An outrageously fun musical set in an all-girls school in the 60s, from the team behind Bad Girls: The Musical. It's 1963 and the Dame Dorothea Dosserdale School for Girls has a proud tradition of fostering free spirits from all walks of life. So it's a crushing blow when the new headmistress turns out to be a tyrant with strict Victorian values - and top of her hit list are the two sixth-formers accused of 'Unnatural Behaviour' in the Art Room... Brimming with catchy tunes and witty lyrics, Crush is a hilarious pastiche of Girls' School stories - a blend of Malory Towers and St Trinian's - with added hockey sticks and 'lashings of jolly good fun' Coventry Telegraph. Crush was first performed on tour in the UK in 2015.

Carousel (1945), with music by Richard Rodgers and the book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, was their second collaboration following the surprising success of Oklahoma! (1943). They worked again with Theresa Helburn and Lawrence Langner of the Theatre Guild (producers), Rouben Mamoulian (director), and Agnes de Mille (choreographer). But with Oklahoma! still running to sell-out houses, they needed to do something quite different. Based on a play, Liliom (1909), by the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnar, Carousel took Broadway musical theater in far darker directions because of its subject matter-the protagonist, Billy Bigelow, is wholly an anti-hero-and also given its extensive music that some claimed came close to opera. The action is shifted from a gritty working-class suburb of Budapest to the New England coast (Maine), but the themes remain the same as two social misfits try to survive harsh economic times. Billy Bigelow is unemployed, prone to domestic violence, and dies in the course of committing a robbery; Julie Jordan sticks by him through thick and thin; and the show seeks some manner of redemption for both of them as Billy is given a day back on earth to do some good for his wife and their daughter. Troubling though these matters are nowadays, they fit squarely in the context of a country moving through the end of World War II to an uncertain future. Not for nothing had composers such as Giacomo Puccini and Kurt Weill already tried to persuade Molnar to release his play. It also led Rodgers and Hammerstein to new heights: songs such as "If I Loved You," Billy's "Soliloquy," and "You'll Never Walk Alone" transformed the American musical. In this book, we discover how and why they came about, and exactly what Carousel was trying to achieve.

"Over the Rainbow" exploded into worldwide fame upon its performance by Judy Garland in the MGM film musical The Wizard of Oz (1939). Voted the greatest song of the twentieth century in a 2000 survey, it is a masterful, delicate balance of sophistication and child-like simplicity in which composer Harold Arlen and lyricist E. Y. "Yip" Harburg poignantly captured the hope and anxiety harbored by Dorothy's character. In Arlen and Harburg's Over the Rainbow, author Walter Frisch traces the history of this song from its inception during the development of The Wizard of Oz's screenplay, to its various reinterpretations over the course of the twentieth century. Through analysis of the song's music and lyrics, this Oxford Keynotes volume provides a close reading of the piece while examining the evolution of its meaning as it traversed widely varying cultural contexts. From its adoption as a jazz standard by generations of pianists, to its contribution to Judy Garland's role as a gay icon, to its reemergence as a chart-topping recording by Hawaiian singer Israel Kamakawiwo'ole, "Over the Rainbow" continues to engage audiences and performers alike in surprising ways. Featuring a companion website with audio and video supplements, this book leaves no path unexplored as it succeeds in capturing the extent of this song's impact on the world.

Musicals are the most popular form of stage entertainment today, with the West End and Broadway dominated by numerous long-running hits. But for every Wicked or Phantom of the Opera, there are dozens of casualties that didn't fare quite so well. In this book, Julian Woolford explores the musical-theatre canon to explain why and how some musicals work, why some don't, and what you should (and shouldn't) do if you're thinking of writing your own. Drawing on his experience as a successful writer and director of musicals, and as a lecturer in writing musicals at the University of London, Woolford outlines every step of the creative process, from hatching the initial idea and developing a structure for the work, through creating the book, the music and the lyrics, and on to the crucial process of rewriting. He then guides the reader through getting a musical produced, with invaluable advice about generating future productions and sustaining a career. The book includes dozens of exercises to assist the novice writer in developing their craft, and detailed case studies of well-known musicals such as Les Miserables, The Sound of Music, Miss Saigon, Little Shop of Horrors, Godspell and Evita. An essential guide for any writers (or would-be writers) of musicals, How Musicals Work is a fascinating insight for anyone interested in the art form or who has ever wondered what it takes to get from first idea to first night. 'A comprehensive and thoughtful guide to everything one must consider in order to write a successful musical. It would take at least a decade to learn all of this on one's own. Invaluable.' David Zippel (lyricist of City of Angels and The Woman in White) 'If anyone knows how musicals work (I'm not sure I do), this highly entertaining dissection of every aspect of that bewildering art form reveals that Julian Woolford does.' Tim Rice

In Strategies for Success in Musical Theatre, veteran musical director and teacher Herbert Marshall provides an essential how-to guide for teachers or community members who find themselves in charge of music directing a show. Stepping off the podium, Marshall offers practical and often humorous real-world advice on managing auditions; organizing rehearsals; working with a choir, choreographer, and leads; how to run a sitzprobe, a technical rehearsal, and a dress rehearsal; how to manage the cast and crew energy for a successful opening night; and ways to end the experience on a high note for all involved. Throughout the book, Marshall emphasizes the importance of learning through performance and the beauty of a group united in a common goal. In doing so, he turns what can appear as a never-ending list of tasks and demand for specialized knowledge into a manageable, educational, and ultimately engaging and fun experience for all. Because the techniques in Marshall's book have been thoroughly workshopped and classroom tested, they are based in proven pedagogy and will be of particular use for the music director in acting as a teaching director: someone imparting theatrical knowledge to his or her cast and production staff. Marshall provides both extended and abbreviated timelines, flexible to fit any director's needs. Marshall's book is a greatly beneficial resource for music education students and teachers alike, giving an insightful glimpse into the range of possibilities within a music educator's career. Musicians and actors with varying levels of skill and experience will be able to grow simultaneously through Marshall's innovative teaching plans. Through collaborative techniques, steps in the book serve to educate both director and student. Thoroughly illustrated with charts, diagrams, and scores, Strategies for Success in Musical Theatre is an ideal companion for all who work with school and community based musical theater productions.

Musical numbers from the stage version of John Kander and Fred Ebb's Chicago. Written in 1975, it centres on prohibition Chicago of the mid?1920s.
Titles: And All That Jazz * Funny Honey * When You're Good to Mama * All I Care About * A Little Bit of Good * Roxie * My Own Best Friend * Me And My Baby * Mister Cellophane * Razzle Dazzle * Nowadays * Class.

Ethan Mordden has been hailed as "a sharp-eared listener and a discerning critic," by Opera News, which compares his books to "dinner with a knowledgeable, garrulous companion." The "preeminent historian of the American musical" (New York Times), he "brings boundless energy and enthusiasm buttressed by an arsenal of smart anecdotes" (Wall Street Journal). Now Mordden offers an entirely fresh and infectiously delightful history of American musical theatre. Anything Goes stages a grand revue of the musical from the 1920s through the 1970s, narrated in Mordden's famously witty, scholarly, and conversational style. He peers with us over Stephen Sondheim's shoulder as he composes at the piano. He places us in a bare rehearsal room as the cast of Oklahoma! changes history by psychoanalyzing the plot in the greatest of the musical's many Dream Ballets. And he gives us tickets for orchestra seats on opening night-raising the curtain on the pleasures of Victor Herbert's The Red Mill and the thrill of Porgy and Bess. Mordden examines the music, of course, but also more neglected elements. Dance was once considered as crucial as song; he follows it from the nineteenth century's zany hoofing to tap "combinations" of the 1920s, from the injection of ballet and modern dance in the 1930s and '40s to the innovations of Bob Fosse. He also explores the changing structure of musical comedy and operetta, and the evolution of the role of the star. Fred Stone, the avuncular Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz, seldom varied his acting from part to part; but the versatile Ethel Merman turned the headlining role inside out in Gypsy, playing a character who was selfish, fierce, and destructive. From "ballad opera" to burlesque, from Fiddler on the Roof to Rent, the history and lore of the musical unfolds here in a performance worthy of a standing ovation.

'... love creates something that was not there before.' - Hedwig John Cameron Mitchell and Stephen Trask's Hedwig and the Angry Inch opened on Valentine's Day,1998, in New York City, and ever since, it and its genderqueer heroine have captivated audiences around the world. As the first musical to feature a genderqueer protagonist as its lead, the show has had an extraordinary life on film, Broadway and in the music field. A glam rock musical with a complex relationship to issues related to art, eroticism and matters of identity formation, Hedwig and the Angry Inch is a darkly exuberant fairy tale about a child that discovers she is one of a kind, but also potentially among her own kind, if she dares travel past borders that confine and try to stabilise her being and identity. Caridad Svich examines this exhilarating work through the lenses of visual and vocal rock 'n' roll performance, the history of the American musical, and its positioning within LGBTIQ+ theatre.

Everyone has heard the songs from The Sound of Music by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The stage show was a roaring success in New York and London, and the much-loved feature film, directed by Hollywood veteran Robert Wise, continues to be a staple of television schedules 50 years after its release in 1965. In this fascinating and wide-ranging book, Paul Simpson explores the incredible story of the Von Trapp family and their escape from the Third Reich in all its incarnations, from real-life adventure, to book, to stage, to award-winning film to cultural phenomenon. He discusses the stage show, the many differences that were incorporated into the fictionalisation of the tale, and how that story was brought to the screen. He also looks at the numerous other ways in which the Von Trapp's story has been told, including the two West German movies from the 1950s and the extensive forty-part Japanese anime series from the 1990s, to explain why the story of the Von Trapp family has appealed to so many generations. Praise for A Brief Guide to Stephen King: 'The best book about King and his work I have ever read' Books Monthly

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart are one of the defining duos of musical theater, contributing dozens of classic songs to the Great American Songbook and working together on over 40 shows before Hart's death. With hit after hit on both Broadway and the West End, they produced many of the celebrated songs of the '20s and '30s--such as "Manhattan," "The Lady is a Tramp," and "Bewitched"--that remain popular favorites with great cultural resonance today. Yet the early years of these iconic collaborators have remained largely unexamined.
We'll Have Manhattan: The Early Work of Rodgers & Hart provides unprecedented insight into the first, formative period of Rodgers and Hart's collaboration. Author Dominic Symonds examines the pair and their work from their first meeting in 1919 to their brief flirtation with Hollywood in the early 1930s as they left the theater to explore sound film. During this time, their output was prodigious, progressive, and experimental. They developed their characteristic style and a new approach to musical theater writing that provided the groundwork for the development of the Broadway musical. Symonds also analyzes the theme of identity that runs throughout Rodgers and Hart's work, how the business side of the theater affected their artistic output, and their continued experimentation with a song's dramatic role within a narrative.
We'll Have Manhattan goes beyond a biographical or historical look at Rodgers and Hart's early years--it's also an accessible but authoritative study of their material. Symonds documents their early shows and provides deft critical and analytical commentary on their evolving practice and its influence on the subsequent development of the American musical. Fans of musical theater and devotees of Rodgers and Hart will find this definitive exploration of their early works to be an essential addition to their Broadway library.

Full-page newspaper ads announced the date. Reserved seats went on sale at premium prices. Audience members dressed up and arrived early to peruse the program during the overture that preceded the curtain's rise. And when the show began, it was-a rather disappointing film musical. In Roadshow!, film historian Matthew Kennedy tells the fascinating story of the downfall of the big-screen musical in the late 1960s. It is a tale of revolutionary cultural change, business transformation, and artistic missteps, all of which led to the obsolescence of the roadshow, a marketing extravaganza designed to make a movie opening in a regional city seem like a Broadway premier. Ironically, the Hollywood musical suffered from unexpected success. Facing doom after its bygone heyday, it suddenly broke box-office records with three rapid-fire successes in 1964 and 1965: Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and The Sound of Music. Studios rushed to catch the wave, but everything went wrong. Kennedy takes readers inside the making of such movies as Hello, Dolly! and Man of La Mancha, showing how corporate management imposed financial pressures that led to poor artistic decisions-for example, the casting of established stars regardless of vocal or dancing talent (such as Clint Eastwood in Paint Your Wagon). And Kennedy explores the impact of profound social, political, and cultural change. The traditional-sounding Camelot and Doctor Dolittle were released in the same year as Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, representing a vast gulf in taste. The artifice of musicals seemed outdated to baby boomers who grew up with the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, race riots, and the Vietnam War. From Julie Andrews to Barbra Streisand, from Fred Astaire to Rock Hudson, Roadshow! offers a brilliant, gripping history of film musicals and their changing place in our culture.

The Disney Musical: Critical Approaches on Stage and Screen is the first critical treatment of the corporation's hugely successful musicals both on screen and on the stage. Its 13 articles open up a new territory in the critical discussion of the Disney mega-musical, its gender, sexual and racial politics, outreach work and impact of stage, film and television adaptations. Covering early 20th century works such as the first full-length feature film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), to The Lion King - Broadway's highest grossing production in history, and Frozen (2013), this edited collection offers a diverse range of theoretical engagements that will appeal to readers of film and media studies, musical theatre, cultural studies, and theatre and performance. The volume is divided into three sections to provide a contextual analysis of Disney's most famous musicals: * DISNEY MUSICALS: ON FILM * DISNEY ADAPTATIONS: ON STAGE AND BEYOND * DISNEY MUSICALS: GENDER AND RACE The first section employs film theory, semiotics and film music analysis to explore the animated works and their links to the musical theatre genre. The second section addresses various stage versions and considers Disney's outreach activities, cultural value and productions outside the Broadway theatrical arena. The final section focuses on issues of gender and race portraying representations of race, hetero-normativity, masculinity and femininity in Newsies, Frozen, High School Musical, Aladdin and The Jungle Book. The various chapters address these three aspects of the Disney Musical and offer new critical readings of a vast range of important works from the Disney musical cannon including Enchanted, Mary Poppins, Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Lion King and versions of musicals for television in the early 1990s and 2000s. The critical readings are detailed, open-minded and come to surprising conclusions about the nature of the Disney Musical and its impact.

Singin' in the Rain, The Sound of Music, Camelot-love them or love to hate them, movie musicals have been a major part of all our lives. They're so glitzy and catchy that it seems impossible that they could have ever gone any other way. But the ease in which they unfold on the screen is deceptive. Dorothy's dream of finding a land "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" was nearly cut, and even a film as great as The Band Wagon was, at the time, a major flop. In Dangerous Rhythm: Why Movie Musicals Matter, award winning historian Richard Barrios explores movie musicals from those first hits, The Jazz Singer and Broadway Melody, to present-day Oscar winners Chicago and Les Miserables. History, film analysis, and a touch of backstage gossip combine to make Dangerous Rhythm a compelling look at musicals and the powerful, complex bond they forge with their audiences. Going behind the scenes, Barrios uncovers the rocky relationship between Broadway and Hollywood, the unpublicized off-camera struggles of directors, stars, and producers, and all the various ways by which some films became our most indelible cultural touchstones - and others ended up as train wrecks. Not content to leave any format untouched, Barrios examines animated musicals and popular music with insight and enthusiasm. Cartoons have been intimately connected with musicals since Steamboat Willie. Disney's short Silly Symphonies grew into the instant classic Snow White, which paved the way for that modern masterpiece, South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut. Without movie musicals, Barrios argues, MTV would have never existed. On the flip side, without MTV we might have been spared Evita. Informed, energetic, and humorous, Dangerous Rhythm is both an impressive piece of scholarship and a joy to read.

A composer and lyricist of enormous innovation and influence, Marc Blitzstein remains one of the most versatile and fascinating figures in the history of American music, his creative output running the gamut from films scores and Broadway operas to art songs and chamber pieces. A prominent leftist and social maverick, Blitzstein constantly pushed the boundaries of convention in mid-century America in both his work and his life. Award-winning music historian Howard Pollack's new biography covers Blitzstein's life in full, from his childhood in Philadelphia to his violent death in Martinique at age 58. The author describes how this student of contemporary luminaries Nadia Boulanger and Arnold Schoenberg became swept up in the stormy political atmosphere of the 1920s and 1930s and throughout his career walked the fine line between his formal training and his populist principles. Indeed, Blitzstein developed a unique sound that drew on everything contemporary, from the high modernism of Stravinsky and Hindemith to jazz and Broadway show tunes. Pollack captures the astonishing breadth of Blitzstein's work-from provocative operas like The Cradle Will Rock, No for an Answer, and Regina, to the wartime Airborne Symphony composed during his years in service, to lesser known ballets, film scores, and stage works. A courageous artist, Blitzstein translated Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's The Threepenny Opera during the heyday of McCarthyism and the red scare, and turned it into an off-Broadway sensation, its "Mack the Knife" becoming one of the era's biggest hits. Beautifully written, drawing on new interviews with friends and family of the composer, and making extensive use of new archival and secondary sources, Marc Blitzstein presents the most complete biography of this important American artist.

Show Boat: Performing Race in an American Musical tells the full story of the making and remaking of the most important musical in Broadway history. Drawing on exhaustive archival research and including much new information from early draft scripts and scores, this book reveals how Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern created Show Boat in the crucible of the Jazz Age to fit the talents of the show's original 1927 cast. After showing how major figures such as Paul Robeson and Helen Morgan defined the content of the show, the book goes on to detail how Show Boat was altered by later directors, choreographers, and performers up to the end of the twentieth century. All the major New York productions are covered, as are five important London productions and four Hollywood versions. Again and again, the story of Show Boat circles back to the power of performers to remake the show, winning appreciative audiences for over seven decades. Unlike most Broadway musicals, Show Boat put black and white performers side by side. This book is the first to take Show Boat's innovative interracial cast as the defining feature of the show. From its beginnings, Show Boat juxtaposed the talents of black and white performers and mixed the conventions of white-cast operetta and the black-cast musical. Bringing black and white onto the same stage - revealing the mixed-race roots of musical comedy - Show Boat stimulated creative artists and performers to renegotiate the color line as expressed in the American musical. This tremendous longevity allowed Show Boat to enter a creative dialogue with the full span of Broadway history. Show Boat's voyage through the twentieth century offers a vantage point on more than just the Broadway musical. It tells a complex tale of interracial encounter performed in popular music and dance on the national stage during a century of profound transformations.

The Wizard of Oz, Gigi, Top Hat, High Society - some of the most popular movie musicals ever made were written by Broadway songwriters. The Sound of Music, Chicago, West Side Story, The Music Man, Grease - some of the other most popular movie musicals were adaptations of Broadway shows. From the very first talkies to the present, Broadway's composers and lyricists have given much of their best work to the movies - but with varying results. In the 1930s, Rodgers and Hart's Love Me Tonight, with Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald at their sexiest, is a masterpiece of fairytale sophistication. But Hallelujah, I'm a Bum, an Al Jolson vehicle about tramps in Central Park, is one of the outstanding flops, partly because Rodgers and Hart wrote it as a kind of opera that is spoken instead of sung. Or take the big films based on Broadway shows in the 1960s. After The Sound of Music, Hollywood sought to fill the screen with lots of scenery, lots of drama, and lots of Julie Andrews. But Camelot and Hello, Dolly! had too much scenery, Paint Your Wagon was the hippie musical, and Song of Norway was simply loony. Even Julie Andrews couldn't save the Broadway bio film called Star!, all about the adventures of Gertrude Lawrence. Who? As historians have begun to consider the movie musical along with the stage musical, Ethan Mordden explores just how influential such writers as Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, and Stephen Sondheim have been when they moved from Broadway to Hollywood. Are the welcomed? Do they get to experiment, using the freedom of the camera to expand the very geography of song? Or do movie producers resent that New York sophistication? Broadway excels in the bittersweet "Send in the Clowns." But Hollywood wants it simple: "White Christmas." With his usual combination of scholarship and wicked wit, Ethan Mordden tantalizes us with anecdotes and fresh observations. He discusses many unusual titles as well - Viennese Nights, The Boys From Syracuse, Anything Goes, with Ethel Merman preserving her classic stage part as Reno Sweeney, the swinging evangelist. The first of its kind, this book is made for the moviegoer and theatre buff alike.

" Anna Held (1870?-1918), a petite woman with an hourglass figure, was America's most popular musical comedy star during the two decades preceding World War I. In the colorful world of New York theater during La Belle ?poque, she epitomized everything that was glamorous, sophisticated, and suggestive about turn-of-the-century Broadway. Overcoming an impoverished life as an orphan to become a music-hall star in Paris, Held rocketed to fame in America. From 1896 to 1910, she starred in hit after hit and quickly replaced Lillian Russell as the darling of the theatrical world. The first wife of legendary producer Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., Held was the brains and inspiration behind his Follies and shared his knack for publicity. Together, they brought the Paris scene to New York, complete with lavish costumes and sets and a chorus of stunningly beautiful women, dubbed ""The Anna Held Girls."" While Held was known for a champagne giggle as well as for her million-dollar bank account, there was a darker side to her life. She concealed her Jewish background and her daughter from a previous marriage. She suffered through her two husbands' gambling problems and Ziegfeld's blatant affairs with showgirls. With the outbreak of fighting in Europe, Held returned to France to support the war effort. She entertained troops and delivered medical supplies, and she was once briefly captured by the German army. Anna Held and the Birth of Ziegfeld's Broadway reveals one of the most remarkable women in the history of theatrical entertainment. With access to previously unseen family records and photographs, Eve Golden has uncovered the details of an extraordinary woman in the vibrant world of 1900s New York.

From patriotic "God Bless America" to wistful "White Christmas," Irving Berlin's songs have long accompanied Americans as they fall in love, go to war, and come home for the holidays. Irving Berlin's American Musical Theater is the first book to fully consider this songwriter's immeasurable influence on the American stage. Award-winning music historian Jeffrey Magee chronicles Berlin's legendary theatrical career, providing a rich background to some of the great composer's most enduring songs, from "There's No Business Like Show Business" to "Puttin' on the Ritz." Magee shows how Berlin's early experience singing for pennies made an impression on the young man, who kept hold of that sensibility throughout his career and transformed it into one of the defining attributes of Broadway shows. Magee also looks at darker aspects of Berlin's life, examining the anti-Semitism that Berlin faced and his struggle with depression. Informative, provocative, and full of colorful details, this book will delight song and theater aficionados alike as well as anyone interested in the story of a man whose life and work expressed so well the American dream.

The romantic, musical dramedy film La La Land is the winner of six Oscars, seven Golden Globes and five BAFTAs. This selection of songs from the Oscar-winning music by Justin Hurwitz, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul has been simplified for easy piano. Features the Oscar-winning song, City of Stars.

In fourteen years of collaboration, composer Jerry Bock and lyricist Sheldon Harnick wrote seven of Broadway's most beloved and memorable musicals together, most famously Fiddler on the Roof (1964), but also the enduring audience favorite She Loves Me (1963), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fiorello! (1959). With their charm, humor, and boundless musical invention, their musicals have won eighteen Tony Awards and continue to capture the imaginations of millions around the world. To Broadway, To Life!: The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick is the first complete book about these creative figures, one of Broadway's most important songwriting teams. Drawing from extensive archival sources, and from personal interviews and communications with Bock and Harnick themselves and their most important collaborators, author Philip Lambert explores the essence of a Bock-Harnick show: how it is put together, and what makes it work. The book includes discussion of songs such as "Sunrise, Sunset" and "If I Were a Rich Man" that have long been favorites in the public consciousness, and it also explores a vast catalogue of lesser-known songs from their many other shows and works, including a musical puppet show on Broadway, music for the 1964 World's Fair, and a made-for-television musical. Here too is the first look at the little-known youthful professional beginnings of Bock and Harnick in revues and television shows and summer retreats in the 1950s, and the careers they have forged for themselves with new collaborators in the decades since their partnership dissolved in 1970. The musicals of Bock and Harnick came at a transitional time in Broadway history, when the traditions of Rodgers and Hammerstein were starting to give way to the concept musical, the rock musical, and eventually the mega-musical. To Broadway, To Life! combines exhaustive research, close musical investigation, and interpretive critical analysis to place Bock and Harnick in the context of these times, and helps establish their place in the history of the American musical theater.

Famed lyricist Dorothy Fields penned the words to more than four hundred songs, among them mega-hits such as "On the Sunny Side of the Street," "I Can't Give You Anything But Love, " and "The Way You Look Tonight." In Pick Yourself Up, Charlotte Greenspan offers the most complete treatment of Fields's life and work to date, tracing her rise to prominence in a male-dominated world. Born in 1904 into a show business family - her father, Lou Fields, was a famed stage comedian turned Broadway producer - Fields first teamed with songwriter Jimmy McHugh in the late 1920s and went on to a series of Hollywood collaborations with Jerome Kern, including the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers classic Swing Time. With her brother Herbert, she co-authored the books for several of Cole Porter's shows and for Irving Berlin's classic Annie Get Your Gun. Fields's lyrics - colloquial, urbane, sometimes slangy, sometimes sensuous - won her high praise from later generations of songwriters including Stephen Sondheim, and her stellar career opened a path for other women in her profession, among them Betty Comden and Dory Previn.

Clad in white tie and tails, dancing and scatting his way through the "Hi-de-ho" chorus of "Minnie the Moocher," Cab Calloway exuded a sly charm and sophistication that endeared him to legions of fans. In Hi-de-ho, author Alyn Shipton offers the first full-length biography of Cab Calloway, whose vocal theatrics and flamboyant stage presence made him one of the highest-earning African American bandleaders. Shipton sheds new light on Calloway's life and career, explaining how he traversed racial and social boundaries to become one of the country's most beloved entertainers. Drawing on first-hand accounts from Calloway's family, friends, and fellow musicians, the book traces the roots of this music icon, from his childhood in Rochester, New York, to his life of hustling on the streets of Baltimore. Shipton highlights how Calloway's desire to earn money to support his infant daughter prompted his first break into show business, when he joined his sister Blanche in a traveling revue. Beginning in obscure Baltimore nightclubs and culminating in his replacement of Duke Ellington at New York's famed Cotton Club, Calloway honed his gifts of scat singing and call-and-response routines. His career as a bandleader was matched by his genius as a talent-spotter, evidenced by his hiring of such jazz luminaries as Ben Webster, Dizzy Gillespie, and Jonah Jones. As the swing era waned, Calloway reinvented himself as a musical theatre star, appearing as Sportin' Life in "Porgy and Bess" in the early 1950s; in later years, Calloway cemented his status as a living legend through cameos on "Sesame Street" and his show-stopping appearance in the wildly popular "The Blues Brothers" movie, bringing his trademark "hi-de-ho" refrain to a new generation of audiences. More than any other source, Hi-de-ho stands as an entertaining, not-to-be-missed portrait of Cab Calloway-one that expertly frames his enduring significance as a pioneering artist and entertainer.

The Sounds of the Silents in Britain explores the sonic dimension of film exhibition in Britain, from the emergence of cinema through to the introduction of synchronized sound. Edited by Julie Brown and Annette Davison, the volume includes original scholarship from many highly-regarded experts on British silent film from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, such as film history, theatre studies, economic history, and musicology. The essays provide an introduction to diverse aspects of early film sound: vocal performance, from lecturing and reciting, to voicing the drama; music, from the forerunners of music for visual spectacle to the impact of legislation and the development of film music practice; and performance in cinemas more generally, from dancing and singalong films, to live stage prologues, and even musical performances captured in British Pathe's early sound shorts. Other topics include the sonic eclecticism of performances at the Film Society, British International Pictures' first synchronized sound films, and the role of institutions such as the Musicians' Union and the Performing Right Society in relation to cinema music and musicians. In addition to tackling these familiar topics from surprising new angles, The Sounds of the Silents in Britain also debunks some of the myths about the sonic dimension of film exhibition. For example, the book reveals that local venue licensing decisions had a profound effect on whether music could even be performed with film in some British performances spaces and cities, and that the same was true of live acts alongside film - even into the late 1920s. The books also bring to light the fact that, in terms of special film presentation and orchestral accompaniment, practices in London were arguably more sophisticated than those in New York before the onset of World War I; that lecturing to film in Aberdeen, Scotland had almost as long a life as Japanese benshi; and that the London Film Society was as eclectic in its approach to sound as it was in programming the films themselves. Filled with both archival research and sound musicological analysis, The Sounds of the Silents in Britain represents an important addition to early film and film music scholarship.