Music Theory through Musical Theatre takes a new and powerful approach to music theory. Written specifically for students in music theatre programs, it offers music theory by way of musical theatre. Not a traditional music theory text, Music Theory through Musical Theatre tackles the theoretical foundations of musical theatre and musical theatre literature with an emphasis on what students will need to master in preparation for a professional career as a performer. Veteran music theatre musician John Franceschina brings his years of experience to bear in a book that offers musical theatre educators an important tool in equipping students with what is perhaps the most important element of being a performer: the ability to understand the language of music in the larger dramatic context to which it contributes. The book uses examples exclusively from music theater repertoire, drawing from well-known and more obscure shows and songs. Musical sight reading is consistently at the forefront of the lessons, teaching students to internalize notated music quickly and accurately, a particularly necessary skill in a world where songs can be added between performances. Franceschina consistently links the concepts of music theory and vocal coaching, showing students how identifying the musical structure of and gestures within a piece leads to better use of their time with vocal coaches and ultimately enables better dramatic choices. Combining formal theory with practical exercises, Music Theory through Musical Theatre will be a lifelong resource for students in musical theatre courses, dog-eared and shelved beside other professional resource volumes.

Harry B. Smith was the most prolific writer of librettos for the American musical theatre in history, with nearly half of his 300 works actually opening in New York City. In addition, Smith was instrumental in adapting and popularizing foreign musicals in America, significantly influencing writing and composing styles of American shows. He worked with every major composer in America between 1880 and 1920, and consequently this examination of his work and process is highly instructive of the history of the American musical.

It is a generally accepted fact that in the first half of the nineteenth century, Catherine Gore became the most prolific, if not most popular writer of fashionable novels in England. It is less well known that Mrs. Gore's 200-volume output included eleven extremely popular, if not always critically successful, plays, performed at all three of the Theatres Royal in London: Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket. While several of the plays held the stage in England and the United States well into the second half of the nineteenth century, modern critical appraisals of the works have been hampered by the lack of available texts. Gore on Stage, for the first time provides performance texts of all of Mrs. Gore's work for the stage, including original cast lists, criticial responses, illustrations, and glossaries of foreign words and nineteenth-century jargon. Students of drama and nineteenth-century literature will delight in the intricacies of plot and theatrical effects in this collection of historical melodramas, comedies of manners, and farces; and they will marvel at the contemporary nature of the plays' themes, trading on a balance of power between male and female characters.

Harry B. Smith was the most prolific writer of librettos for the American musical theatre in history, with nearly half of his 300 works actually opening in New York City. In addition, Smith was instrumental in adapting and popularizing foreign musicals in America, significantly influencing writing and composing styles of American shows. He worked with every major composer in America between 1880 and 1920, and consequently this examination of his work and process is highly instructive of the history of the American musical.

Duke Ellington's son Mercer has said that his father was frustrated in only one area of musical ambition: his desire to do his own Broadway show. Though Ellington wrote many theatrical pieces, he was never able to achieve success as a composer for the stage, and today his stage shows receive little attention from music historians. Nevertheless, these works occupied a significant place in Ellington's creative imagination, and many of the ideas he employed in their composition found their way into his other work. Here is the first book to acknowledge Duke Ellington's contribution to the stage. It offers a survey of every theater piece Ellington is known to have worked on during his lifetime, beginning with the 1925 revue The Chocolate Kiddies and ending with the unfinished "street opera" Queenie Pie. This large body of work includes full-length musicals, African American revues, ballets, and incidental music. The plot of each work is described and the score analyzed according to its dramatic function in the piece. Musical phrases are reproduced in the text, and associations with other well-known Ellington compositions are noted. An appendix provides a chronological listing of Ellington's shows with song titles conveniently listed under each.

It is a generally accepted fact that in the first half of the nineteenth century, Catherine Gore became the most prolific, if not most popular writer of fashionable novels in England. It is less well known that Mrs. Gore's 200-volume output included eleven extremely popular, if not always critically successful, plays, performed at all three of the Theatres Royal in London: Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket. While several of the plays held the stage in England and the United States well into the second half of the nineteenth century, modern critical appraisals of the works have been hampered by the lack of available texts. "Gore on Stage, " for the first time provides performance texts of all of Mrs. Gore's work for the stage, including original cast lists, criticial responses, illustrations, and glossaries of foreign words and nineteenth-century jargon. Students of drama and nineteenth-century literature will delight in the intricacies of plot and theatrical effects in this collection of historical melodramas, comedies of manners, and farces; and they will marvel at the contemporary nature of the plays' themes, trading on a balance of power between male and female characters.

Scholars have given increasing amounts of attention to the place of homosexuality in different periods of English cultural and literary history. This book is a broad survey of representations of homosexuality in the English theatre from the Renaissance to the late 19th century. It draws on scholarship from a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, history, psychology, literature, and drama. The first chapter provides a background for the book by discussing the nature of same-sex behavior in the ancient and medieval worlds. The chapters that follow discuss such topics as sodomy and transvestite theatre in the Renaisssance; female transvestism on the English stage during the 17th century; bisexuality in 18th-century drama; the rise of English homophobia and the proliferation of lesbian relationships in England between 1745 and 1790; the homophobic context of English theatre during the Romantic Movement (1790-1835); and the rebirth of interest in Greek thought and its associations with same-sex poetry, drama, and pornography in the Victorian era (1840-1900). Scholars have given increasing amounts of attention to the place of homosexuality in English literature and culture. Dramatic works are a reflection of cultural issues, and thus they sometimes treat homosexual subject matter. But because plays are enacted, they also represent homosexual concerns through staging conventions, such as the use of young boys to play female roles during the Renaissance. While some scholars have examined homosexuality in particular plays, this volume is a broad survey of the representation of same-sex relationships on the English stage from the Renaissance to the close of the 19th century. It draws on scholarship from a wide range of fields, including sociology, history, psychology, literature, and drama to provide a sweeping, multidisciplinary account of homosexuality and English Drama. Modern drama has its roots largely in the Renaissance, and Renaissance drama, in turn, drew heavily from classical culture and medieval dramatic traditions. Thus the first chapter of the book provides a background discussion of same-sex behavior in the ancient and medieval worlds. The chapters that follow discuss such topics as sodomy and transvestite theatre in the Renaissance; female transvestism on the English stage during the 17th century; bisexuality in 18th-century drama; the rise of English homophobia and the proliferation of lesbian relationships in England between 1745 and 1790; the homophobic context of English theatre during the Romantic Movement (1790-1835); and the rebirth of interest in Greek thought and its associations with same-sex poetry, drama, and pornography in the Victorian era (1840-1900). The playwrights discussed include major figures such as Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Shelley, and Wilde, along with less frequently read authors such as John Marston, Thomas Dekker, and Barnabe Barnes.

Music Theory through Musical Theatre takes a new and powerful approach to music theory. Written specifically for students in music theatre programs, it offers music theory by way of musical theatre. Not a traditional music theory text, Music Theory through Musical Theatre tackles the theoretical foundations of musical theatre and musical theatre literature with an emphasis on what students will need to master in preparation for a professional career as a performer. Veteran music theatre musician John Franceschina brings his years of experience to bear in a book that offers musical theatre educators an important tool in equipping students with what is perhaps the most important element of being a performer: the ability to understand the language of music in the larger dramatic context to which it contributes. The book uses examples exclusively from music theater repertoire, drawing from well-known and more obscure shows and songs. Musical sight reading is consistently at the forefront of the lessons, teaching students to internalize notated music quickly and accurately, a particularly necessary skill in a world where songs can be added between performances. Franceschina consistently links the concepts of music theory and vocal coaching, showing students how identifying the musical structure of and gestures within a piece leads to better use of their time with vocal coaches and ultimately enables better dramatic choices. Combining formal theory with practical exercises, Music Theory through Musical Theatre will be a lifelong resource for students in musical theatre courses, dog-eared and shelved beside other professional resource volumes.

First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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.

"When numerous critics have all pointed to the stunning mastery of dialogue evinced in Sade's] novels, to say nothing of the truly theatrical disposition of many of the scenes erotic or otherwise this would seem to be linked to the theatrical obsession that persisted so disturbingly throughout his tempestuous existence. Shouldn't we therefore look more closely at this theatre...?" - Annie Le Brun In commemoration of the two hundred years that have passed since the death of the Marquis de Sade in 1814, the three-volume series, Rape, Incest, Murder The Marquis de Sade on Stage, offers English translations of all of Sade's writings, for and about the theatre, with introductions that contextualize Sade's work within the theatrical climate of eighteenth-century France. Volume 1 presents Sade's earliest theatrical efforts, ranging from occasional verse, written to accompany the plays of other authors, to his first attempts at comedy and a newly developing bourgeois tragedy called the drame. The violence and eroticism of Sade's infamous novels are present in the plays, though in a lower dosage, obviously to render them accessible to public performance rather than private reading. " I]t is at the theatre rather than somewhere else that we must revive the almost extinguished flame of the love that every Frenchman owes his country; there is where he'll be convinced of the dangers that would exist for him should he fall back into the hands of tyranny. He'll carry home the enthusiasm and teach it to his family and its effects will be so much more durable, so much more passionate than the momentary inspirations of a newspaper article or proclamation because at the theatre, he learns the lesson by example, and he remembers it." - The Marquis de Sade

Off-Broadway composer John Franceschina's wonderful musical score, now in print for the first time!

Socialists, Socialites, and Sociopaths is a quartet of plays and screenplays written by Frank Tuttle between film directing assignments during the last twenty-five years of his life. Even more than his autobiography, They Started Talking, Tuttle's original plays reveal the wit and imagination that made him one of Hollywood's most sought after (if often underrated) directors of the 1920s and 30s. In addition the plays and screenplays provide vibrant behind-the-scenes views of the many facets of the entertainment industry as well as an honest portrayal of how politics and show business intersect with Tuttle's pacifist and socialist political views emerging loud and clear from the plays, though more subtly from the screenplays.

From Frank Tuttle, the director of Kid Boots, The Studio Murder Mystery, True to the Navy, Roman Scandals, College Holiday, and This Gun for Hire, comes a candid and lively backstage tour of the film industry from the 1920s through the 1950s. With a cast of characters that includes Jean Arthur, Mary Astor, Mischa Auer, William Bendix, Joan Blondell, Clara Bow, Evelyn Brent, Louise Brooks, Eddie Cantor, Dane Clark, Bing Crosby, Bebe Daniels, William Demarest, Dick Foran, Mitzi Green, Glen Hunter, Victor Jory, Otto Kruger, Alan Ladd, Angela Lansbury, Veronica Lake, Charlie McCarthy, Fredric March, Thomas Meighan, George Montgomery, Adolphe Monjou, Osgood Perkins, William Powell, Robert Preston, Edward G. Robinson, Charlie Ruggles, Simone Signoret, Phil Silvers, Gloria Swanson, and Monty Wooley, They Started Talking is an affectionate Who's Who of the leading supporting players of Hollywood's golden age. In addition, published for the first time, are rare letters from film directors George Cukor, Jos Ferrer, Elia Kazan, Stanley Kramer, George Stevens, Norman Taurog, and William Wyler.