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- Volume 3, Issue 1, 2009
Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2009
Volume 3, Issue 1, 2009
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The American musical theatre in 1957
By Paul R LairdThis Introduction to a volume on musical theatre from 1957 includes a list of every musical playing on Broadway that year with brief comment on each. There is also a summary of events and issues that the United States faced in 1957, including those from the political world and popular culture. Finally, there is an introduction of each article in the volume.
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West Side Story and The Music Man: whiteness, immigration, and race in the US during the late 1950s
By Carol J OjaWest Side Story and The Music Man, the two biggest hits among Broadway musicals of the 195758 season, yield an odd sort of couple wildly mis-matched yet interconnected nonetheless. They opened within three months of one another, appearing as starkly opposed views of a shared nation. I offer here a side-by-side reading of these two shows, with a special focus on a cluster of intersecting themes, including the insidious interconnectedness of racism and nostalgia; the strategy of focusing on Jane or Joe Citizen (or the common man); the targeting of youth and teen culture; and a shared subtext of fear (even paranoia) about outsiders. Together, they provide a window on the complexity of America in the late 1950s on its diverse demographics and polarized politics, on the market segmentation of its myths, on the ways in which racism, even seemingly non-overt forms of racism, can join hands with nostalgia.
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Iowa Stubborn: Meredith Willson's musical characterization of his fellow Iowans
More LessThe song Iowa Stubborn from The Music Man provides a key to understanding the development and musical content of the work. Willson's Iowa Stubborn insistence on the organic development of songs from the narrative led him to use experimental techniques like speak-song and words-without-songs, some of which were by-products of his long career in radio. By creating a dialogic style of song based on stubborn pitch repetition and a small number of motifs, the composer, who by the early 1950s was Iowa's most famous son, was able to characterize the stubborn natives of the Hawkeye state, both musically and lyrically, in numerous numbers in the score.
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Haunted characters: Harold and Marian: directing The Music Man
More LessIt is odd to think of Meredith Willson's valentine to small-town Midwest America, The Music Man, as a haunted house, but in fact, it is one of the best examples of how theatre, and specifically musical theatre, is haunted by the enduring presence of past performances. The ghosts of Robert Preston as the original Harold Hill and, to a lesser degree, Shirley Jones (in the film of The Music Man) and Barbara Cook as Broadway's original Marian the Librarian, haunt every production of the musical since it was first performed.
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Candide and the tradition of American operetta
More LessLeonard Bernstein's Candide, billed as a comic operetta, includes many allusions to the American operetta style of the 1920s as exemplified in the work of Sigmund Romberg and Rudolf Friml. The genre was experiencing renewed popularity in the 1950s through studio recordings, films, radio and television broadcasts and live performances. Audiences would have recognized many features in Candide as operetta tropes, both musical and textual: musical in terms of vocal types and styles, and the textual in terms of socio-political references.
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From On the Waterfront to West Side Story, or There's Nowhere Like Somewhere
More LessThree years before the world witnessed what was arguably Leonard Bernstein's finest synthesis of musical and dramatic elements in West Side Story, he composed his first and only film score for Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront. Several scholars and critics have commented on the separate historical and artistic significance of these dramatic works, but virtually no one has made connections between these Bernstein contributions beyond noting similarities in orchestral timbre, rhythmic intensity, and overlapping thematic material. For instance, some have pointed out the shared melodic contour between the Love theme in On the Waterfront and Something's Coming, yet neglected to suggest why this might be significant. This paper addresses this question; it also demonstrates that in each work Bernstein employs similar techniques to comment effectively on narratives that emphasize what it means to be an individual in the 1950s.
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Damn Yankees and the 1950s man: you gotta have (loyalty, an escape clause, and) heart
More LessDespite its reception as a light-hearted romp, Damn Yankees (by Adler, Ross, and Abbott, 1955) embodies several cultural ideas that were in conflict or in flux in the mid-1950s. This story of a middle-aged man who makes a deal with the devil to become a champion baseball star can teach us much about the way the era viewed young healthy men versus older unfit men, in a time when concerns about fitness and international threats conflicted with growing prosperity and lives of ease. The musical delves into the time period's distinct notions of masculinity, fighting for country, fidelity to one's wife, and the psyche of a post-war suburban populace. Joe Boyd becomes representative of a growing type of 1950s man, teaching a somewhat ambiguous, not entirely inspirational lesson about the dangers of risking a comfortable lifestyle for the sake of adventure.
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Li'l Abner: from comic strip to musical
More LessBy the time that Li'l Abner opened on Broadway in 1956, Al Capp's popular comic strip had been running for over twenty years. While Capp was barely involved in the creation of the musical, the show was faithful to the strip in many regards, including storylines, dialect, and the use of irony. However the musical's faithfulness to the comic strip has probably been its greatest problem in remaining popular, since much of the show's popularity seemed to hinge on the audience's awareness of the source material. That, and the relative obscurity of the songs, indicates that while Li'l Abner will always have a place as a piece of Americana, it may continue to lose its truly devoted audience.
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Brigadoon: Lerner and Loewe's Scotland
More LessSince the 1950s, Brigadoon has been accepted as a representation of Scotland. Brigadoon's Scotland consists of a highland landscape with lochs, mists, castles populated by fair maidens, warlike yet sensitive kilted men, and bagpipers. Much of this comes from the invented traditions of Scotland, such as kilts and clan tartans; late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Scottish literature; Scottish propaganda for tourism following World War II; and Scottish popular culture. In spite of Lerner's well-written book, Loewe's charming music, and Agnes De Mille's exciting choreography, the Scottishness of the work received, and still receives, the most attention. Brigadoon's inauthentic or dubious depiction of Scotland points to the complex relationship between popular culture, history, and art. But is Brigadoon Scottish? I will argue that Brigadoon reflects an example of discursive unconsciousness, drawing on Scottish literary traditions, what Scotland's own popular culture produced as Scottish and devices that are viewed as Scottish by the western world.
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When the Children Are Asleep: Carousel in 1957
More LessRodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel tells the story of Billy Bigelow and Julie Jordan's troubled marriage, which ends tragically when Billy dies in a botched robbery attempt. The musical opened in 1945, near the end of World War II, and it expressed the loss that many women and families experienced during the war; it also comforted these families with a message that love transcends death and reassured them that You'll Never Walk Alone. It was a timely and powerful statement. In 1957, however, when the musical received its second New York revival, the secondary plot concerning the upwardly mobile Enoch Snow and his wife Carrie, who is Julie's best friend, had far more cultural resonance than it did twelve years earlier. This essay contextualizes the romance of Snow and Carrie within mid-century American middle-class culture and examines the changes in postwar American life that are reflected, and even reinforced, by these two characters.
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Ten Minutes and Fifty (Two) Years Ago: the three TV versions of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella
By Graham WoodThis article complements existing discussions of the three versions of Rodgers and Hammerstein's TV musical Cinderella by highlighting three specific aspects: (1) the time period and location of the narrative in the context of other musicals by Rodgers and Hammerstein (and by Rodgers and Hart), (2) the song Ten Minutes Ago and its musical, visual, and dramatic elements as presented in each version, and (3) the cultural politics of the different versions, from the colour-blind casting of the Disney version to more subtle narrative moments in the original 1957 version, and how they reflect very different periods in American life.
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Ziegfeld, Bagley, Sillman, and Cranko: The Revue in the 195657 Season On and Off-Broadway
More LessThis essay examines five musical revues produced on and off Broadway during the 195657 season New Faces of 56, Cranks, Shoestring 57, the Ziegfeld Follies of 57, and Mask and Gown exploring such issues as changes to the form (or lack of form), critical reception and audience expectations, the showcasing of new talent, and the legacy of the revues.
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Reviews
Authors: Barbara Poston-Anderson, Greg Booth, Peter Purin and Ann Ommen van der MerweThe Opera Lover's Companion, Charles Osborne (2004) New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 627 pp., includes Index of Titles and General Index, ISBN 978-0-300-12373-9, paperback, 25.00
Hindi Film Songs and the Cinema, Anna Morcom (2007) SOAS Musicology Series, Aldershot: Ashgate, 281 pp., ISBN: 978-0-7546-5198-7 (hbk), 60.00
Directors and the New Musical Drama: British and American Musical Theatre in the 1980s and 1990s, Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen (2008) Palgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 231 pp., ISBN 978-0-230-60129-1, hardback, 42.50
Tony Pastor: Father of Vaudeville, Armond Fields (2008) Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company, 210 pp., ISBN 9780786430543, hardback, 52.50
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