"Hope Rises From The Ashes..."

No one planned to stay in the Porcupine Camp. All anyone hoped for was to find gold fast and get on the next train home. But when the Great Fire of 1911 strikes, something strange happens, and the people of the Porcupine Camp discover that gold isn't only found in the ground...

... It is found in each other.

Based on true events that occurred during the Porcupine Gold Rush of the early 20th century, Heart of Gold is a new musical theatre creation exploring the romance, adventure, and hope that is synonymous with Canadian History. Reviews from the amateur premiere: "Heart of Gold an 'amazing' production" By Wayne Snider, The Daily Press (Timmins)

..".The story of the community bouncing back from the Great Fire of 1911 needed to be told in a manner that carried the audience through a range of emotions - from sorrow and fear to laughter and joy... It did, allowing the performance to flow north as naturally as the Porcupine River.

... the final production is absolutely amazing.

Right from the beginning - where after the initial gold discovery, wave after wave of various immigrant groups dance onto the stage in search of the same prize - to the end where formal rivals become a loving, caring community, the audience is hooked..."

"The story, written by Laureen Kuhl, introduces us to characters that the audience cares about from the beginning. It provides a very human story - mixing romance and greed together - that not only succeeds in telling the story of the Great Fire, but is truly entertaining.

There are great moments of laughter, such as when all the guys are teasing the would-be womanizing francophone Andre LeRoux (superbly portrayed by Thomas Vezina) to when Andre is poking fun at the best attempts to read French by leading lady Caroline Mayben-Flowers (an admirable performance by Catarina Ciccone). These are pioneer scenes that one could picture taking place today - making the historic tale relatable to a modern audience.

The music... adds an entire new dimension to the story of Timmins. Individual tunes like Come On Come to the Porcupine and Gold Runs Down in Rivers could easily stand on their own. But as a key part of the story, it helps form the cultural mosaic that is Heart of Gold...."

"The audience connects with Heart of Gold on all levels.

There was a real sense of awe and fright when it was realized the Great Fire was bearing down on the pioneer community..."

As characters mourn the loss of life on stage, the audience shares the emotional experience. It was one of the most powerful theatrical moments ever seen on stage in Timmins.

Overall, the cultural Avengers of Timmins have assembled one truly magical, creative and entertaining showpiece..." Link: http: //www.timminspress.com/2012/06/10/heart-of-gold-an-amazing-production

"It was a masterful piece..." "the show felt real. "From Blogger Naomi: "

..". (It) "made you feel as though you were peaking in through a window back in 1911..."

"We had the opportunity to feel fear, hatred, love, hope, joy, mourning and relief over the course of the play and it was a masterful piece performed from the heart to celebrate this wonderful community.

What a wonderful show- I only wish I was able to stay in town to enjoy it again " Link: http: //windingdownwithnaomi.blogspot.ca

"From Anthony Roberts at the Timmins Daily Press: "

..". What a treat. Well done. It deserves a TIMMINS OSCAR. A night to remember." Link: http: //www.timminspress.com/2012/06/11/heart-of-gold-musical

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.

Theatre is often said to offer unique insights into the nature of reality, but this obscures the reality of theatre itself. In Real Theatre, Paul Rae takes a joined-up approach to the realities of theatre to explain why performances take the forms they do, and what effects they have. Drawing on examples ranging from Phantom of the Opera and Danny Boyle's Frankenstein, to the performances of the Wooster Group and arthouse director Tsai Ming-liang, he shows how apparently discrete theatrical events emerge from dynamic and often unpredictable social, technical and institutional assemblages. These events then enter a process of cultural circulation that, as Rae explains, takes many forms: fleeting conversations, the mercurial careers of theatrical characters and the composite personae of actors, and high-profile products like the Hollywood movie Birdman. The result is a real theatre that speaks of, and to, the idiosyncratic and cumulative experience of every theatre participant.

For millions of moviegoers unable to see the original stage version of "West Side Story, " director Robert Wise's adaptation was a cinematic gift that brought a Broadway hit to a mass audience.

Ernesto Acevedo-Munoz argues that Wise's film was not only hugely popular, but that it was also an artistic triumph that marked an important departure in the history of American movie making.

With a score by Leonard Bernstein and choreography by Jerome Robbins, this update of the Romeo and Juliet story remains one of the most revered and highly popular American movie musicals, with only "Singin' in the Rain" ranking higher in the AFI's list of the best of the genre. Acevedo-Munoz draws on previously unreleased production documents--from interoffice memos to annotations on the director's script--to go beyond publicity accounts and provide an inside look at this critically acclaimed film classic, offering details of its filming that have never before been published.

From location scouting to scripting to casting to filming, Acevedo-Munoz focuses on little-known details of the actual production. He provides close analyses of dramatic sequences and musical numbers, emphasizing the film's technical innovations and its visual and aural coding as a means for defining character and theme. He carefully explains the differences between Broadway and film versions, exposing censorship and creative issues that the filmmakers were forced to confront. And taking readers behind the cameras, he highlights the creative differences and financial difficulties that led to the departure of Robbins--who had conceived and directed the stage version--long before filming was complete.

Acevedo-Munoz makes a strong case for the film's daring vision in combining music, dance, dialogue, and visual elements--especially color--in highly creative ways, while also addressing the social, racial, and class tensions of American society. Drawing on his own Puerto Rican heritage, he provides a Hispanic perspective on the cultural aspects of the story and explores the ways in which the film's portrayal of Puerto Rican identity is neither as transparent nor as negative as some critics have charged.

Bursting with facts, insights, and inside stories, this book boasts a wealth of material that has never been explored before in print. Both history and homage, it is a must for scholar and buff alike."

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.

Those who have lived - not just witnessed - the efflorescence of a pivotal culture moment never see the world through veiled eyes again. Jimmy Lyons was there, devising wholly original inventions of words and music while the Beats, the neo-folk troubadours, the post-bop jazz shooting stars, and the tie-dyed psychedelic rockers were scorching through the underbrush and opening new paths of creativity as alternatives to the increasingly bottom line-driven mainstream. Lyons, though, wasn't content to find a niche in one countercultural movement or another. He kept moving, observing, and writing new poems, stories, and songs. But he never gave up on the wry sophistication of the classic American popular song. Indeed, he has dedicated himself to infusing the same hallowed forms perfected by Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Harold Arlen, and others, with his singular fantasias of ingeniously colored and textured wordplay.

These plays have a subtext only Lyons can provide, derived from what he calls the "rituals of the road" and the "the circular rhythms" of the race track, the beats and pulses of everyday American life that rarely raise a ripple on the surface of American culture. Lyons hears the screams and dreams of his countrymen and woman; from them he creates new modes of expression. He has been changed by each of his open-hearted an open-eared encounters, and this body of work is his way of making those changes sing and swing. - Derk Richardson

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.

Vocal ScoreMusic from Wonderful Town has been out of print for more than 40 years, so we are very proud to present this new edition of the brilliant musical comedy currently running in an acclaimed Broadway revival The music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green tell the story of two sisters who move from Ohio to Greenwich Village. After many hardships of adjustment, they find New York to be a "Wonderful Town." The original run of the show opened in 1953 and starred Rosalind Russell, and the Broadway revival, which opened on November 23, 2003, stars Donna Murphy. The cast recording is being released by DRG Records. Our Vocal Score includes all of the music from the musical.

Vocal ScoreMusic from Wonderful Town has been out of print for more than 40 years, so we are very proud to present this new edition of the brilliant musical comedy currently running in an acclaimed Broadway revival The music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green tell the story of two sisters who move from Ohio to Greenwich Village. After many hardships of adjustment, they find New York to be a "Wonderful Town." The original run of the show opened in 1953 and starred Rosalind Russell, and the Broadway revival, which opened on November 23, 2003, stars Donna Murphy. The cast recording is being released by DRG Records. Our Vocal Score includes all of the music from the musical.

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.

In this welcome addition to the immensely popular Yale Broadway Masters series, Larry Starr focuses fresh attention on George Gershwin's Broadway contributions and examines their centrality to the composer's entire career. Starr presents Gershwin as a composer with a unified musical vision-a vision developed on Broadway and used as a source of strength in his well-known concert music. In turn, Gershwin's concert-hall experience enriched and strengthened his musicals, leading eventually to his great "Broadway opera," Porgy and Bess. Through the prism of three major shows-Lady Be Good (1924), Of Thee I Sing (1931), and Porgy and Bess (1935)-Starr highlights Gershwin's distinctive contributions to the evolution of the Broadway musical. In addition, the author considers Gershwin's musical language, his compositions for the concert hall, and his movie scores for Hollywood in the light of his Broadway experience.

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.

Herman Finck (1872 - 1939) was a celebrated musical theatre conductor of the early 20th century, with a twenty year term as both musical director and composer at the Palace Theatre in London, followed and overlapped by sessions at the Queen's Theatre and the Drury Lane Theatre. He conducted the London premieres of many romantic musicals including Rose Marie, The Desert Song and Showboat; composed, arranged and orchestrated a great deal of music, particularly for revues (including Round the Map and The Passing Show), wrote around thirty theatre shows including operettas and ballets, and composed many light orchestral pieces and popular songs including 'I'll make a man of you' and 'Gilbert the Filbert'. As conductor he worked with many of the great luminaries of the period, including Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, Vesta Tilley, Harry Lauder, Edith Day and Marie Lloyd. Finck was also a celebrated wit, bon viveur, and clubman, and his autobiography includes many gems of theatrical anecdotage and stories of his famous friends, ranging from Dan Leno to Sir Edward Elgar. It presents a fascinating and wide-ranging picture of life in London musical theatre in the early part of the twentieth century.

From "Over the Rainbow" to "Moon River" and from Al Jolson to Barbra Streisand, The Songs of Hollywood traces the fascinating history of song in film, both in musicals and in dramatic movies such as High Noon. Extremely well-illustrated with 200 film stills, this delightful book sheds much light on some of Hollywood's best known and loved repertoire, explaining how the film industry made certain songs memorable, and highlighting important moments of film history along the way. The book focuses on how the songs were presented in the movies, from early talkies where actors portrayed singers "performing" the songs, to the Golden Age in which characters burst into expressive, integral song-not as a "performance" but as a spontaneous outpouring of feeling. The book looks at song presentation in 1930s classics with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and in 1940s gems with Judy Garland and Gene Kelly. The authors also look at the decline of the genre since 1960, when most original musicals were replaced by film versions of Broadway hits such as My Fair Lady.

The space capsule "Lunar Lady" blasts off from Earth on a voyage to the moon with Dr. Braun, Percy and Henry Applegate on board. Upon their arrival on the moon they become aware that there is unrest between the "Nams" of the light side and the "Nooms" of the dark side. It just so happens that one bite from one of Henry's apples causes the both sides to forget their feud and become friends once again.
To celebrate peace on the moon, King Linus throws a "Galaxy Gala" and invites all the
planets to attend. Mercury Mercurial gets the speedy invitations out to "Queen Venus" and her court, the "Kazooties" of Mars, "King Jupiter," the "Saturnettes," the "Uranus Rockers," "King Neptune" and his Mermaids, and "Nicky" and his gang from Pluto.
A grand time is had by all but suddenly Percy reminds everyone that the "Lunar Lady" must return to Earth. Henry asks the Princess Aurora to marry him and return with him now that peace and friendship have been restored on the moon and in the galaxy. There is a happy ending for all, including the little green stow away on the trip back