Expresso Bongo and Make Me an Offer: The ‘Angry Young Musical’ in the 1950s | Intellect Skip to content
1981
Volume 14, Issue 2
  • ISSN: 1750-3159
  • E-ISSN: 1750-3167

Abstract

Following on from John Osborne’s infamous play of 1956, London’s stage saw the emergence of the ‘Angry Young Man’, realistic portrayals of working-class men in a difficult age. and , works of the mid-to-late 1950s, demonstrate that the angry young man was also present in London’s musicals, previously an upper- and middle-class genre. Featuring the Soho district, gangsters, prostitutes and rock music, this unique era of musical theatre changed expectations of what musical theatre could and would offer to a jaded urban audience. These astonishing musical theatre works offer potent commentary on British society, British identity and particularly disenfranchised young British men, and offer insights into American and British relations, gender roles and expectations, and the complicated role of working-class men in the new Elizabethan era.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1386/smt_00030_1
2020-07-01
2024-04-29
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Allsop, Kenneth (1958), The Angry Decade, London: British Book Centre.
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Anon. (1954), untitled review, The Spectator, 1 October, n.pag.
    [Google Scholar]
  3. Anon. (1958), untitled review, Manchester Evening News, 28 April, n.pag.
    [Google Scholar]
  4. Billington, Michael (2014), ‘John Osborne: A natural dissenter who changed the face of British theatre’, The Guardian, 24 December, https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/dec/24/john-osborne-a-natural-dissenter-who-changed-the-face-of-british-theatre. Accessed 24 October 2019.
    [Google Scholar]
  5. Chappell, William (1960), ‘Production Note’, Expresso Bongo, London: Evans Brothers.
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Conquest, Robert (ed.) (1956), New Lines: An Anthology, London: Macmillan.
    [Google Scholar]
  7. Gilleman, Luc (2002), John Osborne: Vituperative Artist: A Reading of His Life and Work, New York: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  8. Hope-Wallace, Philip (1958), untitled review, The Manchester Guardian, 25 April, n.pag.
    [Google Scholar]
  9. Lacey, Stephen (1995), British Realist Theatre: The New Wave in Its Context, 1956-1965, New York: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  10. Leader, Zachary (ed.) (2009), The Movement Reconsidered: Essays on Larkin, Amis, Gunn, Davie, and Their Contemporaries, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  11. Mankowitz, Wolf (1959), Make Me an Offer, Guildford: Biddles.
    [Google Scholar]
  12. Mankowitz, Wolf, Julian More, David Heneker and Norman, Monty (1958), Expresso Bongo, playscript, Lord Chamberlain’s collection, London: British Library.
    [Google Scholar]
  13. Mankowitz, Wolf, Julian More, David Heneker and Norman, Monty (1961), Make Me an Offer, playscript, London: Evans Brothers.
    [Google Scholar]
  14. Morrison, Blake (1980), The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction in the 1950s, New York: Oxford University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  15. Osborne, John (1956), Look Back in Anger, New York: Criterion.
    [Google Scholar]
  16. Osborne, John (1957), ‘They call it cricket’, in T. Maschler (ed.), Declaration, London: MacGibbon & Lee, p. 65.
    [Google Scholar]
  17. Rebellato, Dan (1999), 1956 and All That: The Making of Modern British Drama, New York: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  18. Shulman, Milton (1958), untitled review, Evening Standard, 24 April.
    [Google Scholar]
  19. Shulman, Milton (1959), ‘Mankowitz comes up with a brash and breezy musical’, Evening Standard, 20 October, n.pag.
    [Google Scholar]
  20. Sierz, Aleks (2008), John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, London: Continuum Theatre Guides.
    [Google Scholar]
  21. Wells, Elizabeth A. (2020), ‘Expresso Bongo and Make Me an Offer: The “Angry Young Musical” in the 1950s’, Studies in Musical Theatre, 14:2, pp. 163173, doi: https://doi.org/10.1386/smt_00030_1
    [Google Scholar]
http://instance.metastore.ingenta.com/content/journals/10.1386/smt_00030_1
Loading
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a success
Invalid data
An error occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error