Studies in Musical Theatre - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2013

Robert Wise’s 1965 screen version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music was one of the biggest blockbusters in Hollywood history: in the United States alone it had box-office takings of $1.16 billion (adjusted for inflation). It was a smash hit and became an important pop-cultural reference point in countless other countries around the world. But, to the utter surprise and dismay of film distributor 20th Century Fox, The Sound of Music failed to win over audiences in the very territory in which the story was set. In fact, the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar winner of 1965 was such a flop in Germany and Austria as My Songs, My Dreams (English translation of the German title) that it did not even recoup its dubbing costs. To this day, the film remains virtually unknown in either country. This article investigates several potential reasons why the film never ‘clicked’ with Germans and Austrians, such as the popularity of two earlier German films about the Trapp family singers, the 1956 movie Die Trapp-Familie and its 1958 sequel Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika. It also considers the US film’s portrayal of fascism and its inauthentic depiction of Austria and Austrian culture. Other factors that might have been crucial in the reception of My Songs, My Dreams include local reviews, the advertising for the film, the German dubbing and the general disinterest of Austrian and German audiences in Hollywood musicals.

In the wake of the ‘megamusicals’ at the end of the twentieth century, this article explores the current state of new British musical development. The article outlines the challenges faced by producers, venues and writers engaged with new musicals that do not conform to the demands of the West End and examines recent developments that have started to address these hurdles. The article draws on interviews conducted by the author in 2012 with thirteen contemporary practitioners (including producers, writers, teachers and theatre programmers) to create a snapshot of the current and potential future state of new British musical theatre development.

Imre Kálmán’s operetta Die Csárdásfürstin premiered in Vienna in 1915 and was soon an international success. It appeared in Budapest as Csárdáskirályné (1916), in Moscow as u (1917), in New York as The Riviera Girl (1917) and in London as The Gipsy Princess (1921). By considering its different stagings, this article focuses on the reciprocal ways whereby Western and Eastern Europeans interact, influence, react and respond to each other. Thus the aim of the article is to bring together the different formulations of European and international theatre to show the various networks, connections and relations among the different theatre traditions both within and outside Europe; and to set up a methodology of theatre historiography which goes beyond European orientation, the East/West divide and the image of the ‘West’ as a single and unified entity.

Since the 1960s research in theatre laboratories on the nature of acting and structures of performance has dilated the possibilities of the theatrical event. One of the direct outcomes of these developments is the musicalization of theatrical performance. Although relatively recent, the focus on musicality in theatre echoes interests of visionaries and thinkers since at least the turn of the twentieth century. This article discusses Jerzy Grotowski’s musicalized processes in his theatre making. I will argue that Grotowski’s praxis resonates earlier claims made by Friedrich Nietzsche that tragedy, representing as it were a genesis of western theatre practice, was born out of the spirit of music. I will propose that rather than bridging the boundaries of music and theatre, Grotowski promotes music as an intrinsic element in theatre through the embodied musicality of the performer.

This article draws on previously published multimedia documents to explore the notion of musicality in the work of Wodzimierz Staniewski and the Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices. In addition to offering a close analysis of several documented moments – including performances, work demonstrations, expeditions and gatherings – it tests the ability of multimedia documentation to capture performance knowledge, arguing that the work of Gardzienice is a paradigmatic example of ‘practice as research’. Taking the archive as a crucial dimension of the dissemination of knowledge, the article uses multimedia citation to examine the specific contributions of Gardzienice in the context of musicality as a relation between the theatrical and the musical. The article demonstrates that the stability of the archive allows for a detailed explication of performance knowledge in a way that is not possible from live performance alone.

Broadway has historically played directly to its home crowd of New Yorkers and suburbanites, providing musical stylizations that would gratify or (sometimes) challenge that audience. Thus, even for its more remote or exotic settings, Broadway has honoured audience expectations more than historical or ethnographic accuracy. But Broadway has also provided local audiences with a different kind of mirror, reflecting their native city more directly and often aiming more to disquiet than to gratify. This study considers some of these more troubling musical cityscapes across the end of the ‘golden age’ and beyond, including the comic underworld of Guys and Dolls (1950), the upbeat cynicism of Wonderful Town (1953), the playful angst of Saturday Night (1954), the incipient violence of West Side Story (1957), the sleazy underside of Gypsy (1959), the street-savvy innocence of Sweet Charity (1965), and the alienated sophistications of Company (1970) and Follies (1971). After sketching the trajectory of these diverse representations, involving five composers and an array of perspectives and moods, I focus particularly on the scores of West Side Story and Company to show how their edgy critiques inspired their composers, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, to explore similarly edgy musical idioms that blend familiar Broadway musical practices with an assortment of musical modernisms.

This article offers an examination of the creative process as revealed in the papers of eight musical theatre songwriters, seven of whose collections are in the Music Division of the Library of Congress: Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Oscar Hammerstein II, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Jonathan Larson.

Lisa Lambert is an award-winning actress, comedy writer, composer and lyricist. She won a Tony Award for Best Original Score and two Drama Desk awards for Outstanding Music and Outstanding Lyrics in 2006 for her work on The Drowsy Chaperone, an original Broadway musical. Below are excerpts from a conversation among Princeton University undergraduate students, Sandy Fong (SF), Caitlin Lansing (CL) and Carly Robbins (CR), Lisa Lambert (LL), and members of a general public audience about the genesis of The Drowsy Chaperone and Lambert’s creative process. This conversation took place as part of the ‘Making Broadway Musicals: Artists and Scholars in Conversation’ symposium at Princeton University on 21 April 2012.

Musical Theatre, Realism And Entertainment, Millie Taylor (2012) Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing Limited, viii+194 pp., ISBN: 978-0-7546-6670-7, h/bk, £55.00

Loverly: The Life and Times of My Fair Lady, Dominic McHugh (2012) [Broadway Legacy Series] New York: Oxford University Press, 265 pp., ISBN: 978-0-19-982730-5, hb/k, $25.91 (US)

The Björling Sound: A Recorded Legacy, Stephen Hastings (2012) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 406 pp., ISBN: 978-1-58046-406-2, h/bk, £22.80