Twenty Years on Broadway and the Years it Took to Get There PDF Download

Author: George Michael Cohan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Actors
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Author: Armond Fields
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786438681
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 247

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Colorful and boisterous first nights were the rule in New York theaters of the 1880s. Everyone, it seemed, attended, from the rich and powerful to young people who scraped together just enough to buy a ticket. And no star was more popular than Lillian Russell. At a time when serious plays dominated the stages, Lillian Russell was one of the first to popularize musical theater. With her beauty, voice, and grace, she was the symbol of the new American woman. She used those attributes to attain power, social status and wealth, and then to become one of the earliest champions of women's equality. Her life and career are covered here in detail, with particular emphasis on the way she influenced theater history and popular culture.

Author: Nathan Hurwitz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317428323
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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From the favorites of Tin Pan Alley to today’s international blockbusters, the stylistic range required of a musical theatre performer is expansive. Musical theatre roles require the ability to adapt to a panoply of characters and vocal styles. By breaking down these styles and exploring the output of the great composers, Songwriters of the American Musical Theatre offers singers and performers an essential guide to the modern musical. Composers from Gilbert and Sullivan and Irving Berlin to Alain Boublil and Andrew Lloyd Webber are examined through a brief biography, a stylistic overview, and a comprehensive song list with notes on suitable voice types and further reading. This volume runs the gamut of modern musical theatre, from English light opera through the American Golden Age, up to the "mega musicals" of the late Twentieth Century, giving today’s students and performers an indispensable survey of their craft.

Author: Nicholas Gebhardt
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022644869X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 192

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If you enjoy popular music and culture today, you have vaudeville to thank. From the 1870s until the 1920s, vaudeville was the dominant context for popular entertainment in the United States, laying the groundwork for the music industry we know today. In Vaudeville Melodies, Nicholas Gebhardt introduces us to the performers, managers, and audiences who turned disjointed variety show acts into a phenomenally successful business. First introduced in the late nineteenth century, by 1915 vaudeville was being performed across the globe, incorporating thousands of performers from every branch of show business. Its astronomical success relied on a huge network of theatres, each part of a circuit and administered from centralized booking offices. Gebhardt shows us how vaudeville transformed relationships among performers, managers, and audiences, and argues that these changes affected popular music culture in ways we are still seeing today. Drawing on firsthand accounts, Gebhardt explores the practices by which vaudeville performers came to understand what it meant to entertain an audience, the conditions in which they worked, the institutions they relied upon, and the values they imagined were essential to their success.

Author: Patrick McGilligan
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299084745
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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The 1942 smash musical hit Yankee Doodle Dandy has long remained a favorite among audiences and film buffs. Ostensibly the story of "Mr. Broadway"--George M. Cohan-- the movie evolved in its making into one of Warners' trademark "biopics" and a showcase for the singing and dancing talents of James Cagney. This book includes the complete screenplay.

Author: James Fisher
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 0810870479
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 618

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The 50-year period from 1880 to 1929 is the richest era for theater in American history, certainly in the great number of plays produced and artists who contributed significantly, but also in the centrality of theater in the lives of Americans. As the impact of European modernism began to gradually seep into American theater during the 1880s and quite importantly in the 1890s, more traditional forms of theater gave way to futurism, symbolism, surrealism, and expressionism. American playwrights like Eugene O'Neill, George Kelly, Elmer Rice, Philip Barry, and George S. Kaufman ushered in the Golden Age of American drama. The A to Z of American Theater: Modernism focuses on legitimate drama, both as influenced by European modernism and as impacted by the popular entertainment that also enlivened the era. This is accomplished through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced entries on plays; music; playwrights; great performers like Maude Adams, Otis Skinner, Julia Marlowe, and E.H. Sothern; producers like David Belasco, Daniel Frohman, and Florenz Ziegfeld; critics; architects; designers; and costumes.

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: Kathryn McKendry
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781735610016
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Have you ever been so touched by a story that it changed your life? One Year on Broadway is the unlikely true story of two musical theater fans whose lives were forever changed by seeing a touring production of Once on This Island in 1992. What they saw that night was a version of their own story played out on the stage and it gave them the courage to fight for their own forbidden love. Twenty-five years later, by some strange twist of fate, they were led back to the Island where they ignored conventional wisdom, took a leap of faith, and became co-producers of the Tony Award winning Broadway Revival of Once on This Island. This is their love letter to the musical that gave them more than they ever could have imagined

Author: Bruce Pollock
Publisher: Hal Leonard
ISBN: 148038609X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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(Book). On February 13, 1914, a group of the nation's most distinguished and popular songwriters gathered together in New York City to support the mission of ASCAP, a new organization for publishers and songwriters. A few years later, ASCAP received its mandate from the Supreme Court to collect royalties for the public performance of copyrighted material. Over the course the next century, ASCAP has been as prominent a force for the advancement and nurture and financial well-being of songwriters as any record label or publishing outfit one would care to name. With a responsive board of directors made up entirely of songwriter/composer and publisher members, ASCAP has defended creators' rights at every turn against those who would seek to devalue music. Today, with copyright under renewed assault, its mission is as resonant and vital as ever, along with its relatively new role as a nurturer of the young artists who represent the future of music. Award-winning music writer Bruce Pollock explores the growth and changes within this complex society and its relationship to emerging technologies, in the context of 100 years of an ever-evolving music business, to see how ASCAP has become, for those who hope to make a living making music, now more than ever, "a friend in the music business."

Author: Dominic McHugh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190490004
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 690

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Book Description
Hollywood's conversion to sound in the 1920s created an early peak in the film musical, following the immense success of The Jazz Singer. The opportunity to synchronize moving pictures with a soundtrack suited the musical in particular, since the heightened experience of song and dance drew attention to the novelty of the technological development. Until the near-collapse of the genre in the 1960s, the film musical enjoyed around thirty years of development, as landmarks such as The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St Louis, Singin' in the Rain, and Gigi showed the exciting possibilities of putting musicals on the silver screen. The Oxford Handbook of Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations traces how the genre of the stage-to-screen musical has evolved, starting with screen adaptations of operettas such as The Desert Song and Rio Rita, and looks at how the Hollywood studios in the 1930s exploited the publication of sheet music as part of their income. Numerous chapters examine specific screen adaptations in depth, including not only favorites such as Annie and Kiss Me, Kate but also some of the lesser-known titles like Li'l Abner and Roberta and problematic adaptations such as Carousel and Paint Your Wagon. Together, the chapters incite lively debates about the process of adapting Broadway for the big screen and provide models for future studies.