Enchanted Evenings:The Broadway Musical from 'Show Boat' to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber Block, Geoffrey (large ebook reader .txt) 📖

CARLOTTA AND CHORUS

Poor young maiden! For the thrill (loosely based on Don Juan A)

Tangled in the winding sheets! (rhythm of the Phantom at his organ motive, Don Juan C)

Don Juan triumphs once again! (I have brought you motive)

ORCHESTRA

Gypsy motive in 7/8 time, Don Juan D, followed by a variation of Don Juan

A DON JUAN (SIGNOR PIANGI)

Passarino, faithful friend (Don Juan A, extended)

Furtively, we’ll scoff and quaff (Don Juan E)

I shall say: “come—hide with me” (Don Juan E in vocal line; Don Juan A in orchestra)

PASSARINO

Poor thing hasn’t got a chance! (based on Don Juan A)

AMINTA (CHRISTINE)

No thoughts within her head (Don Juan F)

Reused in final lair scene on the words “The tears I might have shed for your dark fate grow cold, and turn to tears of hate …”

DON JUAN (now the PHANTOM)

For the trap is set and waits for its prey (variation on Don Juan A)

You have come here (Don Juan D)

I have brought you (Don Juan D)

SONG: “The Point of No Return”

AMINTA (CHRISTINE)

You have brought me (Don Juan D) SONG: “The Point of No Return”

BOTH

SONG: “The Point of No Return”

PHANTOM

SONG: “All I Ask of You” (last part of the song)

NOTES

Preface to the First Edition

1. The Rodgers and Hammerstein Song Book (New York: Simon & Schuster and Williamson Music, 1956); Six Plays by Rodgers and Hammerstein (New York: Modern Library Association, 1959).

2. Like other Broadway-loving families, especially those residing on the west side of the country, it took the release of the West Side Story movie with Natalie Wood for us to become fully cognizant of this show.

3. “The World of Stephen Sondheim,” interview, “Previn and the Pittsburgh,” channel 26 television broadcast, March 13, 1977.

4. A chronological survey of Broadway texts from the 1950s to the 1980s might include the following: Cecil Smith, Musical Comedy in America; Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theater; David Ewen, New Complete Book of the American Musical Theatre; Ethan Mordden, Better Foot Forward; Abe Laufe, Broadway’s Greatest Musicals (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1977); Martin Gottfried, Broadway Musicals; Stanley Green, The World of Musical Comedy; Richard Kislan, The Musical (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980); Gerald Bordman, American Musical Comedy, American Musical Theatre, American Musical Revue, and American Operetta; Alan Jay Lerner, The Musical Theatre: A Celebration; and Gerald Mast, Can’t Help Singin.’

5. See Gerald Bordman, American Musical Comedy, American Musical Revue, and American Operetta, and Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theater.

6. Miles Kreuger, “Show Boat”: The Story of a Classic American Musical; Hollis Alpert, The Life and Times of “Porgy and Bess.” The literature on Porgy and Bess contains a particularly impressive collection of worthwhile analytical and historical essays by Richard Crawford, Charles Hamm, Wayne Shirley, and Lawrence Starr (see the Selected Bibliography).

7. Joseph P. Swain, The Broadway Musical; Stephen Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals.

8. Joseph Kerman, Opera as Drama; Paul Robinson, Opera & Ideas.

9. Peter Kivy, Osmin’s Rage.

10. Swain, The Broadway Musical, 205.

11. Stephen Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals, 6–7.

12. Ibid., 37. Quotation from Bernstein, 147. For a more detailed exploration of Swain and Banfield and the differences between opera and musicals, see my review essay of Banfield in Block, Review essay, 1996.

A New Preface

1. Several of the revivals on this list that appeared before 1995 were discussed in the first edition.

2. Gerald Bordman, American Operetta, American Musical Comedy, and American Musical Revue; Lehman Engel, The American Musical Theater.

3. Engel, The American Musical Theater, xix, 35.

4. Ibid., 35.

5. Joseph P. Swain, The Broadway Musical.

6. Geoffrey Block, “Integration,” and Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama.

7. Block, “Reading Musicals.”

8. The volumes in Yale Broadway Masters and, in the future, Oxford’s Broadway Legacies, are among recent attempts to fully engage the musical component of a musical. Six volumes of the former series were published between 2003 and 2009: Richard Rodgers (Block), Andrew Lloyd Webber (John Snelson), Jerome Kern (Stephen Banfield); Sigmund Romberg (William A. Everett), Frank Loesser (Thomas L. Riis), and John Kander and Fred Ebb (James Leve). George Gershwin (Larry Starr) is scheduled to appear in 2010. Other important recent books in the field that face the music, even when it is not the central concern, include Tim Carter’s “Oklahoma!,” Raymond Knapp’s The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity and The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity, bruce d. mcclung’s Lady in the Dark, and Mark Eden Horowitz’s Sondheim on Music.

9. Charles Hamm, “Omnibus Review.” The five books reviewed are Jack Gottlieb, Funny It Doesn’t Sound Jewish; Mark N. Grant, The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical; John Bush Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theatre; Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity; and Andrew Most, Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical.

10. For three thoughtful books highly critical of megamusicals see Mark N. Grant, The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical; Scott McMillin, The Musical as Drama; and Ethan Mordden, The Happiest Corpse. Even Barry Singer, in a book that is generally sympathetic to musicals of the past thirty years, has little positive to say about Lloyd Webber (Singer, Ever After). For positive critical assessments in the scholarly literature see John Snelson’s Andrew Lloyd Webber and Jessica Sternfeld’s The Megamusical.

11. George Gershwin (Rodney Greenberg, Howard Pollack, Wayne Schneider); Oscar Hammerstein (Amy Asch); Moss Hart (Steven Bach); Jerome Kern (Stephen Banfield); Arthur Laurents (Arthur Laurents); Frank Loesser (Robert Kimball and Steve Nelson, Thomas L. Riis); Cole Porter (William McBrien); Jerome Robbins (Deborah Jowitt, Greg Lawrence); Richard Rodgers (Geoffrey Block, William G. Hyland, Meryle Secrest); Rodgers and Hammerstein (Tim Carter, Frederick Nolan); and Kurt Weill (Foster Hirsch, Lys Symonette and Kim Kowalke, bruce d. mcclung).

12. Stephen Banfield, Jerome Kern; Todd Decker, “Do You Want to Hear a Mammy Song,” and a forthcoming volume on Show Boat in Oxford’s Broadway Legacies.

13. Howard Pollack, George Gershwin; and Larry Starr, George Gershwin.

14. bruce d. mcclung, “Lady in the Dark”; and Tim Carter, “Oklahoma!”

15. Thomas L. Riis,