Giant Love Song is witness to the poetic journey of fourteen-year-old Maureen Muldoon, a committed daydreamer trying to navigate the final hours of her mother's life without getting crushed. She weaves a tapestry of stories and songs in hopes of avoiding the inevitable. Along the way, we meet colorful characters from this Jersey neighborhood who leave their mark on your heart. As daybreak comes, Maureen is granted a gift from her father, the Giant. Carried to her from several decades before her birth, this could be the very thing she was chasing all along.
A book that explores the great American novelist and playwright Edna Ferber, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Ficton, whose work was made into many Academy Award-winning movies; the writing of her controversial, international best-selling novel about Texas, and the making of George Stevens’ Academy Award winning epic film of the same name, Giant. The stupendous publication of Edna Ferber's Giant in 1952 set off a storm of protest over the novel's portrayal of Texas manners, money and mores with oil-rich Texans threatening to shoot, lynch or ban Ferber from ever entering the state again. In Giant Love, Julie Gilbert writes of the internationally best-selling Ferber, one of the most widely read writers in the first half of the 20th Century – her evolution from mid-west maverick girl-reporter to Pulitzer Prize winning, beloved American novelist, from her want-to-be actress days to becoming Broadway's acclaimed prize-winning playwright whose collaborators – George S. Kauffman and Moss Hart, among them, were, along with Ferber, herself, the most successful playwrights of their time. Here is the making of an American classic novel and the film that followed in its wake. We see how George Stevens, Academy-Award winning director, wooed the prickly, stubborn Ferber, ultimately getting her to agree to everything including writing, for the first time ever, a draft of a screenplay, to her okaying James Dean for the part of the ranch hand, Jett Rink, something she was dead set against. Here is the casting of Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean and their backstory triangle of sex and seduction – each becoming a huge star because of the film; the frustrated Stevens trying to direct the instinctive but undisciplined Dean, and the months long landmark filming in the sleepy town of Marfa, Texas, suddenly invaded by a battalion of a film crew and some of the biggest stars in the rising celebrity culture.
A girl giant, afraid of the light, and a boy giant, afraid of the dark, live lonely lives following only the moon or the sun until an eclipse brings them together.
Uncovers the unexplored history of the love song, from the fertility rites of ancient cultures to the sexualized YouTube videos of the present day, and discusses such topics as censorship, the legacy of love songs, and why it is a dominant form of modern musical expression.
(Vocal Collection). This massive collection features 50 songs from 41 shows and films appropriate for teen singers. Includes: Astonishing from Little Women * For the First Time in Forever from Frozen * Home from Beauty and the Beast * How Far I'll Go from Moana * Live Out Loud from A Little Princess * My New Philosophy from You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown * Part of Your World from The Little Mermaid * Pulled from The Addams Family * Shy from Once Upon a Mattress * Watch What Happens from Newsies The Musical * and many more. Over 300 pages of music!
