theoretical regard given to Chekhov or opera. Until recently, the musical has been considered either an \"integrated\" form of theater or an inferior sibling of opera. McMillin demonstrates that neither of these views is accurate, and that the musical holds true to the disjunctive and irreverent forms of popular entertainment from which it arose a century ago.
Critics and composers have long held the musical to the standards applied to opera, asserting that each piece should work together to create a seamless drama. But McMillin argues that the musical is a different form of theater, requiring the suspension of the plot for song. The musical's success lies not in the smoothness of unity, but in the crackle of difference. While disparate, the dancing, music, dialogue, and songs combine to explore different aspects of the action and the characters.
Discussing composers and writers such as Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, Kander and Ebb, Leonard Bernstein, and Jerome Kern,The Musical as Dramadescribes the continuity of this distinctively American dramatic genre, from the shows of the 1920s and 1930s to the musicals of today.
eBook
South Pacific : paradise rewritten
This book explores the show's complex messages and demonstrates how the presentation of those messages changed throughout the creative process. Jim Lovensheimer shows how Rodgers and especially Hammerstein continually refined and softened the theme of racial intolerance until it was more acceptable to mainstream Broadway audiences.--[book jacket]
Book
The American musical and the performance of personal identity
The American musical has long provided an important vehicle through which writers, performers, and audiences reimagine who they are and how they might best interact with the world around them. Musicals are especially good at this because they provide not only an opportunity for us to enact dramatic versions of alternative identities, but also the material for performing such alternatives in the real world, through songs and the characters and attitudes those songs project.
eBook
Something wonderful : Rodgers and Hammerstein's Broadway revolution
\"Even before they joined forces, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II had written dozens of Broadway shows, but together they pioneered a new art form: the serious musical play. Their songs and dance numbers served to advance the drama and reveal character, a sharp break from the past and the template on which all future musicals would be built. [This is a portrait of that creative partnership]\"--Amazon.com
Book
Young talents sing Rodgers, Hammerstein favorites
The Songs of Rodgers and Hammerstein is a classic example of what Anzevino can achieve with young vocal talent, a few hundred square feet of raw space, a handsome piano player (and fine music director) named Austin Cook, and the American songbook.
Newspaper Article
Heavy themes make this 'Cinderella' too slippery
[...]an audience plunking down money for the first-ever Broadway production of \"Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella,\" first seen on American television in 1957 with Julie Andrews in the title role (played here by Laura Osnes), has certain, reasonable expectations born of the last century: ugly stepsisters, a mean stepmother, a glass slipper and, most crucially of all, the aspirational notion that an ordinary girl, a mistreated kitchen maid, can be suddenly transformed into the kind of glamorous woman who can sweep a monarch off his feet.
Newspaper Article
'Oklahoma!' brings enchanted evening to Clay: ; Review
The 28-member cast was uniformly competent, appropriately cast, well-rehearsed and professionally enthusiastic. Patti McClure, subbing as Aunt Eller for Pat Sibley, carried her anchoring role as worldly wise earth mother with an array of acting, singing and dancing talents worthy of Broadway itself. Sarah Shahinian's high-hormone Ado Annie nearly stopped the show with the famous \"I Cain't Say No,\" and both her suitors were humorously believable - J. Michael Zygo as the sincere, rope- twirling Will Parker and Sorab Wadia as the caddish Persian peddler Ali Hakim. Andrew Lebon as the psychotic Jud Fry, who stalked [Laurey] obsessively and tried to kill Curly, was menacing in both his beefy physicality and his resonant, deep timbral voice. His role was enlarged significantly from the original playbook for the 2002 revival, and runs a thread of unease throughout the two acts until his death near the end.
Newspaper Article
Arts & Entertainment: Cinderella Is Late to Broadway
For producers, mounting the stage debut of a fairy tale that is familiar to millions became about preserving the classic elements -- ball gown, pumpkin, the original score -- while adding contemporary touches, like an updated and expanded book by Douglas Carter Beane, additional songs from the Rodgers & Hammerstein \"trunk,\" and several unique cross-promotions including a partnership with the Palace Hotel, which is offering Cinderella-themed packages and Saturday brunches. [...]Robyn said, 'Could we make it so that a modern audience could get the empowerment of young girls and things that are kind of needed in the theater in this day and age?\" Enter Mr. Beane, the book writer behind \"Xanadu,\" \"Sister Act\" and \"Lysistrata Jones\" (A play of his own, \"The Nance,\" comes to Lincoln Center later this season.) He spent two years broadening and modernizing Hammerstein's original book. Where the 1957 Julie Andrews version (which was shot in a theater house turned TV studio on Broadway and 81st Street; the ballroom was staged in the basement) ran only 75 minutes and was essentially a one-act play with songs, Mr. Beane expanded the story to a full night of theater with an intermission.
Newspaper Article
So Pretty in Soot
No, not Annie, but rather Cinderella, history's longest-running ''Extreme Makeover,'' with more than 800 variations on her legend worldwide. The Paper Mill Playhouse here has upped the ante by offering a musically rich, eye-poppingly gorgeous, fun-filled ''Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella,'' an adaptation by Tom Briggs of the 1957 made-for-television movie. There are also nods to Disney's animated film of 1950 and to a multi-ethnic 1997 remake of the television movie written by Robert L. Freedman. It is the addition of Cinderella's groupies -- an enchanting puppet entourage of four twittering mice, a cat and a soaring white dove -- that creates a special kind of magic. Singing the poignant Rodgers and Hammerstein ''In My Own Little Corner,'' surrounded by these adoring creatures, Angela Gaylor as Cinderella is captivating.
Newspaper Article