One legacy of the 1960s sexual revolution was the "adult" musical of the 1970s. Adult musicals distinguished themselves from other types of musicals in their reliance on strong sexual content, frequent nudity, and simulated sexual activity. Cheap to produce, adult musicals proliferated in New York's theatres at a time when the city was teetering toward bankruptcy and tourism was sharply declining. Influenced by the overwhelming success in 1968 of "Hair"-the first Broadway musical to feature nudity-as well as by a series of legal rulings about the nature of obscenity, adult musicals became faddish in part because they allowed theatre producers to attract audiences at a time of economic crisis while simultaneously slashing budgets typically allotted for scenery, props and, of course, costumes. Typically structured like old-fashioned revues, with thematically interconnected songs and skits, adult musicals like "Stag Movie," "Let My People Come," "The Faggot," and the long-running "Oh! Calcutta!" were reviled by theatre critics, who tended to dismiss them as either going too far in the direction of hard-core pornography or, conversely, of not being erotic enough. But critics, who could typically close a show with a single scathing review, were no match for the public appetite for sex and even the shows that got the worst reviews usually made money. Adult musicals disappeared almost entirely by the early 1980s, as the city's economy improved and the country grew more socio-politically conservative, and they have since been dismissed by writers and critics as a silly fad befitting a silly decade. Author Elizabeth Wollman finds a much richer story in adult musicals, illustrating how they both drew from and reflected aspects of American culture at a particularly tumultuous time: the country's rapidly changing sexual mores, the women's and gay liberation movements, New York City's socioeconomic status, and contemporary debates on the relationship between art and obscenity. She argues that because of their middlebrow appeal and their concentration in a city that experienced the 1970s in especially turbulent ways, adult musicals represent aspects of 1970s American culture at their messiest and most confused, and thus, perhaps, at their most honest.

In recent years there has been a remarkable resurgence in the success of film musicals. Since the turn of the millennium, films such as Chicago (2002) and Phantom of the Opera (2004) have restated the close connections between the stage and screen. This edited collection will look at the breadth and diversity of recent film musicals, including adaptations from the stage such as Mamma Mia! (2008), Tim Burton's Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) and Rock of Ages (2012). This collection will also look at films that owe less of a direct debt to stage musicals, such as Julie Taymor's Across the Universe (2007) and Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark (2000).

When it comes to living life to its fullest, Rosalind Russell's character Auntie Mame is still the silver screen's exemplar. And Mame, the role Russell (1907-1976) will always be remembered for, embodies the rich and rewarding life Bernard F. Dick reveals in his biography, "Forever Mame: The Life of Rosalind Russell," now available in paperback.

Drawing on personal interviews and information from the archives of Russell and her producer-husband Frederick Brisson, Dick begins with Russell's childhood in Waterbury, Connecticut, and chronicles her early attempts to achieve recognition after graduating from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Frustrated by her inability to land a lead in a Broadway show, she headed for Hollywood in 1934 and two years later played her first starring role, the title character in Craig's Wife.

Dick discusses all of her films along with her triumphal return to Broadway, first in the musical "Wonderful Town" and later in "Auntie Mame." "Forever Mame" details Russell's social circle of such stars as Loretta Young, Cary Grant, and Frank Sinatra. It traces an extraordinary career, ending with Russell's courageous battle against the two diseases that eventually caused her death: rheumatoid arthritis and cancer. Russell devoted her last years to campaigning for arthritis research. So successful was she in her efforts to alert lawmakers to this crippling disease that a leading San Francisco research center is named after her.

Hamilton opened on Broadway in 2015 and quickly became one of the hottest tickets the industry has ever seen. Lin-Manuel Miranda - who wrote the book, lyrics, and music, and created the title role - adapted the show from Ron Chernow's biography Alexander Hamilton. Although it seems an unlikely source for a Broadway musical, Miranda found a liminal space where the life that Hamilton led and the issues that he confronted came alive more than two centuries later while also commenting on contemporary life in the United States and how we view our nation's history. With a score largely based on rap and drawing on other aspects of hip-hop culture, and staged with actors of color playing the white Founding Fathers, Hamilton has much to say about race in the United States today and in our past, but at the same time it leaves important things insufficiently explained, such as the role of women and people of color in Hamilton's time. Dueling Grounds: Revolution and Revelation in the Musical Hamilton is a volume that combines the work of theater scholars and practitioners, musicologists, and scholars in such fields as ethnomusicology, history, gender studies, and economics in a multi-faceted approach to the show's varied uses of liminality, looking at its creation, casting philosophy, dance and movement, costuming, staging, direction, lyrics, music, marketing, and how aspects of race, gender, and class fit into the show and its production. Demonstrating that there is much to celebrate, as well as challenging issues to confront concerning Hamilton, Dueling Grounds is an uncompromising look at one of the most important musicals of the century.

The Gondoliers was Gilbert and Sullivan's last great success. In this opera, Gilbert returns to the subject of class distinctions and it's background connected with Venice and Venetian life.

Richard Dyer's In the Space of a Song takes an in-depth look at the use of songs in film. Songs take up space and time in film and the way they do so indicates a great deal about the songs themselves, the nature of the feelings they present, and who is allowed to present feelings how, when and where. In the Space of a Song explores this perception through a range of examples, from classic MGM musicals to blaxploitation cinema, with the career of Lena Horne providing a turning point in the cultural dynamics of the feeling. Chapters include: The Perfection of Meet Me in St. Louis A Star Is Born and the Construction of Authenticity 'I Seem to Find the Happiness I Seek': Heterosexuality and Dance in the Musical The Space of Happiness in the Musical Singing Prettily: Lena Horne in Hollywood Is Car Wash a Musical? Music and Presence in Blaxploitation Cinema In the Space of a Song is ideal for both scholars and students of film studies.

Songs take up space and time in films. Richard Dyer's In the Space of a Song takes off from this perception, arguing that the way songs take up space indicates a great deal about the songs themselves, the nature of the feelings they present, and who is allowed to present feelings how, when and where. In the Space of a Song explores this perception through a range of examples, from classic MGM musicals to blaxploitation cinema, with the career of Lena Horne providing a turning point in the cultural dynamics of the feeling. Chapters include: The perfection of Meet Me in St. Louis A Star Is Born and the construction of authenticity 'I seem to find the happiness I seek': Heterosexuality and dance in the musical The space of happiness in the musical Singing prettily: Lena Horne in Hollywood Is Car Wash a musical? Music and presence in blaxploitation cinema In the Space of a Song is ideal for both scholars and students of film studies.

How many hit musicals are based on films that were shot in two days at a budget of $30,000? The answer is one: Little Shop of Horrors. Roger Corman's monster movie opened in 1960, played the midnight circuit, and then disappeared from view. Two decades later, Little Shop of Horrors opened Off-Broadway and became a surprise success. Attack of the Monster Musical: A Cultural History of Little Shop of Horrors chronicles this unlikely phenomenon. The Faustian tale of Seymour and his man-eating plant transcended its humble origins to become a global phenomenon, launching a popular film adaptation and productions all around the world. This timely and authoritative book looks at the creation of the musical and its place in the contemporary musical theatre canon. Examining its afterlives and wider cultural context, the book asks the question why this unlikely combination of blood, annihilation, and catchy tunes has resonated with audiences from the 1980s to the present. At the core of this in-depth study is the collaboration between the show's creators, Howard Ashman and Alan Menken. Told through archival research and eyewitness accounts, this is the first book to make extensive use of Ashman's personal papers, offering a unique and inspiring study of one of musical theatre's greatest talents.

Few people in recent memory have dedicated themselves as devotedly to the story of twentieth- century American music as Rob Kapilow, the composer, conductor, and host of the hit NPR music radio program, What Makes It Great? Now, in Listening for America, he turns his keen ear to the Great American Songbook, bringing many of our favorite classics to life through the songs and stories of eight of the twentieth century's most treasured American composers-Kern, Porter, Gershwin, Arlen, Berlin, Rodgers, Bernstein, and Sondheim. Hardly confi ning himself to celebrating what makes these catchy melodies so unforgettable, Kapilow delves deeply into how issues of race, immigration, sexuality, and appropriation intertwine in masterpieces like Show Boat and West Side Story. A book not just about musical theater but about America itself, Listening for America is equally for the devotee, the singer, the music student, or for anyone intrigued by how popular music has shaped the larger culture, and promises to be the ideal gift book for years to come.

Dramaturgy is at the heart of any musical theatre score, proving that song and music combined can collectively act as drama. The Musical Theatre Composer as Dramatist: A Handbook for Collaboration offers techniques for approaching a musical with the drama at the centre of the music. Written by a working composer of British musical theatre, this original and highly practical book is intended for composers, students of musical theatre and performing arts and their collaborators. Through detailed case studies, conceptual frameworks and frank analysis, this book encourages the collaboration between the languages of music and drama. It offers a shared language for talking about music in the creation of musical theatre, as well as practical exercises for both composers and their collaborators and ways of analysing existing musical theatre scores for those who are versed in musical terminology, and those who are not. Speaking directly to the contemporary artist, working examples are drawn from a wide range of musicals throughout Part One, before a full case study analysis of Matilda the Musical brings all the ideas together in Part Two. Part Three offers a range of practical exercises for anyone creating new musicals, particularly composers and their collaborators.

A bawdy, fast-paced, raunchy comedy musical from one of the world's most influential and innovative creators of musical theatre, loosely based on the plays of Plautus. Pseudolus, a simpering slave, is trying to win his own freedom by cooking up a romance for his master's son, Hero, with the pretty young virgin Philia. But there's a problem - not only is Philia owned by Marcus Lycus, an infamous courtesan dealer, but she's also already promised to swaggering soldier Miles Gloriosus... and neither of them are keen to give her up. Stephen Sondheim's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, with a book by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, ran for three years on Broadway. The first British production, starring Frankie Howerd as the cowardly slave Pseudolus, ran almost as long and spawned the TV series Up Pompeii! A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum won the 1962 Tony Award for Best Musical.

Written to meet the needs of thousands of students and pre-professional singers participating in production workshops and classes in opera and musical theater, Acting for Singers leads singing performers step by step from the studio or classroom through audition and rehearsals to a successful performance. Using a clear, systematic, positive approach, this practical guide explains how to analyze a script or libretto, shows how to develop a character building on material in the score, and gives the singing performer the tools to act believably. More than just a "how-to" acting book, however, Acting for Singers also addresses the problems of concentration, trust, projection, communication, and the self-doubt that often afflicts performers pursuing the goal of believable performance. Part I establishes the basic principles of acting and singing together, and teaches the reader how to improvise as a key tool to explore and develop characters. Part II teaches the singer how to analyze theatrical work for rehearsing, and performing. Using concrete examples from Carmen and West Side Story, and imaginative exercises following each chapter, this text teaches all singers how to be effective singing actors.

The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical is dedicated to the musical's evolving relationship to American culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the past decade-and-a-half, international scholars from an ever-widening number of disciplines and specializations have been actively contributing to the interdisciplinary field of musical theater studies. Musicals have served not only to mirror the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural tenor of the times, but have helped shape and influence it, in America and across the globe: a genre that may seem, at first glance, light-hearted and escapist serves also as a bold commentary on society. Forty-four essays examine the contemporary musical as an ever-shifting product of an ever-changing culture. This volume sheds new light on the American musical as a thriving, contemporary performing arts genre, one that could have died out in the post-Tin Pan Alley era but instead has managed to remain culturally viable and influential, in part by newly embracing a series of complex contradictions. At present, the American musical is a live, localized, old-fashioned genre that has simultaneously developed into an increasingly globalized, tech-savvy, intensely mediated mass entertainment form. Similarly, as it has become increasingly international in its scope and appeal, the stage musical has also become more firmly rooted to Broadway-the idea, if not the place-and thus branded as a quintessentially American entertainment.

Disney Theatrical Productions: Producing Broadway Musicals the Disney Way is the first work of scholarship to comprehensively examine the history and production practices of Disney Theatrical Productions (DTP), the theatrical producing arm of the studio branch of the Walt Disney Corporation. This book uncovers how DTP has forged a new model for producing large-scale musicals on Broadway by functioning as an independent theatrical producer under the umbrella of a large entertainment corporation. Case studies of three productions (The Lion King, Tarzan, and Newsies) demonstrate the flexibility and ingenuity of DTP, and showcase the various production models that the company has employed over the years. Exploring topics such as the history of DTP, its impact on the revitalization of Times Square, and its ability to open up a new audience base for Broadway theatre, this volume examines the impact that DTP has had on American musicals, both domestically and internationally, and how its accomplishments have helped reshape the Broadway landscape. This book is relevant to students in Musical Theatre, History of Musical Theatre, Theatre History, and Arts Management courses, along with general Disney enthusiasts.

Armed with an eighth-grade education, an inexhaustible imagination, and an innate talent for dancing, Hermes Pan (1909-1990) was a boy from Tennessee who became the most prolific, popular, and memorable choreographer of the glory days of the Hollywood musical. While he may be most well-known for the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals which he choreographed at RKO film studios, he also created dances at Twentieth Century-Fox, M-G-M, Paramount, and later for television, winning both the Oscar and the Emmy for best choreography.
In Hermes Pan: The Man Who Danced with Fred Astaire, Pan emerges as a man in full, an artist inseparable from his works. He was a choreographer deeply interested in his dancers' personalities, and his dances became his way of embracing and understanding the outside world. Though his time in a Trappist monastery proved to him that he was more suited to choreography than to life as a monk, Pan remained a deeply devout Roman Catholic throughout his creative life, a person firmly convinced of the powers of prayer. While he was rarely to be seen without several beautiful women at his side, it was no secret that Pan was homosexual and even had a life partner. As Pan worked at the nexus of the cinema industry's creative circles during the golden age of the film musical, this book traces not only Pan's personal life but also the history of the Hollywood musical itself. It is a study of Pan, who emerges here as a benevolent perfectionist, and equally of the stars, composers, and directors with whom he worked, from Astaire and Rogers to Betty Grable, Rita Hayworth, Elizabeth Taylor, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Bob Fosse, George Gershwin, Samuel Goldwyn, and countless other luminaries of American popular entertainment.
Author John Franceschina bases his telling of Pan's life on extensive first-hand research into Pan's unpublished correspondence and his own interviews. Pan enjoyed one of the most illustrious careers of any Hollywood dance director, and because his work also spanned across Broadway and television, this book will appeal to readers interested in musical theater history, dance history, and film.

The man behind "I Could Have Danced all Night" and "Almost Like Being in Love," lyricist Alan Jay Lerner (1918-1986) is widely regarded as one of the most important figures of the American musical stage. In penning the lyrics to some of the most well-known and beloved Broadway shows, including Brigadoon, Paint Your Wagon, My Fair Lady, and Camelot, Lerner worked and corresponded with some of the greatest luminaries of popular entertainment over a career which spanned four decades, from performers like Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews to composers like Andre Previn, Leonard Bernstein, Charles Strouse, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and especially Frederick Loewe.
In this rich collection of correspondence, most of it published for the first time, author Dominic McHugh sheds new light on Lerner's working relationships with these legendary figures. McHugh's extensive commentary reveals Lerner's turbulent partnerships with Loewe and Lane, his affection for Harrison, and his reverence for Burton. Particular emphasis is placed on Lerner's aborted projects with composers like Richard Rodgers and Arthur Schwartz. Especially valuable is the correspondence from his final years, in which he worked on a movie version of The Merry Widow, a BBC TV series about musicals, and a musical version of My Man Godfrey, none of which came to fruition. The collection ends with a poignant final exchange between Lerner and Andrew Lloyd Webber, with whom he was to have written The Phantom of the Opera. Overall, this important and lively book reveals the highs and lows of the career of one of America's wittiest and most romantic lyricists."

(Applause Libretto Library). Book by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart Introduction by Larry Gelbart "This brazenly retro Broadway musical, inspired by Plautus, is as timeless as comedy itself." Vincent Canby, The New York Times "The most urbane and literate musical comedy text ever conceived." John Simon, New York magazine

When Leonard Bernstein first arrived in New York City, he was an unknown artist working with other brilliant twentysomethings, notably Jerome Robbins, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green. By the end of the 1940s, these artists were world famous. Their collaborations defied artistic boundaries and subtly pushed a progressive political agenda, altering the landscape of musical theater, ballet, and nightclub comedy. In Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War, award-winning author and scholar Carol J. Oja examines the early days of Bernstein's career during World War II, centering around the debut in 1944 of the Broadway musical On the Town and the ballet Fancy Free. As a composer and conductor, Bernstein experienced a meteoric rise to fame, thanks in no small part to his visionary colleagues. Together, they focused on urban contemporary life and popular culture, featuring as heroes the itinerant sailors who bore the brunt of military service. They were provocative both artistically and politically. In a time of race riots and Japanese internment camps, Bernstein and his collaborators featured African American performers and a Japanese American ballerina, staging a model of racial integration. Rather than accepting traditional distinctions between high and low art, Bernstein's music was wide-open, inspired by everything from opera and jazz to cartoons. Oja shapes a wide-ranging cultural history that captures a tumultuous moment in time. Bernstein Meets Broadway is an indispensable work for fans of Broadway musicals, dance, and American performance history.

The American Song Book, Volume I: The Tin Pan Alley Era is the first in a projected five-volume series of books that will reprint original sheet music, including covers, of songs that constitute the enduring standards of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, the Gershwins, and other lyricists and composers of what has been called the "Golden Age" of American popular music. These songs have done what popular songs are not supposed to do-stayed popular. They have been reinterpreted year after year, generation after generation, by jazz artists such as Charlie Parker and Art Tatum, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong. In the 1950s, Frank Sinatra began recording albums of these standards and was soon followed by such singers as Tony Bennet, Doris Day, Willie Nelson, and Linda Ronstadt. In more recent years, these songs have been reinterpreted by Rod Stewart, Harry Connick, Jr., Carly Simon, Lady GaGa, K.D. Laing, Paul McCartney, and, most recently, Bob Dylan. As such, these songs constitute the closest thing America has to a repertory of enduring classical music. In addition to reprinting the sheet music for these classic songs, authors Philip Furia and Laurie Patterson place these songs in historical context with essays about the sheet-music publishing industry known as Tin Pan Alley, the emergence of American musical comedy on Broadway, and the "talkie" revolution that made possible the Hollywood musical. The authors also provide biographical sketches of songwriters, performers, and impresarios such as Florenz Ziegfeld. In addition, they analyze the lyrical and musical artistry of each song and relate anecdotes, sometimes amusing, sometimes poignant, about how the songs were created. The American Songbook is a book that can be read for enjoyment on its own or be propped on the piano to be played and sung.

(Piano Solo Songbook). 12 piano pieces from the 2006 Oscar-nominated film, including: Another Dance * Darcy's Letter * Dawn * Georgiana * Leaving Netherfield * Liz on Top of the World * Meryton Townhall * The Secret Life of Daydreams * Stars and Butterflies * and more.

(Easy Piano Vocal Selections). Nominated for a whopping 10 Tony Awards, Wicked is the Broadway smash of 2004 A prequel to the all-American classic The Wizard of Oz, this new musical is a character study of Elphaba and Glinda, school roommates who grow up to become the Wicked Witch and the Good Witch, respectively. 13 fantastic tunes: As Long as You're Mine * Dancing Through Life * Defying Gravity * For Good * I Couldn't Be Happier * I'm Not That Girl * No Good Deed * No One Mourns the Wicked * One Short Day * Popular * What Is This Feeling? * The Wizard and I * Wonderful.

Truly powerful vocal performance in musical theater is more than just the sum of good vocal tone and correct notes. As experienced teacher, director, and performer Mark Ross Clark lays out in The Broadway Song, powerful performance communicates the central function of a song within the context of the surrounding narrative, or the "truth" of a song. Because unstaged performances of a song, such as auditions, are key to the success of all aspiring singers, Clark provides here the essential practical manual that will help performers choose the right pieces for their vocal abilities and identify the key truths of them. Clark begins by walking readers conceptually through how a song's truth is based in contexts: what show is a song from? Which character sings it? When in the show does it occur? Answering these questions will lead readers to more convincing performances that are grounded in the text, music, character, context, and larger environment (setting, time frame, and circumstances). The Broadway Song provides a comprehensive guide to the formal characteristics of key Broadway songs on a song-by-song basis, including main voice type, secondary voice qualities (such as soprano-lyric or alto-comic), range and tessitura, as well as larger contextual materials about the source - from the musical's background, information about the character singing, and synoptic narrative information for the song - that provide the performer a way into the character. Clark moreover brings his wide-ranging and extensive experience as a director, performer, and teacher to bear in his performance notes on the individual pieces. Additionally, he includes excerpts from short interviews with artists that provide insight into the song from the perspective of those who first created (or re-created) it. The interviews, conducted with composers, lyricists, performers, and - in one case - book collaborators, are snapshots into the creative process, and act as conduits to further study of the selected songs.

Few musicals have had the impact of Lerner and Loewe's timeless classic My Fair Lady. Sitting in the middle of an era dominated by such seminal figures as Rodgers and Hammerstein, Frank Loesser, and Leonard Bernstein, My Fair Lady not only enjoyed critical success similar to that of its rivals but also had by far the longest run of a Broadway musical up to that time. From 1956 to 1962, its original production played without a break for 2,717 performances, and the show went on to be adapted into one of the most successful movie musicals of all time in 1964, when it won eight Academy Awards. Internationally, the show also broke records in London, and the original production toured to Russia at the height of the Cold War in an attempt to build goodwill. It remains a staple of the musical theater canon today, an oft-staged show in national, regional, and high school theaters across the country. Using previously-unpublished documents, author Dominic McHugh presents a completely new, behind-the-scenes look at the five-year creation of the show, revealing the tensions and complex relationships that went into its making. McHugh charts the show from the aftermath of the premiere of Shaw's Pygmalion and the playwright's persistent refusal to allow it to be made into a musical, through to the quarrel that led lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe to part ways halfway through writing the show, up to opening night and through to the present. This book is the first to shed light on the many behind-the-scenes creative discussions that took place from casting decisions all the way through the final months of frantic preparation leading to the premiere in March 1956. McHugh also traces sketches for the show, looking particularly at the lines cut during the rehearsal and tryout periods, to demonstrate how Lerner evolved the relationship between Higgins and Eliza in such a way as to maintain the delicate balance of ambiguity that characterizes their association in the published script. He looks too at the movie version, and how the cast album and subsequent revivals have influenced the way in which the show has been received. Overall, this book explores why My Fair Lady continues to resonate with audiences worldwide more than fifty years after its premiere.