Blog Posts by Subject: Musical theatre

If you're interested in doing research on a musical, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts has an embarrassment of riches. To find all the information we have, you may have to look in many different places. Of course, your first move should be to consult with the knowledgeable staff at the 2nd Floor Drama Desk, who'll be able to guide your research.

A guest post by Ben West.

Strange as it may seem given its frank narrative and its traditional sound, The Fig Leaves Are Falling is not a conventional musical. This colorful, vivacious and disarmingly sweet 1969 confection is—at its core and in its construction—a unique and exciting entertainment that marvelously straddles the worlds of 1960s musical comedy and 1940s revue. It was, in fact, Fig Leaves' central story and stylized conceit that initially grabbed me and ultimately defined the reimagined UnsungMusicalsCo. (UMC) production.

Life on the road was a hard-knock life for Dorothy Loudon, who spent much of the sixties traveling to far flung locations all over North America to perform in her cabaret act and, later, in the touring companies of Luv and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds. A guarded person whenever she wasn't "on," Loudon hated leaving her beloved Manhattan, but—in the days before Annie made her a Broadway star—it was the most lucrative way to ply her trade.

I'll be posting a April's Musical of the Month later this week, but before I do, I wanted to share the results of a little experiment.

I recently discovered a new music streaming subscription called Rdio which, for a monthly subscription fee (currently about $5), allows one unlimited access to all of the songs in their catalog. It's more or less the same idea as Spotify, but with one really cool feature for programmers: an open and easy to use API (application programming interface) for playing music within your own site.

Last August, musical theater historian Laura Frankos detailed the history of the Princess Musicals in her introduction to Oh, Boy! This month's musical, Very Good Eddie, was the second of this set of smaller-and-smarter musicals produced at the Princess Theater on 39th street (following Nobody's Home and immediately preceding Oh, Boy!).

How do we love Christopher Walken? On his 70th birthday, let us count the ways. Star of film, TV, and NYPL's own iBook Point, somehow everyone has a favorite film that stars him, be it The Deer Hunter, True Romance, or Pulp Fiction. The consummate villain, he faced off Batman and James Bond with his signature dead stare that transforms at the drop of a hat into a Rockwellesque boyish grin. By the time his fancy footwork stupefied us in Spike Jonze's Fatboy Slim video, few knew Walken was already a 30-year Broadway veteran, sharing the stage with Liza Minnelli and Raul Julia. What? Read on, share movie quotes, or just look at the pictures!

OOOOOOOOOO! KLAHOMA!

As a native Oklahoman and former "Sylvie" in my high school's production of Oklahoma!, there is no sweeter sound than the joyous shouts and celestial harmonies of the massive hit 8-part chorus number during the second act of Rodgers and Hammerstein's first smash musical. As a confirmed choir nerd, arranger Robert Russell Bennett is the star of my heart. Here's why...

A guest post by UnsungMusicalsCo director, Ben West

Currently in its fifth year, UnsungMusicalsCo. (UMC) is a not-for-profit production company that I founded with the aim of researching, restoring and presenting obscure but artistically sound works from the Golden Age of musical theatre. It should be noted upfront that I am perhaps more liberal than most in my definition of the Golden Age, by which I mean those 40 glorious years between the Follies: Mr. Florenz Ziegfeld's in 1931 and Mr. Stephen Sondheim's in 1971.

A guest post by Levi Branson

By 1920 Jerome Kern had achieved success as a noteworthy American composer with a uniquely American career. His melodies graced many entertainment platforms, but he was most prominently represented on the musical stage. His early composing career included scores for the successful Princess Theatre musicals as well as song interpolations into others' musicals. In 1919 a Charles Dillingham production paired him with a songwriter and librettist who would become a frequent collaborator in the approaching new decade, Anne Caldwell.

I've blogged before about my joy in finding something I never knew existed in the richly varied archival holdings of the New York Public Library, but while processing the James Barton Papers, I had an epiphany of another color: finding something I've wanted to get my hands on for nearly twenty years.

A guest post by Maya Cantu

"America at the close of the Great War was a Cinderella magically clothed in the most stunning dress at the ball... immense gains with no visible price tag seemed to be the American destiny," as historian Ann Douglas has noted. In the expansively optimistic and prosperous America of 1920, there could hardly have been a musical — or heroine — more suited to its times than Jerome Kern and Guy Bolton's Sally, a Jazz Age Cinderella story clothed in opulent enchantment.

I dreamed a dream in time gone by that someday I would be sitting in a cinema watching the film version of Les Misérables. In 1993 I had recently convinced my mother to take me to a touring production that had settled for a week in St. Louis (an event that is, in large part, the reason I am now sitting in this office in Lincoln Center).

A guest post by Brian D. Valencia

Evangeline, or The Belle of Acadia rounds out the Musical of the Month blog's consideration of the four most popular American-devised musicals of the late 19th century. Only The Black Crook  (1866) surpassed Evangeline in frequency, longevity, and popularity—and Humpty Dumpty (1868) and A Trip to Chinatown (1890/1) trailed not far behind. It premiered in New York in 1874, and remained a fixture of the American musical repertory for the next three decades, reportedly amassing more than 3,000 total performances and appearing as late as 1901 throughout 

A guest post by Tracy C. Davis, Barber Professor of Performing Arts — Northwestern University.

Extracted from the preface to Dorothy in Tracy C. Davis, ed., The Broadview Anthology of Nineteenth-Century British Performance (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2012). The full text of the book and lyrics (based on the British Library's manuscript) appears for the first time in this volume.

A guest post by Professor William Everett

Part of the innate appeal of the Princess Theatre musicals comes from the songs, which famously emerge out of the plots. Musical numbers in these shows illuminate some dimension of the story; characters often reflect on what is happening at the time or offer insights into their personalities and desires. As Stephen Banfield asserts in his extraordinary study of Kern and his music, songs in the Princess Theatre musicals constitute the middle parts of sequences that generally move from dialogue to song to dance. (Banfield, Jerome Kern, 86-88). In a musical, musical style can accentuate or reveal details in ways that 

A guest post and edition by Andrew Lamb.

The works of Gilbert and Sullivan dominated nineteenth-century British comic opera from the start. Yet in neither London nor New York was a work of theirs the longest-running British comic opera of its time. Indeed, in New York The Mikado wasn't even the most successful British comic opera of its year.

A guest post By Laura Frankos
Oh, Boy!: Kern, Bolton, Wodehouse and the Princess Theatre Musicals
The Genesis of the Series

In 1913, the Shuberts added another theatre to their empire at 104 West 39th Street, on the edge of the theatre district. Architect William Albert Swaney, who had built the Winter Garden for the brothers, designed an intimate 299-seat house, with an understated Georgian exterior of red brick and limestone and five stories of office space for rental income. The theatre, dubbed the Princess, spent its first seasons as "the Theatre of Thrills," as manager Ray Comstock mounted a series of unsuccessful Grand Guignol one-acts. Its 

A guest post by Professor William Everett.

His statue stands in Times Square, the only one located at the "Crossroads of the World." This legendary showman did it all—actor, writer, composer, producer, manager, sheet music publisher. If one individual had to be chosen as an embodiment of the breadth of the stage entertainment industry at the turn of the twentieth century, an ideal choice would be George M. Cohan (1878-1942).

A guest post by Elizabeth Titrington Craft.

"I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy / A Yankee Doodle do or die / A real live nephew of my Uncle Sam / Born on the Fourth of July." If these lines conjure up a familiar patriotic ditty, perhaps learned in school or heard at Independence Day celebrations, then you already know one of the hit songs from George M. Cohan's 1904 musical Little Johnny Jones. This landmark show tapped into the nationalism of the day and fashioned Cohan's public persona, earning him his reputation as the "Yankee Doodle Dandy" himself. Cohan's theatrical "flag-waving" and his vision of nationhood both delighted