Download or read book American Vaudeville as Seen by Its Contemporaries written by Charles W. Stein and published by CNIB. This book was released on 1985 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recalls the history and colorful personalities of vaudeville
Download or read book American Vaudeville as Seen by Its Contemporaries written by Charles W. Stein and published by New York : Knopf. This book was released on 1984 with total page 486 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Comic Offense from Vaudeville to Contemporary Comedy written by Rick DesRochers and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-07-31 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Comic Offense from Vaudeville to Contemporary Comedy examines how contemporary writer/performers are influenced by the comedic vaudevillians of the early 20th century. By tracing the history and legacy of the vaudeville era and performance acts, like the Marx Brothers and The Three Keatons, and moving through the silent and early sound films of the early 1930s, the author looks at how comic writer/performers continue to sell a brand of themselves as a form of social commentary in order to confront and dispel stereotypes of race, class, and gender. The first study to explore contemporary popular comic culture and its influence on American society from this unique perspective, Rick DesRochers analyzes stand-up and improvisational comedy writing/performing in the work of Larry David, Tina Fey, Stephen Colbert, and Dave Chappelle. He grounds these choices by examining their evolution as they developed signature characters and sketches for their respective shows Curb Your Enthusiasm, 30 Rock, The Colbert Report, and Chappelle's Show.
Download or read book Vaudeville on the Diamond written by David M. Sutera and published by Scarecrow Press. This book was released on 2014-01-09 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last couple of decades, minor league baseball games have shown substantial attendance figures, with more than forty-one million spectators in both 2010 and 2011. With all the high-tech, live-streaming, fast-paced entertainment available to consumers, what is it about minor league baseball that still holds appeal with today’s audiences? With access to major league games broadcast on countless cable networks, what draws fans to small stadiums to watch obscure players struggle to make the big time? Sports historian David M. Sutera set out to answer these questions by visiting fourteen minor league baseball parks around the country. In Vaudeville on the Diamond, Sutera discusses the lure of minor league baseball with fans, players, and team representatives, examining how teams have survived and thrived in today’s competitive entertainment world. Combining interviews with game-day observations, Sutera argues that minor league baseball’s key to survival lies in the creation of on- and off-field attractions that invoke the traditions of vaudeville with their unique and quirky spectacle. From inviting fans to participate in dizzy bat competitions and races against the mascot to featuring Star Wars theme nights and monkeys riding border collies, teams have created a multifaceted form of entertainment that transcends the game itself. Part study and part travelogue, Vaudeville on the Diamond features numerous photographs of on-field entertainment, showcasing the vaudevillian side of minor league baseball. A light-hearted and engaging look at the minor leagues, this book will appeal not only to scholars and students of popular culture, sports and leisure studies, and sports management but to all fans of baseball and minor league sports.
Download or read book Four Parts No Waiting written by Gage Averill and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2003-02-20 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Investigates the role that vernacular, barbershop-style close harmony has played in American musical history, in American life, and in the American imagination. It critiques the myths that have surrounded the barbershop revival, but also celebrates the participatory spirit of the harmony.
Download or read book Music in the Chautauqua Movement written by Paige Lush and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2013-08-08 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The chautauqua movement was a truly American phenomenon, providing education and entertainment for millions of people and employing thousands of musicians in the process. While scholars have previously explored various facets of the chautauqua movement, this is the first book to trace the place of music in the movement from its inception through its decline. Drawing upon the rich collections of ephemera left by several chautauqua bureaus, this study profiles several famous musicians and introduces the reader to lesser-known musical acts that traveled the chautauqua circuits. In addition, it explores music's role in defining the chautauqua movement as "high culture," legitimizing the movement in the eyes of community leaders and setting it apart from vaudeville and other competing amusements. Finally, it addresses music's role in establishing chautauqua's identity as an American institution, specifically in the years surrounding World War I.
Download or read book Translating America written by Peter Conolly-Smith and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the turn of the century, New York City's Germans constituted a culturally and politically dynamic community, with a population 600,000 strong. Yet fifty years later, traces of its culture had all but disappeared. What happened? The conventional interpretation has been that, in the face of persecution and repression during World War I, German immigrants quickly gave up their own culture and assimilated into American mainstream life. But in Translating America, Peter Conolly-Smith offers a radically different analysis. He argues that German immigrants became German-Americans not out of fear, but instead through their participation in the emerging forms of pop culture. Drawing from German and English newspapers, editorials, comic strips, silent movies, and popular plays, he reveals that German culture did not disappear overnight, but instead merged with new forms of American popular culture before the outbreak of the war. Vaudeville theaters, D.W. Griffith movies, John Philip Sousa tunes, and even baseball games all contributed to German immigrants' willing transformation into Americans. Translating America tackles one of the thorniest questions in American history: How do immigrants assimilate into, and transform, American culture?
Download or read book The Cambridge History of American Theatre written by Don B. Wilmeth and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second volume of the authoritative, multi-volume Cambridge History of American Theatre, first published in 1999, begins in the post-Civil War period and traces the development of American theatre up to 1945. It covers all aspects of theatre from plays and playwrights, through actors and acting, to theatre groups and directors. Topics examined include vaudeville and popular entertainment, European influences, theatre in and beyond New York, the rise of the Little Theatre movement, changing audiences, modernism, the Federal Theatre movement, scenography, stagecraft, and architecture. Contextualising chapters explore the role of theatre within the context of American social and cultural history, and the role of American theatre in relation to theatre in Europe and beyond. This definitive history of American theatre includes contributions from the following distinguished academics - Thomas Postlewait, John Frick, Tice L. Miller, Ronald Wainscott, Brenda Murphy, Mark Fearnow, Brooks McNamara, Thomas Riis, Daniel J. Watermeier, Mary C. Henderson, and Warren Kliewer.
Download or read book The American Stage written by Ron Engle and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1993-05-06 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book focuses on the economic and social forces which shaped American theatre throughout its history. Alone or as a collection, these essays, written by leading theatre historians and critics of the American theatre, will stimulate discussions concerning the traditionally held views of America's theatrical heritage.
Download or read book Music in German Immigrant Theater written by John Koegel and published by University Rochester Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history -- the first ever -- of the abundant traditions of German-American musical theater in New York, and a treasure trove of songs and information.
Download or read book Dancing Till Dawn written by Julie Malnig and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1995-05 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Malnig examines exhibition ballroom dance as both a theatrical genre and a cultural and social phenomenon, promoting new cultural standards, including the emancipation of women and a new casualness and spontaneity between the sexes. A lively and thorough account of a dance form that has found renewed popularity in recent years.
Download or read book American Culture in the 1910s written by Mark Whalan and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-31 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a fresh account of the major cultural and intellectual trends of the United State in the 1910s, a decade characterised by war, the flowering of modernism, the birth of Hollywood, and Progressive interpretations of culture and society. Chapters on fiction and poetry, art and photography, film and vaudeville, and music, theatre, and dance explore these developments, linking detailed commentary with focused case studies of influential texts and events. These range from Tarzan of the Apes to The Birth of a Nation, from the radical modernism of Gertrude Stein and the Provincetown Players to the earliest jazz recordings. A final chapter explores the huge impact of the First World War on cultural understandings of nationalism, citizenship, and propaganda.Key Features*three case studies per chapter featuring key texts, genres, writers and artists*Detailed chronology of 1910s American Culture*Bibliographies for each chapter*Fifteen black and white illustrations
Download or read book Irving Berlin written by Charles Hamm and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-03-13 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irving Berlin remains a central figure in American music, a lyricist/composer whose songs are loved all over the world. His first piece, "Marie from Sunny Italy," was written in 1907, and his "Alexander's Ragtime Band" attracted more public and media attention than any other song of its decade. In later years Berlin wrote such classics as "God Bless America," "Blue Skies," "Always," "Cheek to Cheek," and the holiday favorites "White Christmas" and "Easter Parade." Jerome Kern, his fellow songwriter, commented that "Irving Berlin is American music." In Irving Berlin: The Formative Years, Charles Hamm traces the early years of this most famous and distinctive American songwriter. Beginning with Berlin's immigrant roots--he came to New York in 1893 from Russia--Hamm shows how the young Berlin quickly revealed the talent for music and lyrics that was to mark his entire career. Berlin first wrote for the vaudeville stage, turning out songs that drew on the various ethnic cultures of the city. These pieces, with their Jewish, Italian, German, Irish, and Black protagonists singing in appropriate dialects, reflected the urban mix of New York's melting pot. Berlin drew on various musical styles, especially ragtime, for such songs as "Alexander's Ragtime Band," and Hamm devotes an entire chapter to the song and its success. The book also details Berlin's early efforts to write for the Broadway musical stage, culminating in 1914 with his first musical comedy, Watch Your Step, featuring the popular dance team, Vernon and Irene Castle. A great hit on Broadway and in London, the show was a key piece in the Americanization of the musical comedy. Blessed with prodigious ambition and energy, Berlin wrote at least 4 or 5 new songs a week, many of which were discarded. He nevertheless published 190 songs between 1907 and 1914, an astonishing number considering that when Berlin arrived in America, he knew not a single word of English. As one writer reported, "there is scarcely a waking moment when Berlin is not engaged either in teaching his songs to a vaudeville player, or composing new ones." Early in his career, Irving Berlin brilliantly exploited the musical trends and influences of the day. Hamm shows how Berlin emerged from the vital and complex social and cultural scene of New York to begin his rise as America's foremost songwriter.
Download or read book Making American Culture written by P. Bradley and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-09-14 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a social and cultural history of American culture in the formative years of the twentieth century, examining forms such as vaudeville, early film, popular songs, modernist art, and many others in the context of contemporary social changes.
Download or read book Musical Theater written by Alyson McLamore and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-09-16 with total page 787 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For Surveys of Musical Theater, Music Appreciation courses and Popular Culture Surveys. This unique historical survey illustrates the interaction of multiple artistic and dramatic considerations with an overview of the development of numerous popular musical theater genres. This introduction provides more than a history of musical theater, it studies the music within the shows to provide an understanding of the contributions of musical theater composers as clearly as the artistry of musical theater lyricists and librettists. The familiarity of the musical helps students understand how music functions in a song and a show, while giving them the vocabulary to discuss their perceptions.
Download or read book Silent Film the Triumph of the American Myth written by Paula Marantz Cohen and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cohen argues that silent film allowed America to sever its literary and linguistic ties to Europe and develop an original form of expression compatible with American strengths and weaknesses. She connects the rise of film and the rise of America as a cultural center and 20th century world power.
Download or read book Road Memories written by Michael Hayes and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume is an exploration of the image that is the Traveller/Gypsy, the migrant and the “Other”. Rapid developments as relating to the global flows of cultural diaspora have both overcome spatial/temporal distance and separation and have created enhanced necessity for the exploration of issues relating to cross-cultural and identity representation. In an age of mass migration and mass-media dissemination, a wide combination of forces have ruptured and blurred the borders of the modern nation-state. These forces have created the trans-national contexts for scholarly enquiry as relating to such scholarly disciplines as Irish Studies, Traveller Studies, Romani Studies and Diaspora and Migration Studies. As outlined in these essays, the diversity that encompasses traditionally migrant and diaspora communities such as Travellers and Gypsies frequently disrupt those narratives which have defined hitherto dominant cultures and thereby serve to hybridise the discourse.
