Approaches To The American Musical

Author : Robert Lawson-Peebles
Publisher : University of Exeter Press
ISBN 13 : 9780859894050
Total Pages : 180 pages
Book Rating : 4.53/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Approaches to the American Musical written by Robert Lawson-Peebles and published by University of Exeter Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This new analysis of American film and stage musicals puts forward the argument that productions such as Kiss Me Kate were popular because they dealt with important issues such as ethnicity, rather than because of their value as escapism.

Author : Jackson R. Bryer
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780813536132
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Art of the American Musical written by Jackson R. Bryer and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Musical theater has captivated American audiences from its early roots in burlesque stage productions and minstrel shows to the million-dollar industry it has become on Broadway today. What is it about this truly indigenous American art form that has made it so enduringly popular? How has it survived, even thrived, alongside the technology of film and the glitz and glamour of Hollywood? Will it continue to evolve and leave its mark on the twenty-first century? Bringing together exclusive and previously unpublished interviews with nineteen leading composers, lyricists, librettists, directors, choreographers, and producers from the mid-1900s to the present, this book details the careers of the individuals who shaped this popular performance art during its most prolific period. The interviewees discuss their roles in productions ranging from On the Town (1944) and Finian's Rainbow (1947) to The Producers (2001) and Bounce (2003). Readers are taken onto the stage, into the rehearsals, and behind the scenes. The nuts and bolts, the alchemy, and the occasional agonies of the collaborative process are all explored. In their discussions, the artists detail their engagements with other creative forces, including such major talents as Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Liza Minnelli, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Jule Styne, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, Alan Jay Lerner, Zero Mostel, and Gwen Verdon. They speak candidly about their own work and that of their peers, their successes and failures, the creative process, and how a show progresses from its conception through rehearsals and tryouts to opening night. Taken together, these interviews give fresh insight into what Oscar Hammerstein called "a nightly miracle"--the creation of the American musical.

Author : Richard Kislan
Publisher : Hal Leonard Corporation
ISBN 13 : 9781557832177
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.7X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Musical written by Richard Kislan and published by Hal Leonard Corporation. This book was released on 1995 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (Applause Books). This revised and expanded edition of Kislan's acclaimed study of America's musical theater includes a new section on "Recent Musical Theater: Issues and Problems." "The ancient union of drama and song, known as musical theater, comes in many forms vaudeville, burlesque, comic opera, minstrels, etc. The author reviews these and other highlights of American musicals ... with a fascinating background on the elements that contribute to the success of a Showboat ." King Features * "Worth study by anyone who still thinks that the musical is a collection of songs." The Stage

Author : Peter Riddle
Publisher : Oakville, Ont. : Mosaic Press
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The American Musical written by Peter Riddle and published by Oakville, Ont. : Mosaic Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the origins of music theatre from its 18th century European roots through its transformation in 19th century America, and its relation to American popular forms of entertainment as the minstrel show, burlesque and the revue. The flowering of the true musical comedy is documented, as represented by the Princess Musical of Jerome Kern and P G Wodehouse, which then gave birth to the first enduring masterpieces of American music drama -- Kern and Hammerstein's 'Show Boat'. Includes section on Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber and the development of music theatre through the sixties and beyond.

Author : Gerald Martin Bordman
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 0199729700
Total Pages : 1033 pages
Book Rating : 4.08/5 ( download)

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Download or read book American Musical Theatre written by Gerald Martin Bordman and published by . This book was released on 2010 with total page 1033 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed as "absolutely the best reference book on its subject" by Newsweek, American Musical Theatre: A Chronicle covers more than 250 years of musical theatre in the United States, from a 1735 South Carolina production of Flora, or Hob in the Well to The Addams Family in 2010. Authors Gerald Bordman and Richard Norton write an engaging narrative blending history, critical analysis, and lively description to illustrate the transformation of American musical theatre through such incarnations as the ballad opera, revue, Golden Age musical, rock musical, Disney musical, and, with 2010's American Idiot, even the punk musical. The Chronicle is arranged chronologically and is fully indexed according to names of shows, songs, and people involved, for easy searching and browsing. Chapters range from the "Prologue," which traces the origins of American musical theater to 1866, through several "intermissions" (for instance, "Broadway's Response to the Swing Era, 1937-1942") and up to "Act Seven," the theatre of the twenty-first century. This last chapter covers the dramatic changes in musical theatre since the last edition published-whereas Fosse, a choreography-heavy revue, won the 1999 Tony for Best Musical, the 2008 award went to In the Heights, which combines hip-hop, rap, meringue and salsa unlike any musical before it. Other groundbreaking and/or box-office-breaking shows covered for the first time include Avenue Q, The Producers, Billy Elliot, Jersey Boys, Monty Python's Spamalot, Wicked, Hairspray, Urinetown the Musical, and Spring Awakening. Discussion of these shows incorporates plot synopses, names of principal players, descriptions of scenery and costumes, and critical reactions. In addition, short biographies interspersed throughout the text colorfully depict the creative minds that shaped the most influential musicals. Collectively, these elements create the most comprehensive, authoritative history of musical theatre in this country and make this an essential resource for students, scholars, performers, dramaturges, and musical enthusiasts.

Author : Jeffrey P. Mehltretter Drury
Publisher : Peter Lang Us
ISBN 13 : 9781433180651
Total Pages : 210 pages
Book Rating : 4.50/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Rhetoric, Politics, and Hamilton: an American Musical written by Jeffrey P. Mehltretter Drury and published by Peter Lang Us. This book was released on 2021 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rhetoric, Politics, and Hamilton: An American Musical approaches Lin-Manuel Miranda's groundbreaking cultural production as a rhetorical text with implications for contemporary U.S. politics. Chapters analyze the musical in relation to three broad themes: national public memory, social and cultural identity, and democracy and social cha...

Author : Raymond Knapp
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0190877782
Total Pages : 128 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Histories of the Musical written by Raymond Knapp and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-09-04 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The American musical is a paradox. On stage or screen, musicals at once hold a dominant and a contested place in the worlds of entertainment, art, and scholarship. Born from a mélange of performance forms that included opera and operetta, vaudeville and burlesque, minstrelsy and jazz, musicals have always sought to amuse more than instruct, and to make money more than make political change. In spite of their unapologetic commercialism, though, musicals have achieved supreme artistry and have influenced culture as much as if not more than any other art form in America, including avant-garde and high art on the one hand, and the full range of popular and commercial art on the other. Reflecting, refracting, and shaping U.S. culture since the early twentieth century, musicals converse with shifting dynamics of gender and sexuality, ethnicity and race, and the very question of what it means to be American and to be human. The chapters gathered in this book, Volume I of the reissued Oxford Handbook, explore the American musical from both the outside and the inside. This first volume concentrates in particular on large-scale, more philosophical issues of relevance to the genre, considering issues of historical situations and formal procedure as they bear on the narratives we make concerning productions and performers, artists and audiences, commerce and context. The first four essays discuss ways of defining histories and texts, and apprehending the formal choices of singers and dancers; the second group of four take up the subtle challenges of the genre's signal transformations out of minstrelsy and Tin Pan Alley to "integration" and beyond.

Author : Lehman Engel
Publisher : New York : Macmillan
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 294 pages
Book Rating : 4.58/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The American Musical Theater written by Lehman Engel and published by New York : Macmillan. This book was released on 1975 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Author : Nathan Hurwitz
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1317912055
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.57/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A History of the American Musical Theatre written by Nathan Hurwitz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-27 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Author : Ben West
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781003094548
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The American Musical written by Ben West and published by . This book was released on 2024 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The American Musical is a comprehensive history of an American art form. It delivers a detailed and definitive portrait of the American musical's artistic evolution over the course of seven distinct, newly defined eras, with a unique perspective gleaned from research at more than twenty different archives across the United States. Individual in both its approach and coverage, The American Musical traces the form's creative journey from its 19th century beginnings, through its 20th century maturation, and to the turn of the 21st century, shedding new light on a myriad of authors, directors, and craftspeople who worked on Broadway and beyond. This book actively addresses the form's often overlooked female and African-American artists, provides an in-depth accounting of such outside influences as minstrelsy, vaudeville, nightclubs, and burlesque, and explores the dynamic relationship between the form and the consciousness of its country. The American Musical is a fascinating and insightful read for students, artists, and afficionados of the American musical, and anyone with an interest in this singular form of entertainment"--