The Richard Rodgers Reader

The Richard Rodgers Reader PDF Author: Geoffrey Block
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195313437
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 378

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Book Description
Richard Rodgers was one of America's most prolific and best-loved composers. A world without "My Funny Valentine," "The Lady is a Tramp," "Blue Moon," and "Bewitched," to name just a few of the songs he wrote with Lorenz Hart, is scarcely imaginable, and the musicals he wrote with his second collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein--Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music--continue to enchant and entertain audiences. Arranged in four sections, Rodgers and Hart (1929-1943), Rodgers and Hammerstein (1943-1960), Rodgers After Hammerstein (1960-1979), and The Composer Speaks (1939-1971), The Richard Rodgers Reader offers a cornucopia of informative, perceptive, and stylish biographical and critical overviews. It also contains a selection of Rodgers's letters to his wife Dorothy in the 1920s, the 1938 Time magazine cover story and New Yorker profiles in 1938 and 1961, and essays and reviews by such noted critics as Brooks Atkinson, Eric Bentley, Leonard Bernstein, Lehman Engel, Walter Kerr, Ken Mandelbaum, Ethan Mordden, George Jean Nathan, and Alec Wilder. The volume features personal accounts by Richard Adler, Agnes de Mille, Joshua Logan, Mary Martin, and Diahann Carroll. The collection concludes with complete selections from more than thirty years of Rodgers's own writings on topics ranging from the creative process, the state of the Broadway theater, even Rodgers's bout with cancer, and a generous sample from the candid and previously unpublished Columbia University interviews. For anyone wishing to explore more fully the life and work of a composer whose songs and musicals have assumed a permanent--and prominent--place in American popular culture, The Richard Rodgers Reader will offer endless delights.

The Richard Rodgers Reader

The Richard Rodgers Reader PDF Author: Geoffrey Block
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195313437
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Get Book Here

Book Description
Richard Rodgers was one of America's most prolific and best-loved composers. A world without "My Funny Valentine," "The Lady is a Tramp," "Blue Moon," and "Bewitched," to name just a few of the songs he wrote with Lorenz Hart, is scarcely imaginable, and the musicals he wrote with his second collaborator, Oscar Hammerstein--Oklahoma!, Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music--continue to enchant and entertain audiences. Arranged in four sections, Rodgers and Hart (1929-1943), Rodgers and Hammerstein (1943-1960), Rodgers After Hammerstein (1960-1979), and The Composer Speaks (1939-1971), The Richard Rodgers Reader offers a cornucopia of informative, perceptive, and stylish biographical and critical overviews. It also contains a selection of Rodgers's letters to his wife Dorothy in the 1920s, the 1938 Time magazine cover story and New Yorker profiles in 1938 and 1961, and essays and reviews by such noted critics as Brooks Atkinson, Eric Bentley, Leonard Bernstein, Lehman Engel, Walter Kerr, Ken Mandelbaum, Ethan Mordden, George Jean Nathan, and Alec Wilder. The volume features personal accounts by Richard Adler, Agnes de Mille, Joshua Logan, Mary Martin, and Diahann Carroll. The collection concludes with complete selections from more than thirty years of Rodgers's own writings on topics ranging from the creative process, the state of the Broadway theater, even Rodgers's bout with cancer, and a generous sample from the candid and previously unpublished Columbia University interviews. For anyone wishing to explore more fully the life and work of a composer whose songs and musicals have assumed a permanent--and prominent--place in American popular culture, The Richard Rodgers Reader will offer endless delights.

The Richard Rodgers Reader

The Richard Rodgers Reader PDF Author: Geoffrey Holden Block
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780197728932
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Arranged in four sections, this collection offers informative, biographical and critical overviews. It also contains a selection of Rodgers's letters to his wife Dorothy, and concludes with selections from his writings on creative process, the state of the Broadway theater, his bout with cancer, and his Columbia University interviews.

Richard Rodgers

Richard Rodgers PDF Author: Geoffrey Block
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300127545
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
Richard Rodgers was an icon of the musical theater, a prolific composer whose career spanned six decades and who wrote more than a thousand songs and forty shows for the American stage. In this absorbing book, Geoffrey Block examines Rodgers’s entire career, providing rich details about the creation, staging, and critical reception of some of his most popular musicals. Block traces Rodgers’s musical education, early work, and the development of his musical and dramatic language. He focuses on two shows by Rodgers and Hart (A Connecticut Yankee and The Boys from Syracuse) and two by Rodgers and Hammerstein (South Pacific and Cinderella), offering new insights into each one. He concludes with the first serious look at the five neglected and often maligned musicals that Rodgers composed in the 1960s and 1970s, after the death of Hammerstein.

Musical Stages

Musical Stages PDF Author: Richard Rodgers
Publisher: New York : Random House
ISBN:
Category : Composers
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description


Something Wonderful

Something Wonderful PDF Author: Todd S. Purdum
Publisher: Henry Holt
ISBN: 162779834X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
"Even before they joined forces, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II had written dozens of Broadway shows, but together they pioneered a new art form: the serious musical play. Their songs and dance numbers served to advance the drama and reveal character, a sharp break from the past and the template on which all future musicals would be built. [This is a portrait of that creative partnership]"--Amazon.com

How Sondheim Found His Sound

How Sondheim Found His Sound PDF Author: Steve Swayne
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472026356
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
"The research is voluminous, as is the artistry and perceptiveness. Swayne has lived richly within the world of Sondheim's music." ---Richard Crawford, author of America's Musical Life: A History "Sondheim's career and music have never been so skillfully dissected, examined, and put in context. With its focus on his work as composer, this book is surprising and welcome." ---Theodore S. Chapin, President and Executive Director, The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization "What a fascinating book, full of insights large and small. An impressive analysis and summary of Sondheim's many sources of inspiration. All fans of the composer and lovers of Broadway in general will treasure and frequently refer to Swayne's work." ---Tom Riis, Joseph Negler Professor of Musicology and Director of the American Music Research Center, University of Colorado Stephen Sondheim has made it clear that he considers himself a "playwright in song." How he arrived at this unique appellation is the subject of How Sondheim Found His Sound---an absorbing study of the multitudinous influences on Sondheim's work. Taking Sondheim's own comments and music as a starting point, author Steve Swayne offers a biography of the artist's style, pulling aside the curtain on Sondheim's creative universe to reveal the many influences---from classical music to theater to film---that have established Sondheim as one of the greatest dramatic composers of the twentieth century. Sondheim has spoken often and freely about the music, theater, and films he likes, and on occasion has made explicit references to how past works crop up in his own work. He has also freely acknowledged his eclecticism, seeing in it neither a curse nor a blessing but a fact of his creative life. Among the many forces influencing his work, Sondheim has readily pointed to a wide field: classical music from 1850 to 1950; the songs of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood; the theatrical innovations of Oscar Hammerstein II and his collaborators; the cinematic elements found in certain film schools; and the melodramatic style of particular plays and films. Ultimately, Sondheim found his sound by amalgamating these seemingly disparate components into his unique patois. How Sondheim Found His Sound is the first book to provide an overview of his style and one of only a few to account for these various components, how they appear in Sondheim's work, and how they affect his musical and dramatic choices.

Pal Joey

Pal Joey PDF Author: Julianne Lindberg
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190051221
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
When Rodgers and Hart's Pal Joey opened at the Barrymore on Christmas day, 1940, it flew in the face of musical comedy convention. The characters and situation were depraved. The setting was caustically realistic. Its female lead was frankly sexual and yet not purely comic. A narratively-driven dream ballet closed the first act, begging audiences to take seriously the inner life and desires of a confirmed heel. Pal Joey: The History of a Heel presents a behind-the-scenes look at the genesis, influence, and significance of this classic musical comedy. Although the show appears on many top-ten lists surveying the Golden Age, it is a controversial classic; its legacy is tied both to the fashionable scandal that it provoked, and, retrospectively, to the uncommon attention it paid to characterization and narrative cohesion. Through an archive-driven investigation of the show and its music, author Julianne Lindberg offers insight into the historical moment during which Joey was born, and to the process of genre classification, canon formation, and the ensuing critical debates related to musical and theatrical maturity. More broadly, the book argues that the critique and commentary on class and gender conventions in Pal Joey reveals a uniquely American concern over status, class mobility, and progressive gender roles in the pre-war era.

From Camelot to Spamalot

From Camelot to Spamalot PDF Author: Megan Woller
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197511058
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
For centuries, Arthurian legend has captured imaginations throughout Europe and the Americas with its tales of Camelot, romance, and chivalry. The ever-shifting, age-old tale of King Arthur and his world is one which depends on retellings for its endurance in the cultural imagination. Using adaptation theory as a framework, From Camelot to Spamalot foregrounds the role of music in selected Arthurian adaptations, examining six stage and film musicals. The book considers how musical versions in twentieth and twenty-first century popular culture interpret the legend of King Arthur, contending that music guides the audience to understand this well-known tale and its characters in new and unexpected ways. All of the productions considered include an overtly modern perspective on the legend, intruding and even commenting on the tale of King Arthur. Shifting from an idealistic utopia to a silly place, the myriad notions of Camelot offer a look at the importance of myth in American popular culture. Author Megan Woller's approach, rooted in the literary theory of scholars like Linda Hutcheon, highlights the intertextual connections between chosen works and Arthurian legend. In so doing, From Camelot to Spamalot intersects with and provides a timely contribution to several different fields of study, from adaptation studies and musical theater studies to film studies and Arthurian studies.

Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel

Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel PDF Author: Tim Carter
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190693444
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Carousel (1945) was Rodgers and Hammerstein's second collaboration following their hugely successful Oklahoma! (1943). Based on Ferenc Molnár's play, Liliom (1909), it took Broadway musical theater in far darker directions given its subject and extensive music. Here we discover how it came about, and what it was trying to achieve.

Historical Dictionary of the Broadway Musical

Historical Dictionary of the Broadway Musical PDF Author: William A. Everett
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442256699
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 465

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Book Description
The Broadway musical has greatly influenced both American and world culture. Shows such as Oklahoma! and Annie Get Your Gun are as American as apple pie, while the long runs of imports such as Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, and Les Misérables have broken records. Shows filled with rock and pop music such as Mamma Mia! and Wicked enthrall audiences, and revivals of beloved shows play an important role in contemporary Broadway culture. Actors Ethel Merman, Yul Brynner, Julie Andrews, Bernadette Peters, and Audra McDonald; composers and lyricists Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Jeanine Tesori; and directors and choreographers George Abbott, Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Tommy Tune, and Susan Stroman—to name only a few—have gained national and international recognition by way of the Broadway musical stage. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of the Broadway Musical contains a chronology, an introduction, an appendix, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 1000 cross-referenced entries on Broadway shows, composers, playwrights, directors, producers, designers, actors, and theatres. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Broadway musicals.