Popular

This book demonstrates how the history of the Broadway musical is inseparable from the history of U.S. women, and argues that this mainstream, commercial form has been dominated by women onstage as performers and offstage as spectators and fans. Beginning in the 1950s and organized by decade, the book examines women in musicals and in the context of U.S. culture, considering both the representation of women—that is, images of women—and the labor of the female performer—that is, her centrality to the musical as performance. In addition to surveying key ideas around gender and sexuality in each decade of U.S. history, every chapter focuses on a specific convention: the female duet in the 1950s; the single woman as a moving body in the 1960s; the ensemble number in the 1970s; sceneography in the 1980s; the opening number and 11 o’clock number in the 1990s. The final chapters on the blockbuster Broadway musical Wicked returns to the 1950s model and analyzes how the musical Wicked reinvigorates the Rodgers and Hammerstein formula in a feminist and queer musical. This book argues that gender, as a key element of the musical, played a crucial role in the Broadway musical’s formal and structural changes from the 1950s on.

Cosmic Cowboys and New Hicks: The Countercultural Sounds of Austin's Progressive Country Music Scene explores the roles that music, as a sounding phenomenon with culturally specific meanings, played in mediating the experiences of a community of musicians, entrepreneurs, journalists, and fans who viewed country music as part of their collective heritage. These same people sought to reclaim the sounds of country music to articulate a distinctively Texan musical counterculture that has had an indelible impact on the production and consumption of country music. Arguing that the sounds of a scene function as relatively stable and extremely powerful signifiers for scene participants, this book explores how music performs important cultural work within a music scene by helping participants to construct personal and collective identities, to imbue music scenes with a sense of place, and to relate to people who are not active within the scene.

One legacy of the 1960s sexual revolution was the “adult” musical of the 1970s. Influenced by the overwhelming success in 1968 of Hair, as well as by a series of rulings on the nature of obscenity, adult musicals proliferated in New York's theaters at a time when the city was teetering toward bankruptcy and tourism was on the decline. Typically structured like old-fashioned revues, shows like Let My People Come, The Faggot, and the long-running Oh! Calcutta! relied on nudity and simulated sex to attract audiences. Adult musicals disappeared almost entirely by the early 1980s, as the city's economy improved and the country grew more socially conservative; they have since been largely dismissed as a silly fad befitting a silly decade. Yet adult musicals reflect aspects of 1970s American culture at their messiest and thus at their most honest. Specifically, they emulate the country's rapidly changing, often contradictory attitudes about gender and sexuality at a time when the sexual revolution had given way to the gay and women's liberation movements. Hard Times examines adult musicals as reflective of the socioeconomic mood of New York City in the 1970s, the socio-sexual mores of the country in the decade following the sexual revolution, and contemporary debates about obscenity and art.

“The mob is always right” was the idea that charged Irving Berlin’s career in American popular music. Taking off from that claim, this book represents a wide-ranging exploration of America’s greatest songwriter and his role in creating twentieth-century musical theater. Drawing on past scholarly efforts and a vast store of recently released archival material, the book strives to break new ground in focusing on Irving Berlin’s half-century of work for the Broadway stage—a career that tracks the development of American musical theater itself. The book traces a fundamental paradigm shift from early twentieth-century values of variety entertainment, manifested in Berlin’s revues and revue-like comedies, to an increasing emphasis on coherent, well-crafted scripts for musical comedy, in which songs were more thoroughly integrated into the plot. Throughout, Berlin maintained a unique balance by fitting musical numbers tightly to their show contexts, and addressing their historical moment, while preserving their integrity as individual songs that could have their own lives in the musical marketplace as jazz and cabaret standards, and as popular classics whose sheet music enjoyed pride of place in the piano benches of American homes. Like Berlin’s songs and shows, the book is designed for a wide readership of musical theater aficionados as well as serious students of music, drama, and popular culture—and anyone interested in the story of a poor immigrant boy whose life and work expressed so well the American dream.

This book provides a comprehensive discussion of the genesis and performance history of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady. Using more than 500 previously unpublished letters from the papers of the producer Herman Levin, it traces the background of the show, from Shaw’s play Pygmalion to the opening night of the musical on Broadway in 1956. It also uses more than 3,000 archival manuscripts and a rehearsal script to propose a reappraisal of the ambiguous relationship between Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) and Eliza Doolittle (Julie Andrews). Finally, the book explores conflicting aspects of the reception of the show, both in critical writings and in performance.

This is a study of the life and work of one of America’s most brilliant and inspiring composer-dramatists, Marc Blitzstein (1905–1964). A piano student of Alexander Siloti, and composition student of Rosario Scalero, Nadia Boulanger, and Arnold Schoenberg, Blitzstein innovatively combined serious and popular techniques and traditions in order to reach the large audience for radio, film, and Broadway shows, producing work, conditioned by Marxist perspectives, that spoke to the concerns of workers, immigrants, women, and minorities. His most successful works include the operas The Cradle Will Rock (1937) and Regina (1949, adapted from Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play, The Little Foxes), for which he wrote both the words and music, and his adaptation of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, which helped popularize that piece in English-speaking countries, and which yielded the hit song “Mack the Knife.” Other notable works include the opera No for an Answer, the Airborne Symphony for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, the ballet The Guests, and two late stage works, Reuben Reuben and Juno. Such works had, according to Leonard Bernstein, an “incalculable” influence on the American musical theater, and remain particularly noteworthy in terms of their musical prosody, their formal novelty, and their amalgam of serious and popular elements. This study considers other aspects of the composer’s life: his Jewish-Russian background and his childhood in Philadelphia; his activities as a pianist, critic, and translator; his marriage to the writer Eva Goldbeck and his relations with friends and colleagues; his involvement with various progressive social causes; his service in the Army as an entertainment specialist during World War II; his brush with anti-communist attacks; and his violent death in Martinique at age fifty-eight.

This book tells the behind-the-scenes story of the songs and scores written for the movie adventures of Ian Fleming's Agent 007 of the British Secret Service. The book looks at many aspects of the 50-year saga including the following: How the “James Bond Theme” was written at the last minute for Dr. No and how it became the subject of controversy, ending in a libel trial 40 years later in London's High Court. How Bond composer John Barry invented a new kind of action-adventure music for movies, and how despite writing immensely popular scores for Goldfinger, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice and eight other Bond films, he never received a single Academy Award nomination for his Bond music. Why Monty Norman preceded Barry, and why Paul McCartney, Marvin Hamlisch, Bill Conti, Michael Kamen, Eric Serra and David Arnold succeeded him as composers (and details of the Burt Bacharach and Michel Legrand scores for the “unofficial” Bond films). How top artists like Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Nancy Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Carly Simon, Madonna and others were convinced to record for 007, and how Frank Sinatra and Amy Winehouse almost did. How changes in the Bond sound reflected what was happening in pop and rock circles, from the twangy guitar of the Sean Connery era to a more sedate sound for Roger Moore, synthesizers for George Lazenby and Timothy Dalton, and a more contemporary approach for Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig. Each chapter also contains a “score highlights” box that examines each Bond score in detail, especially as relates to the commercially available soundtrack albums.

Drawing on archival research and including much new information, this book reveals how Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern created the Broadway musical Show Boat in the crucible of the Jazz Age to fit the talents of the show's original 1927 cast. After showing how major figures such as Paul Robeson and Helen Morgan defined the content of the show, the book goes on to detail how Show Boat was altered by later directors, choreographers, and performers to the end of the twentieth century. All the major New York productions are covered, plus five important London productions and four Hollywood versions. Again and again, the story of Show Boat circles back to the power of performers to remake the show. From its beginnings, Show Boat juxtaposed the talents of black and white performers and mixed the conventions of white-cast operetta and the black-cast musical. Bringing black and white onto the same stage—revealing the mixed-race roots of musical comedy—Show Boat stimulated creative artists and performers to renegotiate the color line as expressed in the American musical and, more broadly, with popular music and dance on the national stage during a century of profound social transformations.

This book explores the development of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein’s classic Broadway musical South Pacific. In particular, it notes how the team balanced the creation of a commercially successful work with the desire to make a passionate statement against racial intolerance that they knew would almost certainly be controversial. Through the examination of archival materials, many of which are heretofore unexplored in the literature on Rodgers and Hammerstein, the book reveals the creative processes of two masters near the peak of their craft. In addition, this book explores the musical as a cultural, social, and political text of the postwar and early cold war eras. Using contemporaneous sources as well as recent scholarship, it analyzes South Pacific in terms of how it deals with, or reflects, postwar constructs of race, gender, colonialism, and the then new prototype of the rising young business executive. Moreover, each subject is examined from a unique perspective. For instance, Nellie Forbush’s racial intolerance is viewed through the lens of literature about race during the prewar era, the time when her ideas would have developed; and the chapter on gender reveals how Hammerstein altered the gender constructs of his principal characters from how they appeared in James A. Michener’s novel Tales of the South Pacific, on which the musical was based. Through exploring the work’s development and reading it as an open text revealing of its time and of contemporary American society, this book offers new insight into South Pacific and its creators.

This book examines Terry Riley's In C as a new paradigm of “classical” composition. In C is only one page long, consists of fifty-three compact modules, is of open instrumentation and length, and generates itself through a set of simple and direct rules. At a time when contemporary concert music was pushing the limits of complexity and information density, In C is an essay in economy; it explores how much can be gotten out of what seems to be so little. Riley's 1964 work is also important in the way it sets the standard for American minimalist repetitive practice, for the use of modality and slow harmonic progression for the acceptance of world music and non-“classical” models, and for the use of structured improvisation to create a new idea of form and development. The book explores the history of In C, in terms of Riley's development as a composer in California in the early 1960s; of the story of the 1964 San Francisco premiere; of the history of the “second premiere” in New York in 1968, when the piece was recorded for Columbia records; and of its influence and legacy as described by subsequent experts and a close examination of later recordings. Throughout there are extensive original interviews with Riley and most of the participants in the 1964 concert and 1968 recording.