The Broadway Musical: A Critical and Musical Survey PDF Download

Author: Joseph P. Swain
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 1461664071
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 466

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Book Description
To see a Broadway musical is to experience how a drama, using melody, harmony, and rhythm, evokes the emotion needed to perpetuate a story line. Without music, many of these plays would not succeed, failing to convey the intended message. This new edition of Swain's classic text, winner of the 1991 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, reveals how a musical drama achieves plot movement, character development and conflict through strategic placement of song and music in 20 musical plays. Unlike critical literature that has simply explored theatrical style and production histories, this survey focuses mainly on the power of music. Illustrated with more than 150 musical excerpts and essays, Swain includes the latest research and viewpoints of contemporary critics, offering insight into dramatic expression and how renowned composers including Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Jerry Bock, Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber influenced the Broadway musical. This provides insights into the many impressive musicals to hit the stage between the years of 1927 and 1987, illuminating how specific revisions to productions such as Showboat and, Oklahoma! forever changed their popularity. Learn how music is used as a symbol for psychological or emotional action from Shakespearean drama's such as Kiss Me, Kate and West Side Story, to more current dramas including Godspell, A Chorus Line, and Jesus Christ Superstar. Replete with a never seen before essay on Les Misérables, this edition also includes an expanded epilogue highlighting the phenomena behind Miss Saigon and Phantom of the Opera, "megamusicals" that changed the direction of the Broadway tradition. For professors of dramatic arts and people interested in Broadway musicals, theater, popular music and opera.

Author: Joseph P. Swain
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195074826
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
The Broadway musical, one of America's most distinctive contributions to Western music, has been chronicled, dissected, described, and debated, but never until now has its essential element--that glorious music--been analyzed directly in any significant detail. Moving beyond the anecdotes, production histories, and generalizations about theatrical style that mark so much of the critical literature, Joseph P. Swain offers a unique survey of the most important or representative musical plays, one that shows how the great Broadway composers have used the traditional tools of composition--melody, harmony, tonal movement, rhythm, and texture--to become powerful dramatists in their own right. Illustrated with over 150 musical excerpts--a unique feature that gives Swain's analysis unparalleled depth and precision--the book yields new insights at every turn. It shows how particular musical solutions to dramatic problems gave Showboat and Oklahoma! the power to change the course of the Broadway tradition, brought Carousel and West Side Story to worldwide recognition as masterpieces of their kind, and lent a light popular genre the formal complexity and emotional range to encompass a tremendous diversity of styles and materials, from Shakespearean drama ( Kiss Me, Kate and West Side Story ) to European opera ( Porgy and Bess ), and from age-old myth ( My Fair Lady and Camelot ) to still-current ethnic conflict ( Fiddler on the Roof ). All the great Broadway composers and musical-comedy teams are here--Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Frank Loesser, Leonard Bernstein, Lerner and Loewe--as well as a representative sample of the classic shows, including the sadly neglected The Most Happy Fella . In addition, Swain's thoughtful evaluation of the current scene illuminates issues of dramatic approach ( Godspell ), plot ( A Chorus Line ), subject matter ( Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita ), and musical rhetoric (Stephen Sondheim's output, exemplified by Sweeney Todd ) that may determine the future course of the musical play. Precise in focus, uncommonly rich in detail, and accessible to fans and scholars alike, The Broadway Musical will have to be read by anyone concerned with contemporary American music and drama, and by anyone who hopes truly to know this supposedly best-known of music.

Author: Alyson McLamore
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317346335
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 787

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Book Description
For Surveys of Musical Theater, Music Appreciation courses and Popular Culture Surveys. This unique historical survey illustrates the interaction of multiple artistic and dramatic considerations with an overview of the development of numerous popular musical theater genres. This introduction provides more than a history of musical theater, it studies the music within the shows to provide an understanding of the contributions of musical theater composers as clearly as the artistry of musical theater lyricists and librettists. The familiarity of the musical helps students understand how music functions in a song and a show, while giving them the vocabulary to discuss their perceptions.

Author: William Everett
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135848076
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
The musical, whether on stage or screen, is undoubtedly one of the most recognizable musical genres, yet one of the most perplexing. What are its defining features? How does it negotiate multiple socio-cultural-economic spaces? Is it a popular tradition? Is it a commercial enterprise? Is it a sophisticated cultural product and signifier? This research guide includes more than 1,400 annotated entries related to the genre as it appears on stage and screen. It includes reference works, monographs, articles, anthologies, and websites related to the musical. Separate sections are devoted to sub-genres (such as operetta and megamusical), non-English language musical genres in the U.S., traditions outside the U.S., individual shows, creators, performers, and performance. The second edition reflects the notable increase in musical theater scholarship since 2000. In addition to printed materials, it includes multimedia and electronic resources.

Author: Dan Dietz
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538168944
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 663

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Book Description
Broadway musicals of the 1900s saw the emergence of George M. Cohan and his quintessentially American musical comedies which featured contemporary American stories, ragtime-flavored songs, and a tongue-in-cheek approach to musical comedy conventions. But when the Austrian import The Merry Widow opened in 1907, waltz-driven operettas became all the rage. In The Complete Book of 1900s Broadway Musicals, Dan Dietz surveys every single book musical that opened during the decade. Each musical has its own entry which features the following: Plot summary Cast members Creative team Song lists Opening and closing dates Number of performances Critical commentary Film adaptations, recordings, and published scripts, when applicable Numerous appendixes include a chronology of book musicals by season; chronology of revues; chronology of revivals of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas; a selected discography; filmography; published scripts; Black musicals; long and short runs; and musicals based on comic strips. The most comprehensive reference work on Broadway musicals of the 1900s, this book is an invaluable and significant resource for all scholars, historians, and fans of Broadway musicals.

Author: Raymond Knapp
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400832683
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 489

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Book Description
The American musical has long provided an important vehicle through which writers, performers, and audiences reimagine who they are and how they might best interact with the world around them. Musicals are especially good at this because they provide not only an opportunity for us to enact dramatic versions of alternative identities, but also the material for performing such alternatives in the real world, through songs and the characters and attitudes those songs project. This book addresses a variety of specific themes in musicals that serve this general function: fairy tale and fantasy, idealism and inspiration, gender and sexuality, and relationships, among others. It also considers three overlapping genres that are central, in quite different ways, to the projection of personal identity: operetta, movie musicals, and operatic musicals. Among the musicals discussed are Camelot, Candide; Chicago; Company; Evita; Gypsy; Into the Woods; Kiss Me, Kate; A Little Night Music; Man of La Mancha; Meet Me in St. Louis; The Merry Widow; Moulin Rouge; My Fair Lady; Passion; The Rocky Horror Picture Show; Singin' in the Rain; Stormy Weather; Sweeney Todd; and The Wizard of Oz. Complementing the author's earlier work, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity, this book completes a two-volume thematic history of the genre, designed for general audiences and specialists alike.

Author: Marc Bauch
Publisher: Tectum Verlag DE
ISBN: 9783828884588
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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Book Description
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.

Author: Scott McMillin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691127309
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Author: Washington Geoffrey Block Professor of Music University of Puget Sound
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199769885
Category : Musicals
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
The classic musicals of Broadway can provide us with truly enchanted evenings. But while many of us can hum the music and even recount the plot from memory, we are often much less knowledgeable about how these great shows were put together. What was the inspiration for Rodgers and Harts Pal Joey, or Rodgers and Hammersteins Carousel? Why is Marias impassioned final speech in West Side Story spoken, rather than sung? Now, in Enchanted Evenings, Geoffrey Block offers theatre lovers an illuminating behind-the- scenes tour of some of the best loved, most admired, and most enduring musicals of Broadways Golden Era. Readers will find insightful studies of such all-time favorites as Show Boat, Anything Goes, Porgy and Bess, Carousel, Kiss Me, Kate, Guys and Dolls, The Most Happy Fella, My Fair Lady, and West Side Story. Block provides a documentary history of fourteen musicals in all--plus an epilogue exploring the plays of Stephen Sondheim--showing how each work took shape and revealing, at the same time, production by production, how the American musical evolved from the 1920s to the early 1960s, and beyond. The book's particular focus is on the music, offering a wealth of detail about how librettist, lyricist, composer, and director work together to shape the piece. Drawing on manuscript material such as musical sketches, autograph manuscripts, pre-production librettos and lyric drafts, Block reveals the winding route the works took to get to their final form. Block blends this close attention to the nuances of musical composition and stagecraft with trenchant social commentary and lively backstage anecdotes. Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe, Kurt Weill, Frank Loesser, Leonard Bernstein, Sondheim, and other luminaries emerge as hardworking craftsmen under enormous pressure to sell tickets without compromising their dramatic vision and integrity. Opening night reviews and accounts of critical and popular response to subsequent revivals show how particular musicals have adapted to changing times and changing audiences, shedding light on why many of these innovative shows are still performed in high schools, colleges, and community theaters across the country, while others, such as Weills One Touch of Venus or Marc Blitzsteins The Cradle Will Rock, languish in comparative obscurity. Packed with information, including a complete discography and plot synopses and song-by-song scenic outlines for each of the fourteen shows, Enchanted Evenings is an essential reference as well as a riveting history. It will deepen readersappreciation and enjoyment of these beloved musicals even as it delights both the seasoned theater goer and the neophyte encountering the magic of Broadway for the first time.

Author: Stanley Green
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493050710
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 556

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Book Description
This updated edition of one of the bestselling and comprehensive Broadway reference books, first published in 1985, has been expanded to include many of the most important and memorable productions of American musical theater, including revivals. Arranged chronologically, beginning with musicals from just after the Civil War, each successive edition of the book has added valuable updates about trends in musical theater as well as capsule features on the most significant musicals of the day. The ninth edition documents important musicals produced since the end of the 2012–2013 season through spring 2019. Broadway Musicals, Show by Show features a wealth of statistics and inside information, plus critical reception, cast lists, pithy commentary about each show, and numerous detailed indexes that no Broadway fan will want to be without. Since its original publication, Broadway Musicals has proved to be an indispensable addition to any Broadway aficionado's library.