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

16. This footnote indicates the points of overlap between Knapp, Miller, and Swain and the musicals discussed in the first edition of Enchanted Evenings:

SHOW BOAT (Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity [Knapp 2005]; Swain, The Broadway Musical)

ANYTHING GOES (Knapp 2005)

PORGY AND BESS (Knapp 2005; Swain, The Broadway Musical)

THE CRADLE WILL ROCK (Knapp 2005; Miller, Rebels with Applause)

PAL JOEY (Miller, Rebels with Applause)

LADY IN THE DARK (Knapp, The American Musical and the Performance of Personal Identity [Knapp 2006])

CAROUSEL (Miller, From “Assassins” to “West Side Story; Swain, The Broadway Musical)

KISS ME, KATE (Knapp 2006; Swain, The Broadway Musical)

GUYS AND DOLLS (Knapp 2005; Swain, The Broadway Musical)

MY FAIR LADY (Knapp 2006; Miller, From “Assassins” to “West Side Story”; Swain, The Broadway Musical)

WEST SIDE STORY (Knapp 2005; Miller, From “Assassins” to “West Side Story”; Swain, The Broadway Musical)

17. Kim Kowalke, Review essay.

18. Banfield, Jerome Kern, 254–56.

19. Quoted in Pauline Kael, For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies (New York: Plume, 1994): 37.

20. Ibid.

21. For a thorough and helpful introduction to Cabaret and the work of Kander and Ebb as a whole, see Leve, John Kander and Fred Ebb.

22. Lloyd Webber’s The Woman in White (lyrics by David Zippel) ran nineteen months in London but only 108 performances in New York in 2004. Sondheim’s Road Show (formerly Bounce, Wise Guys, and Gold), with a book by John Weidman, and directed and designed by John Doyle, played a two-month Off-Broadway engagement at the end of 2008.

Chapter 1: Introduction

1. Book musicals contain a narrative and are represented by three discernible types: operas, operettas, and musical comedies. Operas, which come in various styles, including rock, are for the most part sung throughout. Musical comedies normally utilize contemporary urban settings with matching vernacular dialogue and music, the latter often incorporating jazz. Operettas are generally set in exotic locations, including early Americana (e.g., New England in the 1870s in Carousel and Oklahoma Territory “just after the turn of the century”) and typically utilize appropriate regional dialects and such nineteenth-century European genres as waltzes and polkas or a non-jazz musical vernacular that somehow sounds American. The largest category of non-book musicals is the revue, which may possess a unifying theme but only rarely a clearly delineated plot. In place of a book, most revues consist of a somewhat loose collection of skits (usually topical), along with dances and songs, often composed by a plethora of writers and composers.

2. Miles Kreuger, “Some Words about ‘Show Boat,’” 18.

3. A Trip to Chinatown contained “Reuben and Cynthia,” “The Bowery,” and Charles K. Harris’s “After the Ball”; Little Johnny Jones introduced “The Yankee Doodle Boy” and “Give My Regards to Broadway.”

4. Both Irene and No, No, Nanette (670 and 321 performances, respectively, in their inaugural runs) enjoyed popular revivals in the early 1970s (No, No, Nanette in 1971 [861 performances] and Irene in 1973 [604 performances]).

5. The film version of Naughty Marietta (1935) starred Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, and The Student Prince (1954) featured the voice of Mario Lanza dubbing for Edmund Purdom.

6. Included among these early hits are the following: Berlin (Watch Your Step [1914]); Kern (Princess Shows [1915–1918], Sally [1920], and Sunny [1925]); Porter (numerous interpolated songs in shows by other composers between 1919 and 1924 before making a hit with Paris in 1928); Hammerstein (Wildflower [1923], Rose-Marie [1924], Sunny [1925], and The Desert Song [1926]); George and Ira Gershwin (Lady, Be Good! [1924], Oh, Kay! [1926], and Funny Face [1927]); and Rodgers and Hart (The Garrick Gaieties, Dearest Enemy, [1925], and A Connecticut Yankee [1927]); and Weill (Die Dreigroschenoper [The Threepenny Opera] [1927, in Germany]). Several months before the premiere of Show Boat, the team of Ray Henderson (music) and B. G. DeSylva and Lew Brown (lyrics) presented their first book musical hit, Good News.

7. The term “anxiety of influence” is borrowed from literary critic Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).

8. Richard Crawford, The American Musical Landscape, 87.

9. For a valuable perspective on the development of cultural hierarchies, authentic versus accessible approaches to Shakespeare, and “the sacralization of culture” in nineteenth-century America, see Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).

10. Charles Hamm, “The Theatre Guild Production.”

11. Kerman, Opera as Drama. While under current attack for its elitism and restricted vision of dramatic worthiness, Kerman’s study remains a central text for any exploration of the relationship between music and drama. Another excellent and less judgmental study of opera with concepts that can be applied to Broadway musicals is Robinson.

12. Kivy, Osmin’s Rage, 10–11.

13. Some exceptions are Banfield, Sondheim’s Broadway Musicals; Block, “Frank Loesser’s Sketchbooks”; Hamm, “The Theatre Guild Production”; Carol Oja, “Marc Blitzstein’s The Cradle Will Rock”; and Wayne Shirley, “Porgy and Bess” and “Reconciliation on Catfish Row.”

14. The literature on gender studies in music is considerable and growing exponentially. The most influential work to appear is probably Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).

15. The top forty also includes four musicals that premiered before Show Boat (The Student Prince, Blossom Time, Sally, and Rose-Marie, nos. 31, 33, 37, and 40 in the 1920–1959 list) and four that first appeared after West Side Story (The Sound of Music, The Music Man, Fiorello!, and Gypsy, nos. 4, 6, 20, and 26 in the 1920–1959 list).

16. West Side Story (1980); My Fair Lady (1981, 1993); Show Boat (1983, 1994); On Your Toes (1983); The Cradle Will Rock (1983); Porgy and Bess (1983, 1986, 1989); Anything Goes (1987); The Most Happy Fella (1992); Guys and Dolls (1992–1994); and Carousel (1994). See A New Preface for major New York and London performances after 1994.

17. The figure 467 is deceptively low since Lady in the Dark returned to Broadway after a tour for another 310 performances. The grand total of 777 performances would place this show as the ninth longest running musical of the 1940s and no. 20 in the 1920–1959 list. See