Mates shows the musical stage in all its guises--from burlesque to musical comedy to grand opera--from its beginnings in pre-Revolutionary America to the present day. He deals sensitively with the recurrent aesthetic question of popular versus highbrow art and also looks at critical reactions to popular theatrical forms of musical entertainment. He introduces the reader to various types of theatrical companies, the changing repertory, and the many kinds of musical performers who have animated the stage. Mates focuses on the creative relationships between the different forms of opera, the minstrel show and circus, melodrama and dance, burlesque, revue, vaudeville, and musical comedy.

There isn't a jollier show anywhere than this musical version of The Pickwick Papers. It exactly catches the cheerful and good-hearted spirit of the gentleman with the bald head and round glasses who is its hero. the well-loved story, the tuneful music and witty lyrics provide a recipe that can't fail to delight audiences. The famous "If I Ruled the World" is just one of a host of strong numbers, and there is plenty of work for chorus and dancers.6 women, 13 men

Gives a fresh and contemporary take on the ways in which contemporary US sexual politics plays out on its biggest stage with analyses of Promises, Promises, Newsies, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, The Color Purple, and Frozen. Written accessibly and clearly for all levels of student and scholar in musical theatre as well as interdisciplinary areas of queer, gender, and cultural studies. The most up to date study available of Broadway's cultural politics.

This book tells the story of producer, actor, and author Oscar Asche, one of the most commercially successful actor/managers in the first half of the 20th century. Though virtually written out of theatre history because of his triumph on the musical comedy stage, he is most frequently remembered today as having had a successful career as an actor and producer of Shakespeare. Asche was an innovator in stage lighting and one of the first to use it as a language of the stage rather than as mere illumination. During World War I, he captured the public imagination and provided audiences with escapist musicals set in fictional orients.

Oscar Asche excelled in many theatre genres, including musical comedy, pantomime, music hall, melodrama, and Shakespeare. He provided exotic erotica in orientalist musicals from "Kismet" to "Mecca" and brought unprecedented numbers of spectators to the theatre at its most difficult time. He was responsible for extending the life of musical comedy and orientalism in the theatre before cinemas would appropriate both genre and style.

A comprehensive reassessment of British musical films 1946-1972 including King's Rhapsody, Beat Girl, The Tommy Steele Story, Rock You Sinners, The Golden Disc, and Oliver! Acting as a sequel to Adrian Wright's Cheer Up! British Musical Films, 1929-1945 (Boydell, 2020), Melody in the Dark offers the first major reassessment of the British musical film from the end of Second World War up to the beginning of the 1970s. In the immediate post-war world, British studios sought to reflect fast-changing social attitudes as they struggled to create inventive diversions in an effort to rival American competition. Hollywood stars Errol Flynn, Vera-Ellen, Jayne Mansfield and Judy Garland were among those brought in to provide Hollywood glamour. Embedded in the British consciousness, the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan were represented in three productions. Studios occasionally attempted adaptations of British stage musicals, among them King's Rhapsody and Expresso Bongo, and sexploitation movies turned musical via Secrets of a Windmill Girl and Beat Girl. It was left to minor studios to acknowledge the impact of rock'n'roll on social change in three early films, The Tommy Steele Story, Rock You Sinners and the iconic The Golden Disc. Through the sixties, British cinema seemed intent on flooding the market with entertainments promoting pop singers and rock groups such as Cliff Richard, Billy Fury and The Beatles. Towards the end of the period, it aspired to more grandiose projects such as Oliver! and Oh! What a Lovely War.

In the mid 1920s, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote a song called "Ol' Man River" that combined the seriousness of a Negro spiritual with the crowd-pleasing power of a Broadway anthem. Inspired, according to Kern, by the voice of the African American singer Paul Robeson, "Ol' Man River" went on to great success in the Broadway musical Show Boat and became a signature song for Robeson, who turned the tune towards his own goals as an activist. But the story of "Ol' Man River" goes deeper than the curiosity of a song recorded by so many in so many different ways. For at the heart of Oscar Hammerstein's lyric is a clear-eyed vision of the black experience in American history. Anyone-black or white-who thought they should sing "Ol' Man River" has had to deal with the charged racial content of the song. Who Should Sing "Ol' Man River"? traces this aspect of "Ol' Man River's" course through American history, an at-times high-stakes journey where the African American struggle for dignity and equality came down to the lyrics of a popular song. However beyond Robeson and Show Boat, "Ol' Man River" also had a long and rich life in the world of popular music. An astonishing variety of singers and musicians from across the musical spectrum-from pop to jazz, opera to doo wop, rhythm and blues to gospel to reggae-all chose to perform or record it. Who Should Sing "Ol' Man River"?: The Lives of an American Song traces out the performance history of this remarkable song by listening closely to over two hundred recorded and filmed versions dating from the song's debut in 1927 to the present. Many famous pop singers made "Ol' Man River" a signature song; among them Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland: white performers who took up a lyric told from the black perspective. Important jazz artists such as Bix Biederbecke, Duke Ellington, Dave Brubeck, Count Basie, and Keith Jarrett all played it. Opera singers-black and white, male and female-took it up as well. And a slew of surprising names from the first decades of rock and roll also recorded this inescapable tune, among them Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, the Temptations, Cher, and Rod Stewart.

The professional success achieved by W. S. Gilbert was unique in nineteenth-century English theater: he was the first dramatist ever to be knighted for his stage works, which yielded him a fortune that his less prosperous playwriting predecessors could scarcely have imagined. The Savoy operas-so called after the theater at which most of them were originally produced-were comedies. But comedy, in its traditional form, was hardly congenial to the prevailing social prejudices of the Victorian age: it features the triumph of rebelliousness over laws and rules, ridicules the keepers of the established order, and celebrates the victory of the erotic instinct over repression. Spectacles of this kind were especially uncomfortable for the newly arrived middle class, intent on making itself conspicuous for its dedication to respectability and duty. In fact, before Gilbert's Savoy productions, many of the bourgeoisie refused altogether to patronize the English stage, where the dominant form was comedy in its various guises. Beginning with H. M. S. Pinafore, Fischler demonstrates how Gilbert made it his business to cater to the sensibilities of the middle class through the structure he imposed on his plots, the approach he took to characterization, and the treatment he accorded erotic love, the quintessential theme of comedy. The book's conclusions not only illuminate Gilbert's own comic practice but point the way toward a new understanding of the transactions between comedy in general and the spirit of the Victorian age.

Three out of four Broadway-bound musicals fail to get there, and many of those that do, ultimately fail. The Broadway Musical takes an engrossing look at the industry's successes and failures in an effort to understand the phenomenon of mass collaboration that is Broadway.
The authors investigate the complicated machinery of show business from its birth around the turn of the century through its survival of the cost explosions of the 1980s. Through interviews with many of Broadway's top producers, directors, designers, actors, songwriters, lyricists, librettists, musicians, and other artists, they lead us on an intimate tour of the creative process. They also explore the roles of top executives and the reactions of critics and audiences. They conclude with a fascinating look at the inherent conflicts and tensions that have resulted in some of the most seamless and best-loved productions on Broadway.
Fans of the genre as well as scholars and students of American culture will delight in this revealing insider's look at the scenes behind the scenes and the history of one of America's most popular forms of entertainment.

The effort that goes into making a Broadway musical is enormous, first requiring the enthusiasm of a group of initial creative artists and then the cooperation of hundreds of talented individuals and the investment of millions of dollars before each show is ready to open. Each venture is marked perhaps more by conflict than collaboration, and the continuation of the industry seems more remarkable when it is revealed that three out of four Broadway musicals fail to break even on Broadway.
What goes into the making of a successful musical? No venture can be a success without good collaboration, but whether it is good or bad in any specific case cannot be known beforehand. The Broadway Musical is an investigation into this phenomenon of collaboration and its seeming unpredictability. To gather information, Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Harburg have interviewed many of the top producers, directors, designers, players, songwriters, lyricists, librettists, and other artists that are responsible for today's Broadway musicals. Starting with the development of the industry itself, the authors investigate the complicated machinery of show business and detail how it was able to survive the rapidly rising costs of productions in the 1980s. Proceeding to the creative aspects of the show, the authors provide an intimate look at the assembling of the musical at every level, detailing the workings of the top executives, musicians, songwriters, techne, the reaction of the critics and the audience. The book concludes with a lengthy look at the phenomenon of collaboration itself, describing the inherent conflict and tension that often adds to the production of a Broadway musical.
The Broadway Musical is an engrossing look at the successes and failures of this most elaborate form of live entertainment.

Stephen Sondheim is one of the best-known and most-loved musical theatre composers, but also one of the most misunderstood, often being labelled as 'distant' or 'cynical'. Careful the Spell You Cast instead argues that Sondheim firmly belongs to the Broadway aspirational tradition, in that many of his characters are defined by their dreams: to abandon one's dream (as Ben does in Follies, Frank does in Merrily We Roll Along, and Addison does in Road Show) is to lose one's soul. Rather than take the established view of Sondheim as a cynic, this book contends that throughout Sondheim's work, letting go of one's illusions is a process that his characters need to go through, that they must cast off illusions and false dreams, without becoming cynical and destroying their genuine dreams in the process. In turn this view aligns Sondheim's work as being aspirational and a logical continuation from the work of his mentor, Oscar Hammerstein II. Following the trajectory of Sondheim's career, Careful the Spell You Cast shows how Sondheim has dramatized this process throughout his writing life alongside different collaborators. From his work as a lyricist with the musicals Gypsy and West Side Story through to his later collaborations with Hal Prince (Company, Follies) and James Lapine (Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park with George), this book reframes the established view through lyrical and structural analysis in relation to the characters within each of these celebrated works of musical theatre, arguing that Sondheim is, in the popular sense of the word, a romantic within the tradition of the Broadway musical.

Sets out everything that female singers will need to understand in order to perform safely and effectively in musical theatre. Aimed at trainee singers at undergraduate level in MT degrees, as well as early career professionals. No other book sets out the requirements and capacities of the female voice in this level of detail.

From television shows like Glee and Smash to the phenomenon of the Broadway show Hamilton, musical theatre has never been more popular. In So You Want to Sing Musical Theatre, Updated and Expanded Edition, Broadway vocal coach Amanda Flynn provides an in-depth look at the skills needed to successfully sing and teach this repertoire. Fully updated to meet the current needs of the profession, this new edition covers a vast array of topics with even deeper discussion: musical theatre history; repertoire; genres used in productions; basic singing voice science; vocal health; audio equipment and microphones; vocal production of musical theatre sounds; acting, dancing, and other movement; working with kids; and auditioning at all levels. The book also includes profiles of Broadway singers that explores their training, methods of vocal upkeep, and advice for singers and teachers. The So You Want to Sing series is produced in partnership with the National Association of Teachers of Singing. Please visit www.nats.org to access style-specific exercises, audio and video files, and additional resources.

- A comprehensive guide to musicals that are based on musicians' existing back catalogues - how they work, why they work and why they are so successful. - Written for musical theatre students at all levels - primarily on the 150 BA degrees across the UK and North America. - The first book to address this relatively new genre of musical theatre, doing so with in-depth and wide ranging analysis.

Milestones in Musical Theatre tracks ten of the most significant moments in musical theatre history, from some of its earliest incarnations, especially those crafted by Black creators, to its rise as a global phenomenon. Designed for weekly use in musical theatre courses, these ten chosen snapshots chart the development of this unique art form and move through its history chronologically, tracking the earliest operettas through the mid-century Golden Age classics, as well as the creative explosion in directing talent which reshaped the form, and moves toward inclusivity which have recast its creators. Each chapter explores how the musical and its history have been deeply influenced by a variety of factors, including race, gender and nationality, and examines how each milestone represents a significant turning point for this beloved art form. Milestones are a range of accessible textbooks, breaking down the need-to-know moments in the social, cultural, political and artistic development of foundational subject areas. This book is ideal for diverse and inclusive undergraduate musical theatre history courses.

"A vivid page-turner" (NPR) detailing the rise, fall, and redemption of Broadway-its stars, its biggest shows, its producers, and all the drama, intrigue, and power plays that happened behind the scenes. "A rich, lovely, debut history of New York theater in the 1970s and eighties" (Kirkus Reviews, starred review), Razzle Dazzle is a narrative account of the people and the money and the power that turned New York's gritty back alleys and sex-shops into the glitzy, dazzling Great White Way. In the mid-1970s Times Square was the seedy symbol of New York's economic decline. Its once shining star, the renowned Shubert Organization, was losing theaters to make way for parking lots and losing money. Bernard Jacobs and Jerry Schoenfeld, two ambitious board members, saw the crumbling company was ripe for takeover and staged a coup and staved off corporate intrigue, personal betrayals and criminal investigations. Once Jacobs and Schoenfeld solidified their power, they turned a collapsed theater-owning holding company into one of the most successful entertainment empires in the world, spearheading the revitalization of Broadway and the renewal of Times Square. "For those interested in the business behind the greasepaint, at a riveting time in Broadway's and New York's history, this is the ticket" (USA TODAY). Michael Riedel tells the stories of the Shubert Organization and the shows that re-built a city in grand style-including Cats, A Chorus Line, and Mamma Mia!-revealing the backstage drama that often rivaled what transpired onstage, exposing bitter rivalries, unlikely alliances, and inside gossip. "The trouble with Razzle Dazzle is...you can't put the damn thing down" (Huffington Post).

"Directors and the New Musical Drama" offers a fresh perspective on the dramatic shifts in musical theatre in the 1980s and 90s. Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen explores the cultural differences between British and American musicals, examines their critical reception, and demonstrates the crucial role of British and American directors in developing musical dramas that have initiated change in the parameters of this popular art form. Starting with the provocative idea of the "British Invasion," this volume includes analysis of groundbreaking musicals such as "Sunday in the Park with George," "Les Miserables" and "Jelly's Last Jam, " as well as interviews with leading musical theatre writers, directors and producers.

A complete behind-the-scenes look at the landmark show that launched Rodgers and Hammerstein's creative partnership Oklahoma! premiered on Broadway in 1943 under the auspices of the Theatre Guild, and today it is performed more frequently than any other Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. In this book Tim Carter offers the first fully documented history of the making of this celebrated American musical. Drawing on research from rare theater archives, manuscripts, journalism, and other sources, Carter records every step in the development of Oklahoma! The book is filled with rich and fascinating details about how Rodgers and Hammerstein first came together, the casting process, how Agnes de Mille became the show's choreographer, and the drafts and revisions that ultimately gave the musical its final shape. Carter also shows the lofty aspirations of both the creators and producers and the mythmaking that surrounded Oklahoma! from its very inception, and demonstrates just what made it part of its times.

The first book to deal exclusively with British musical flops, Must Close Saturday presents a rolling panorama of the good, the bad and the ugly, reassessing their place in theatrical history. The ominous announcement "Must Close Saturday" too often heralded the demise of British musicals. Looking forward from the vantage point of Lionel Bart's spectacularly successful Oliver! in 1960, Adrian Wright's authoritative chronicle of the commercially unsuccessful British musical of the last half a century uncovers a wealth of fascinating material. In the wake of the resurgence that briefly blew through the British musical at the end of the 1950s with verismo works such as Fings Ain't Wot They Used T'Be and Expresso Bongo, the British musical was shaken by Bart's adaptation of Dickens, but was quickly left floundering in the face of constant critical complaint and financial failure. The first book to deal exclusively with British musical flops, Must Close Saturday presents a rolling panorama of the good, the bad and the ugly, reassessing their place in theatrical history.Wright reveals a consistent striving at invention, with subjects including the electric chair, the Holocaust, the Virgin Mary, social inequality and Trade Unionism, sexual problems and murder, as well as biographical treatments of Hollywood stars, French painters, tragic novelists, royalty, and the Rector of Stiffkey. Discursive and provoking, Must Close Saturday at last prises open the neglected history of the British musical flop up to 2016. ADRIAN WRIGHT is the author of Foreign Country: The Life of L. P. Hartley (1996), John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure (1998), The Innumerable Dance: The Life and Work of William Alwyn (Boydell & Brewer, 2008), the novel Maroon (2010) and The Voice of Doom (2016). His previous books on British musical theatre are A Tanner's Worth of Tune: Rediscovering the Post-War British Musical (Boydell & Brewer, 2010) and West End Broadway: The Golden Age of the American Musical in London (Boydell & Brewer, 2012). He lives in Norfolk.

The author, a former BBC radio producer, conducted interviews with many leading British composers of the day, and his account provides for a unique insight into this often overlooked genre. Based on Michael Hall's many interviews with leading British composers of the genre, this book looks at the heyday of the British Music Theatre in the 1960s and 70s, a period when the author as a BBC radio producer was actively involved with the contemporary music scene. Music Theatre - a composite of music, singing, dancing and speaking distinct from traditional opera and ballet - has its roots in works by Monteverdi, Schoenberg, Satie, Stravinsky, Weill,Hindemith and Eisler, but flourished anew in the 1960s, in America, Britain and Europe. Hall's book presents an account of the context for the activity of Birtwistle, Goehr and Maxwell Davies; it uncovers details of little-known early works by other major figures such as Cardew and Tavener; and it recognises the highly distinctive contributions of composers whose works are less well known. Music Theatre in Britain also throws new light upon the reaction of British composers to the economic and social upheavals of 'the Sixties', offering a distinct and valuable contribution to our understanding of the relationship of the post-war musical avant-garde to social movementsand ideology. Music Theatre in Britain will be of interest to all those working in the field of late twentieth-century British music, to students of composition, and to composers, performers and producers of Music Theatre. MICHAEL HALL, who died in August 2012, had a long career as a conductor, founder of Royal Northern Sinfonia, BBC producer and broadcaster, university lecturer and writer on music.

This joyous and exhilarating musical encounters five very different couples and a single woman embarking on an exciting journey -- the women are pregnant. To some this is a welcome surprise, to some a carefully planned event, to others a cause for worry and confusion. When the big delivery night arrives, with joy and with sadness, this musical shines with an understanding of natural development, never forsaking hope!

This dramatization of the Bible story gives twenty to thirty 7-10 year olds a chance to practise their acting skills. Miming actions and props and using their voices for songs and sound effects, they learn how to relax, stand still and work together as a chorus. The moral lesson of the play won't go amiss either, as the Noah family battle with hostility and intolerance from Nasty Neighbours to create the Ark saving themselves and the Animals from the Flood.-Large flexible cast

This book offers the first full historical treatment of a music theatre that was once at the center of London's West End. From the late Victorian period to the early 1920s, musical comedy was the single most popular form of "legitimate" theatre entertainment. This lively account establishes musical comedy as one of the first industrial cultures and offers fascinating insights into how it functioned ideologically as a celebrated embracing of the modern condition.

In The Reason to Sing, renowned composer-lyricist and teacher Craig Carnelia provides musical actors with a step-by-step guide to making their singing performances more truthful, vivid, and full of life. Using a technique developed over decades of teaching the professional community of Broadway actors and students alike, The Reason to Sing utilizes detailed descriptions of sessions the author has had with his notable students and lays out a new and proven approach to help you build your skills, your confidence, and your career. This book is intended for musical theater acting students as well as working professionals and teachers of the craft.