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Fie Fie Fi-Fi: A Facsimile of the 1914 Musical Score, With Illustrations from the Original
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Manufacturer: University of South Carolina Press
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ASIN: 157003138X |
Book Description
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.
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Word Crazy: Broadway Lyricists from Cohan to Sondheim
Thomas S. Hischak
Manufacturer: Praeger Publishers
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ASIN: 0275938492 |
Book Description
This volume surveys the development of the American musical during the 20th century by focusing on one of the most important yet least recognized members of the creative team: the lyricist. From George M. Cohan and Irving Berlin through Oscar Hammerstein II, Alan Jay Lerner, Ira Gershwin, Stephen Sondheim, and others, Word Crazy examines both well-known and obscure writers who have shaped one of America's most beloved theatrical forms. The author offers an overview of each lyricist's career and works and evaluates his or her strengths, weaknesses, patterns, temperament, and personal vision. The result is an unusual critical history of the Broadway musical that will be of significant interest to students of the theatre as well as to anyone who wishes to learn more about the unique craft of the theatre lyricist. Beginning with George M. Cohan, the American theatre's first important lyricist, and continuing up into the 1980s, the book presents an overall history of the musical theatre during this century. Hischak explores the various trends and movements, from the early operettas through the arrival of jazz, and up through the conceptual musicals of the last 30 years. The treatment is chronological with most chapters focusing on a single lyricist. A bibliography and index complete the volume. By reviewing the careers and works of America's most influential theatre lyricists, Hischak offers a fresh new perspective on the evolution of musical theatre in America.
Customer Reviews:
love cabaret.......1999-07-18
love the ltyle of the cabare
Customer Reviews:
Show Boat.......2005-09-25
This coffee-table sized book was published in 1977 to commemorate the 50th anniversay of the opening of the Florenz Ziegfeld production of SHOW BOAT, with music and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern. It is not just an entertaining diversion for fans of the show or musical theatre in general, but a serious study and commentary of Edna Ferber's book (upon which the show is based), the original 1927 Broadway production, the first 1929 Hollywood movie version, the 1936 Universal movie version, and the 1951 MGM version. Kreuger is not afraid to be critical (he believes the 1936 movie is the best Hollywood rendition because it follows the original play the closest, while the 1951 movie is the worst because of "its largely inappropriate cast, its musical mutilation, its humorless script, and its empty Technicolored fripperies"). Complete cast listings, a list of regional productions, and a selected discography are included, along with scores of photographs. A very handsome book about a supreme example of the American Musical, a delight for the eye as well as the mind.
One of the best musical theatre books available.......2003-12-13
I have had this remarkable book ever since it was first published back in 1977, to mark the 50th anniversary of "Show Boat"'s opening on Broadway. It is criminal that it has been allowed to slip out of print not once, but twice--in its original edition and in its expanded, updated edition as well.
Perhaps the reason for this is the current trendy emphasis on political correctness. The original stage production, and every American stage production until 1946, used the "n" word several times both in the lyrics and dialogue when referring to black people. (The word was not used in the film versions of the show.) But ever since 1946, both Hammerstein and public taste demanded that this word be expunged from the show. Author Miles Kreuger makes a strong case that the use of the "n" word was not an example of insensitivity; to Kreuger it was Hammerstein's way of being brutally honest about the way blacks were treated in the 19th century South. But perhaps some readers refused to recognize the validity of Kreuger's point.
This book was, as far as I know, the very first book to ever devote itself to analyzing and documenting the history of one Broadway musical. It is clear that author Miles Kreuger deeply reveres "Show Boat", and that he considers it perhaps the most important American musical stage work ever written. The research he has done for this book is staggering. Not only does he include a chapter-by-chapter description of Edna Ferber's original novel, he also includes a scene-by-scene description of the musical, as well as an extremely detailed description of the long unseen 1929 part-talkie film version of Ferber's original novel (illustrated profusely with stills from the film), and a detailed description of the classic 1936 film version of the stage musical (also illustrated profusely with stills). There is detailed information on the writing and staging of the first production, an entire chapter devoted to the now forgotten, and much sanitized post-World War II Broadway revival (staged in 1946),as well as appendices containing cast lists for Broadway, London, regional, and film versions of the show, including which songs were omitted and/or retained.In short, this book gives you the works, and is close to the last word on "Show Boat".
And Kreuger is a strongly opinionated author, who is not afraid to show his preferences. Although he was not born long ago enough to have seen them, to him the 1927 and 1932 stage productions are the most memorable versions of the show, because they most closely reflect Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's original concept for it. Up through the date in which this book was published, no subsequent Broadway revival, according to Kreuger, had ever lived up to or surpassed those first two Broadway stagings, and Kreuger considers the 1936 film version of "Show Boat" one of the finest Hollywood treatments of a Broadway musical classic.
Conversely, Kreuger is absolutely merciless in his withering criticism of the much-loved and much revived M-G-M 1951 Technicolor film of "Show Boat" (with Kathryn Grayson, Ava Gardner and Howard Keel), detailing its almost total disregard for Kern and Hammerstein's intentions, its alteration of some of the song arrangements as well as some of the story, its near-total abandonment of Hammerstein's dialogue, and its flagrant watering down of the show's most dramatic moments to fit what he calls "the M-G-M mold" (i.e., a musical that avoids controversy). He scoffs at some of the casting choices, except for the choice of Howard Keel as Ravenal, Joe E. Brown as Cap'n Andy, and William Warfield as Joe. And he leaves us with the feeling that anyone who loves the 1951 film has no idea of what a production of "Show Boat" should be like or has never been exposed to the original musical.
This book may annoy some, but it is essential reading for theatre students and lovers of musicals. It has been highly influential, prompting both EMI's complete , "authentic", excellent 1988 recording of the score and Harold Prince's 1994 stage revival. It should be brought back into print and kept in print.
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Stars of the American Musical Theater in Historic Photographs
Manufacturer: Dover Publications
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0486242099 |
Book Description
361 portraits, from 1860's to 1950 of over 400 stars. Informative captions. An illustrious collection, long overdue.
Book Description
With thirteen Broadway musicals to his credit, Stephen Sondheim's career in the musical theater has outdistanced those of most of his contemporaries. Each of his shows has presented new challenges to audiences, and each has cast fresh perspectives on the nature and potential of the American musical, as well as probing deeply, often painfully, into the nature of our culture.
Sondheim's Broadway Musicals is the first book to take an in-depth look at Sondheim's work. Stephen Banfield examines each of Sondheim's musicals for Broadway, from West Side Story and Gypsy to the 1987 musical Into the Woods, and includes A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, Anyone Can Whistle, A Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Merrily We Roll Along, Sweeney Todd, and Sunday in the Park with George. Banfield also discusses Sondheim's other work, such as the 1991 show Assassins and his music for the 1990 film Dick Tracy--for which "Sooner or Later" won him an Academy Award for Best Song.
"Banfield seems almost to hear Sondheim's music with Sondheim's ears. This extremely valuable work discusses Sondheim's early training and subsequent career, his general compositional concerns, and his style. The meat of the book is a musical-dramatic analysis of his musicals . . . . For each musical, Banfield places the work and its components in a historical and typological text. He also treats in welcome detail the musical profile or universe of each show: Sondheim's use of generative intervals or interval complexes as source material, motifs that reappear in various guises in various songs, the sound world that defines the musical's emotional mind. The book will be as useful to those who are cool to Sondheim's work as to his fans." --Choice
Customer Reviews:
Scholarly Sondheim.......2007-08-16
This is an excellent publication, but very dense, and designed for the musicologist rather than just the fan. This covers Sondheim's works up to and including "Into The Woods".
Banfield is not "starry eyed" about Sondheim, and is, at times, critical of his 'borrowings' from other composers. He also insists on placing all his citations within the body of the text, rather than as footnotes or as an appendix at the end of the book. This makes for a very disjointed reading experience.
Worth a visit, but quite a plod through it's technicalities.
Not a book for everyone but one of the best out there.......2007-03-13
This book is wonderful in that Banfield has created a series of dissertations on the composition of each of Sondheim's most important works. Those of you who have extensive music theory background will find this book to be golden. Banfield uses musical exceprts and analyzes these small musical moments in regard to how they support the character or the situation and even foreshadowing at hand. I am reminded of a Bach sacred work in which the work is scored in such a way that the printed page creates a picture of the crucifix, yet at the same time depicts a remarkable musical moment. This is the sort of detail and craft that Sondheim uses. Sondheim is a man who is writing many years before his time. The politics and unions of New York Theatre have jaded him, but at any given moment one of Sondheim's works is being produced in revival and being understood far more so than the original production. "Merrily we Roll Along" is a brilliant work that has yet to be completely understood by the public, though "Sweeney Todd" is finally begining to be seen as the major work it is: one of the most important pieces of theatre to have been created so far. "Passion" was recognized as best musical at the Tony awards though never did a road production. "Passion" is brillaintly written so that there is no applause break, no intermission and the audience is not permitted a single moment from start to intense ending where he may slip back into the "real world." In this way, "Passion" moves more like a film, so that the audience, once caught into the magic, is not permitted even an instant of coming back to the surface, making the intensity of this work even more powerful. Sondheim's inteligence and insistence that our fast food nation use its mind to experience an evening of brilliance that often hits very close to home is both part of his brilliance and part of what causes critics to shy away. (We now laugh at the foolish critics who criticized the brilliant second act of "Sunday in The Park With George." Stephen Banfield's "Sondheim's Broadway Musical" gives us a book that is not only fun to read, but allows us to understand the work better. Before staging any Sondheim work yourself you must read this book and if you teach music theory, musical theatre or acting, then this is a book that must be included in the curriculum. For me? I read it both for the professional need as well as the intellectual stimulation. This is not a souvenier book but rather a brilliant study for those who are very serious about music, lyrics and the creation of character, life and art on the stage. Sondheim is an international treasure and we have the very unusual experience of living as contemporarys with a man who will be placed in history beside Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. Banfield's book will begin to show you why.
A Scholarly Investigation into Sondheim's Musical Methods.......2006-08-14
This is not a book for the casual Sondheim fan. Be warned, unless you have a fair degree of musical sophistication -- and this involves music theory and musicology -- this is not the book for you. But for those who do understand such arcane things as harmonic (including Schenkerian) analysis, or how a typical Broadway tune is constructed, or, to use Banfield's favorite term, the diegetic uses of music, this 1993 book is a gold mine. The emphasis throughout is on the music, not on dramatic construction or the lyrics themselves; they are noted but not dwelt on.
Banfield gives us some historical and biographical background, with a fair discussion of Sondheim's pre-Broadway career (including some tidbits about the collaboration with Bernstein on 'West Side Story'), an overview of the compositional process, detailed exegesis of each of Sondheim's works from 'A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum' through 'Into the Woods.' There are many scholarly references and a voluminous bibliography as well as a slightly light-weight index. One is disappointed that the book stops in the early 1990s. Perhaps Banfield will update it one day.
This is definitely a book for serious students of Sondheim's work. It is a densely written text that definitely repays close study.
Scott Morrison
Impressive, arrogant, unclear..........2002-06-20
Despite the wealth of information which is hidden in this book, the professorial writing style makes it very difficult to unearth. The average sentence runs on for 7 full-length lines, and is annoyingly interrupted by literary name-dropping (Sondheim 1980) disguised as references and countless "the former" and "the latter"s. Many opinions are arrogantly offered with no clear examples, which is sadly typical of the "professor" mentality. I'm ashamed that my own college music lit professor is the editor of the series, and didn't ask the author to rewrite the book in a style meant to communicate rather than pontificate.
Dense material, but worth the work.......2002-04-13
As a Sondheim afficionado and serious music student, I adored this book and the insights it gave into the techincal aspects of Sondheim's compositions. As Banfield says in the introduction, too often the music isn't given the serious consideration compositionally that it deserves. Just a warning though, the book is really just about the music, there is fairly little discussion of the dramatic or theatrical aspects of Sondheim's work. That being said, this is an amazingly intelligent, in depth, and scholarly treatment of Sondheim purely as a composer.
Book Description
The first comprehensive social history of the American musical theater.
Customer Reviews:
Superb...........2007-09-04
I thought the book was superb in that it combined the flow of the times with the need for Broadway musicals that were divisionary to counteract the divisiveness in some of the difficult eras. I echo what the previous readers said, but I wondered why the author left out some poignant, comedic and inspirational shows as The Boyfriend with Julie Andrews, Lucky Stiff, a very low key show in the late 80's that was an Ahrens and Flaherty favorite along with Ragtime, and of course, Hairspray which probably would be the best depiction of diversion! Fabulous read and great for teens and university students of the musical theatre.
The Making of the American Musical, by Patricia J. Brown, Esq., Fresno, CA.......2005-08-22
I loved this book. Ever since my high school English teacher chastised me for trying to put Miller's The Crucible in the context of the McCarthy era, I have been fascinated with the social context surrounding the creation of art. Jones focuses on the political as well as social context that has given birth to the great...and the mediocre...of the American musical. First, his use of terms such as "diversionary" ring so true for those of us who love mindless fluff when we go to the theatre. Second, I was shocked at how little I had appreciated the contributions of African-Americans, inter alia, to the American stage prior to reading this book. But, mostly, I liked how he articulated how a writer's gestalt accounts for the end product on the stage and his description of how copy-cat musicals come into being. The book gave me the backstory to many of the original shows I had the good fortune to see on Broadway. I, for one, would love a Volume II of this book to be Jones' next foray. I especially offer this to aspiring young actors, writers, directors and songwriters as a required read before embarking on a life in musical theater. If you want to create art, you must know from whence you came.
A Socio-Political History of the Broadway Musical.......2004-04-19
This book by a long-time professor of theatre arts at Brandeis University is a fascinating study of the social forces influencing the evolution of the Broadway music. Starting with the early part of the 20th-century and working his way slowly to the present day, John Bush Jones groups musicals according to their themes and intent, calling some simply 'diversionary' (the sort that is so often thought to be aimed at the 'tired businessman') and others 'issue-driven,' (those with a theme which somehow mirrors the society at large). Clearly his interest is primarily with the latter, although he does discuss some of the unconscious thematic issues of the former. He does sometimes tend to get a bit caught up in his own premises and oversell them, but by and large this is a scholarly, and entirely readable, history of an art form that was invented on our shores and brought to its peak here, although it has been imitated prolifically elsewhere. He makes the point that most of the creators were Jewish (as he is) but doesn't offer much of an explanation for why this might be so. He focuses repeatedly on such things as shows with African-American, Jewish, political, sociological and psychological themes. He offers a fine analysis of the so-called 'concept musical' (e.g., 'Company' or 'Chorus Line') which he prefers to call 'fragmented musicals,' a description which points out their lack of an ordinary linear plot line.
One could argue with some of his emphases and analyses, but one has to respect the depth and breadth of his research and knowledge. He analyzes sociopolitical themes at length in such musicals as 'Show Boat,' 'The Cradle Will Rock,' 'Pal Joey,' 'Oklahoma,' 'South Pacific,' 'Carousel,' 'Sweeney Todd,' 'Fiddler on the Roof,' and others. Sometimes he finds hidden meanings that I had a hard time agreeing with, but I can only admire his imaginative look at some musicals that many of us tend to see as primarily 'diversionary.'
The book includes appendices listing the most popular or important musicals grouped roughly by decade and the number of performances they achieved. And there is also an extensive bibliography. I've read many books about the musical theatre and this one is unique in its perspective; it brings an interesting slant to the subject. Thus, it is a worthy addition to the long list of important books about the art form.
Scott Morrison
Marvelous New View of Musical Theater.......2004-03-08
As a lover of Musical Theater, and (minor) toiler in the vineyards, myself, I have probably read hundreds of books on the subject. Therefore, it is always a special treat to find one that brings a fresh slant to the subject. Jones' book does just that. By treating musical theater styles neither as a simple reflection of, nor an escape from the world at large, but rather as an integral part of the whole, he presents a broad, but always entertaining and on-target view of both the 20th century and musical theater's part within same. There are, as there always are in works of this scope, some factual errors (e.g. "No Strings" wasn't Richard Rodgers' only "public" credit as a lyricist. He's also so credited on the score for the TV musical "Androcles & The Lion". It ain't Broadway-in every sense-but it IS public!) but none that take anythng away from the over-all achievement of the work.
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American Plays And Musicals On Screen: 650 Stage Productions And Their Film And Televison Adaptations
Thomas S. Hischak
Manufacturer: McFarland & Company
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Book Description
As the popularity of film grew and audiences demanded longer stories, Hollywood began borrowing plots as well as actors and directors from Broadway—some of these play-to-films were triumphs and others were inexplicable duds. This reference work is an annotated guide to American stage productions remade for film and television, with works ranging from late 19th-century American plays and musicals, through silent and sound films, to made-for-video productions by PBS, A&E, HBO, and others.
Each alphabetically listed entry provides complete credits for the play or musical: date, theatre, playwright, cast (with characters) and crew, length of run, along with choreographer, song titles, and authors of the score where available. The screen versions follow, listing alternate titles, date, studio, screenwriter, cast (with characters), director, and producer. Each entry concludes with detailed commentary on the productions; it describes what changes occurred between the formats, determines the strengths and weaknesses of each, judges the success of the transition, and describes how the end product was received. A bibliography and name and title indexes complete this cross-referenced work.
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