The American Musical
The American Musical

Author: Marc Bauch

Publisher: Tectum Verlag DE

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 9783828884588

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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.

American Musicals in Context
American Musicals in Context

Author: Thomas A. Greenfield

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2021-03-29

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 1440865418

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American Musicals in Context: From the American Revolution to the 21st Century gives students a fresh look at history-based musicals, helping readers to understand the American story through one of the country's most celebrated art forms: the musical. With the hit musical Hamilton (2015) captivating audiences and reshaping the way early U.S. history is taught and written about, this book offers insight into an array of musicals that explore U.S. history. The work provides a synopsis, overview of critical and audience reception, and historical context and analysis for each of 20 musicals selected for the unique and illuminating way they present the American story on the stage. Specifically, this volume explores musicals that have centered their themes, characters, and plots on some aspect of America's complex and ever-changing history. Each in its own way helps us rediscover pivotal national crises, key political decisions, defining moral choices, unspeakable and unresolved injustices, important and untold stories, defeats suffered, victories won in the face of monumental adversity, and the sacrifices borne publicly and privately in the process of creating the American narrative, one story at a time. Students will come away from the volume armed with the critical thinking skills necessary to discern fact from fiction in U.S. history.

Our Musicals, Ourselves
Our Musicals, Ourselves

Author: John Bush Jones

Publisher: Brandeis University Press

Published: 2011-04-17

Total Pages: 650

ISBN-13: 1611682231

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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.

The Secret Life of the American Musical
The Secret Life of the American Musical

Author: Jack Viertel

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2016-03-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0374711259

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New York Times Bestseller: “Both revelatory and entertaining . . . Along the way, Viertel provides some fascinating Broadway history.” —The New York Times Book Review Americans invented musicals—and have a longstanding love affair with them. But what, exactly, is a musical? In this book, longtime theatrical producer and writer Jack Viertel takes them apart, puts them back together, sings their praises, and occasionally despairs over their more embarrassing shortcomings. In the process, he shows us how musicals happen, what makes them work, how they captivate audiences, and how one landmark show leads to the next—by design or by accident, by emulation or by rebellion—from Oklahoma! to Hamilton and onward. Beginning with an overture and concluding with a curtain call, with stops in between for “I Want” songs, “conditional” love songs, production numbers, star turns, and finales, Viertel shows us patterns in the architecture of classic shows and charts the inevitable evolution that has taken place in musical theater as America itself has evolved socially and politically. The Secret Life of the American Musical makes you feel like you’re there in the rehearsal room, the front row, and the offices of theater owners and producers as they pursue their own love affair with that rare and elusive beast—the Broadway hit. “A valuable addition to the theater lover’s bookshelf. . . . fans will appreciate the dips into memoir and Viertel’s takes on original cast albums.” —Publishers Weekly “Even seasoned hands will come away with a clearer understanding of why some shows work while others flop.” —Commentary “A showstopper . . . infectiously entertaining.” —John Lahr, author of Notes on a Cowardly Lion “Thoroughly interesting.” —The A.V. Club “The best general-audience analysis of musical theater I have read in many years.” —The Charlotte Observer “Delightful . . . a little bit history, a little bit memoir, a little bit criticism and, for any theater fan, a whole lot of fun.” —The Dallas Morning News

The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity
The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity

Author: Raymond Knapp

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2018-06-05

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0691186200

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The American musical has achieved and maintained relevance to more people in America than any other performance-based art. This thoughtful history of the genre, intended for readers of all stripes, offers probing discussions of how American musicals, especially through their musical numbers, advance themes related to American national identity. Written by a musicologist and supported by a wealth of illustrative audio examples (on the book's website), the book examines key historical antecedents to the musical, including the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, nineteenth and early twentieth-century American burlesque and vaudeville, Tin Pan Alley, and other song types. It then proceeds thematically, focusing primarily on fifteen mainstream shows from the twentieth century, with discussions of such notable productions as Show Boat (1927), Porgy and Bess (1935), Oklahoma! (1943), West Side Story (1957), Hair (1967), Pacific Overtures (1976), and Assassins (1991). The shows are grouped according to their treatment of themes that include defining America, mythologies, counter-mythologies, race and ethnicity, dealing with World War II, and exoticism. Each chapter concludes with a brief consideration of available scholarship on related subjects; an extensive appendix provides information on each show discussed, including plot summaries and song lists, and a listing of important films, videos, audio recordings, published scores, and libretti associated with each musical.

The Musical
The Musical

Author: Richard Kislan

Publisher: Hal Leonard Corporation

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9781557832177

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(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

Irving Berlin's American Musical Theater
Irving Berlin's American Musical Theater

Author: Jeffrey Magee

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2012-04-06

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 0199911630

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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.

The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical
The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical

Author: Taylor & Francis Group

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-12-13

Total Pages: 496

ISBN-13: 9781032240541

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The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical is dedicated to the musical's evolving relationship to American culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the past decade-and-a-half, international scholars from an ever-widening number of disciplines and specializations have been actively contributing to the interdisciplinary field of musical theater studies. Musicals have served not only to mirror the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural tenor of the times, but have helped shape and influence it, in America and across the globe: a genre that may seem, at first glance, light-hearted and escapist serves also as a bold commentary on society. Forty-four essays examine the contemporary musical as an ever-shifting product of an ever-changing culture. This volume sheds new light on the American musical as a thriving, contemporary performing arts genre, one that could have died out in the post-Tin Pan Alley era but instead has managed to remain culturally viable and influential, in part by newly embracing a series of complex contradictions. At present, the American musical is a live, localized, old-fashioned genre that has simultaneously developed into an increasingly globalized, tech-savvy, intensely mediated mass entertainment form. Similarly, as it has become increasingly international in its scope and appeal, the stage musical has also become more firmly rooted to Broadway--the idea, if not the place--and thus branded as a quintessentially American entertainment.

The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical
The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical

Author: Raymond Knapp

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-11-04

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0199874727

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The Oxford Handbook of The American Musical offers new and cutting-edge essays on the most important and compelling issues and topics in the growing, interdisciplinary field of musical-theater and film-musical studies. Taking the form of a "keywords" book, it introduces readers to the concepts and terms that define the history of the musical as a genre and that offer ways to reflect on the specific creative choices that shape musicals and their performance on stage and screen. The handbook offers a cross-section of essays written by leading experts in the field, organized within broad conceptual groups, which together capture the breadth, direction, and tone of musicals studies today. Each essay traces the genealogy of the term or issue it addresses, including related issues and controversies, positions and problematizes those issues within larger bodies of scholarship, and provides specific examples drawn from shows and films. Essays both re-examine traditional topics and introduce underexplored areas. Reflecting the concerns of scholars and students alike, the authors emphasize critical and accessible perspectives, and supplement theory with concrete examples that may be accessed through links to the handbook's website. 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 Oxford Handbook of The American Musical will engage all readers interested in the form, from students to scholars to fans and aficionados, as it analyses the complex relationships among the creators, performers, and audiences who sustain the genre.