Download or read book Cultural Identity in British Musical Theatre 1890 1939 written by Ben Macpherson and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-15 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the performance of ‘Britishness’ on the musical stage. Covering a tumultuous period in British history, it offers a fresh look at the vitality and centrality of the musical stage, as a global phenomenon in late-Victorian popular culture and beyond. Through a re-examination of over fifty archival play-scripts, the book comprises seven interconnected stories told in two parts. Part One focuses on domestic and personal identities of ‘Britishness’, and how implicit anxieties and contradictions of nationhood, class and gender were staged as part of the popular cultural condition. Broadening in scope, Part Two offers a revisionary reading of Empire and Otherness on the musical stage, and concludes with a consideration of the Great War and the interwar period, as musical theatre performed a nostalgia for a particular kind of ‘Britishness’, reflecting the anxieties of a nation in decline.
Download or read book British and American Musical Theatre Exchanges in the West End 1924 1970 written by Arianne Johnson Quinn and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-11-08 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This monograph centres on the history of musical theatre in a space of cultural significance for British identity, namely the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, which housed many prominent American productions from 1924-1970. It argues that during this period Drury Lane was the site of cultural exchanges between Britain and the United States that were a direct result of global engagement in two world wars and the evolution of both countries as imperial powers. The critical and public response to works of musical theatre during this period, particularly the American musical, demonstrates the shifting response by the public to global conflict, the rise of an American Empire in the eyes of the British government, and the ongoing cultural debates about the role of Americans in British public life. By considering the status of Drury Lane as a key site of cultural and political exchanges between the United States and Britain, this study allows us to gain a more complete portrait of the musical’s cultural significance in Britain.
Download or read book Musical Comedy on the West End Stage 1890 1939 written by L. Platt and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-03-09 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers the first full historical treatment of a music theatre that was once at the centre of London's West End. From the late Victorian period to the early 1920s, musical comedy was the single most popular form of 'legitimate' theatre entertainment. This lively account establishes musical comedy as one of the first industrial cultures and offers fascinating insights into how it functioned ideologically as a celebrated embracing of the modern condition.
Download or read book Reviewing the Situation written by John Snelson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-10-05 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The British musical in its formative years has appeared in strikingly different guises: from the lasting hits of Oliver!, and Me and My Girl, to the successes of The Dancing Years, Bless the Bride and Expresso Bongo. This authoritative study traces what made these shows successes in the West End and how their qualities define a uniquely British interpretation of the genre. Cultural, sociological and political influences entwine with close reading of the dramatic and musical elements of this repertory to reveal a fascinating web of connections and contrasts between the times, the shows and the people who made them. Through detailed case studies, such as of The Boy Friend and Bitter Sweet, the rich individuality of each West End work is spotlighted, posing vital questions and intriguing answers as to what a British musical can be. Interdisciplinary in nature, this study brings together all the core materials to discover this period in the story of the British musical. Reviewing the Situation is insightful and lively, an invaluable resource for students and scholars of musical theatre and all those theatregoers drawn to the power of these classic British shows.
Download or read book Musical Theatre Histories written by Millie Taylor and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-10-20 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Musical theatre is often perceived as either a Broadway based art form, or as having separate histories in London and New York. Musical Theatre Histories: Expanding the Narrative, however, depicts the musical as neither American nor British, but both and more, having grown out of frequent and substantial interactions between both centres (and beyond). Through multiple thematic 'histories', Millie Taylor and Adam Rush take readers on a series of journeys that include the art form's European and American origins, African American influences, negotiations arounddiversity, national identity, and the globalisation of the form, as well as revival culture, censorship and the place of social media in the 21st century. Each chapter includes case studies and key concept boxes to identify, explain and contextualise important discussions, offering an accessible study of a dynamic and ever evolving medium. Written and developed for undergraduate students, this introductory textbook provides a newly focused and alternative way of understanding musical theatre history.
Download or read book An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre written by Sean Mayes and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2021-08-26 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A radically urgent intervention, An Inconvenient Black History of British Musical Theatre: 1900 - 1950 uncovers the hidden Black history of this most influential of artforms. Drawing on lost archive material and digitised newspapers from the turn of the century onwards, this exciting story has been re-traced and restored to its rightful place. A vital and significant part of British cultural history between 1900 and 1950, Black performance practice was fundamental to resisting and challenging racism in the UK. Join Mayes (a Broadway- and Toronto-based Music Director) and Whitfield (a musical theatre historian and researcher) as they take readers on a journey through a historically-inconvenient and brilliant reality that has long been overlooked. Get to know the Black theatre community in London's Roaring 20s, and hear about the secret Florence Mills memorial concert they held in 1928. Acquaint yourself with Buddy Bradley, Black tap and ballet choreographer, who reshaped dance in British musicals - often to be found at Noël Coward's apartment for late-night rehearsals, such was Bradley's importance. Meet Jack Johnson, the first African American Heavyweight Boxing Champion, who toured Britain's theatres during World War 1 and brought the sounds of Chicago to places like war-weary Dundee. Discover the most prolific Black theatre practitioner you've never heard of, William Garland, who worked for 40 years across multiple continents and championed Black British performers. Marvel at performers like cabaret star Mabel Mercer, born in Stafford in 1900, who sang and conducted theatre orchestras across the UK, as well as Black Birmingham comedian Eddie Emerson, who was Garland's partner for decades. Many of their names and works have never been included in histories of the British musical - until now.
Download or read book The Mikado to Matilda written by Thomas S. Hischak and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-05-29 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Mikado to Matilda: British Musicals on the New York Stage, Thomas Hischak provides an overview of British musicals that made their way to Broadway, covering their entire history up to the present day. This is the first book to look at the British musical theatre with reference to those London musicals that were also produced in New York City. The book covers 110 British musicals, ranging from 1750 to the present day, including the popular Gilbert and Sullivan comic operettas during the Victorian era, the Andrew Lloyd Webber mega-musicals of the late twentieth century, and today's biggest hits such as Matilda. Each London musical is discussed first as a success in England and then how it fared in America. The plots, songs, songwriters, performers, and producers for both the West End and the Broadway (or Off Broadway) production are identified and described. The discussion is sometimes critical, evaluating the musicals and why they were or were not a success in New York.
Download or read book The Year that Made the Musical written by William A. Everett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-07-11 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether they appeared on Broadway or the Strand, the shows appearing in 1924 epitomized the glamor of popular musical theatre. What made this particular year so distinctive – so special – was the way it brought together the old and the new, the venerated and the innovative, and the traditional and the chic. William Everett, in his compelling new book, reveals this remarkable mid-Roaring Twenties stagecraft to have been truly transnational, with a stellar cast of producers, performers and creators boldly experimenting worldwide. Revues, musical comedies, zarzuelas and operettas formed part of a thriving theatrical ecosystem, with many works – and their leading artists – now unpredictably defying genres. The author demonstrates how fresh approaches became highly successful, with established leads like Marie Tempest and Fred Stone appearing in new productions even as youthful talents such as Florence Mills, Fred and Adele Astaire, Gertrude Lawrence and George Gershwin now started to make their mark.
Download or read book Blockbusters of Victorian Theater 1850 1910 written by Paul Fryer and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2023-11-15 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection of essays details a wide-ranging selection of some of the most sensationally successful theatre productions of the long Victorian era, the real "blockbusters" of the age. Ranging from the world of operetta and music hall to spectacular drama and sensational melodrama, the productions included provide the reader with definitive proof that the phenomenon of the "smash hit" show is not restricted to modern Broadway. This is a world that encompassed the ground-breaking stage technology of Ben Hur, the wide political impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin and the sheer creative originality of L'Enfant Prodigue. Supporting the "star" system, productions featured some of the greatest names of the period - Sir Henry Irving, Sir Johnston Forbes Robertson, James O'Neill and Dion Boucicault. This was the very dawning of a new media age, which saw many of the productions transfer to the new world of silent cinema for the very first time
Download or read book Genre Beyond Borders written by Bruno Bower and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-12-18 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an innovative approach to understanding operetta, drawing attention to its malleability and resistance to boundaries. These shows have traversed (and continue to traverse) with ease the national borders which might superficially define them, or draw on features from many other genres without fundamentally changing in tone or approach. The chapters move from nineteenth-century London and Paris to twentieth-century North America, South America and Europe to present-day Australia. Some offer fresh understandings of familiar composers, such as Johann Strauss or Gilbert and Sullivan, while others examine works or composers that are less well-known. The chapter on Socialist operetta in Czechoslovakia in particular will almost certainly be a revelation to anyone from Western Europe or the US, where operetta is often understood to be a bourgeois phenomenon. As a summary of the current state of the field, this collection showcases the many possible pathways for future scholars who wish to explore it.
Download or read book Music in Edwardian London written by Simon McVeigh and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2024-05-21 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traversing London's musical culture, this book boldly illuminates the emergence of Edwardian London as a beacon of musical innovation. The dawning of a new century saw London emerge as a hub in a fast-developing global music industry, mirroring Britain's pivotal position between the continent, the Americas and the British Empire. It was a period of expansion, experiment and entrepreneurial energy. Rather than conservative and inward-looking, London was invigorated by new ideas, from pioneering musical comedy and revue to the modernist departures of Debussy and Stravinsky. Meanwhile, Elgar, Holst, Vaughan Williams, and a host of ambitious younger composers sought to reposition British music in a rapidly evolving soundscape. Music was central to society at every level. Just as opulent theatres proliferated in the West End, concert life was revitalised by new symphony orchestras, by the Queen's Hall promenade concerts, and by Sunday concerts at the vast Albert Hall. Through innumerable band and gramophone concerts in the parks, music from Wagner to Irving Berlin became available as never before. The book envisions a burgeoning urban culture through a series of snapshots - daily musical life in all its messy diversity. While tackling themes of cosmopolitanism and nationalism, high and low brows, centres and peripheries, it evokes contemporary voices and characterful individuals to illuminate the period. Challenging issues include the barriers faced by women and people of colour, and attitudes inhibiting the new generation of British composers - not to mention embedded imperialist ideologies reflecting London's precarious position at the centre of Empire. Engagingly written, Simon McVeigh's groundbreaking book reveals the exhilarating transformation of music in Edwardian London, which laid the foundations for the century to come.
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Global Stage Musical written by Robert Gordon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-11-14 with total page 1001 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stage musical constitutes a major industry not only in the US and the UK, but in many regions of the world. Over the last four decades many countries have developed their own musical theatre industries, not only by importing hit shows from Broadway and London but also by establishing or reviving local traditions of musical theatre. In response to the rapid growth of musical theatre as a global phenomenon, The Oxford Handbook of the Global Stage Musical presents new scholarly approaches to issues arising from these new international markets. The volume examines the stage musical from theoretical and empirical perspectives including concepts of globalization and consumer culture, performance and musicological analysis, historical and cultural studies, media studies, notions of interculturalism and hybridity, gender studies, and international politics. The thirty-three essays investigate major aspects of the global musical, such as the dominance of Western colonialism in its early production and dissemination, racism and sexism--both in representation and in the industry itself--as well as current conflicts between global and local interests in postmodern cultures. Featuring contributors from seventeen countries, the essays offer informed insider perspectives that reflect the diversity of the subject and offer in-depth examinations of specific cultural and economic systems. Together, they conduct penetrating comparative analysis of musical theatre in different contexts as well as a survey of the transcultural spread of musicals.
Download or read book The Globalization of Theatre 1870 1930 written by Christopher B. Balme and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the fascinating career of Maurice E. Bandmann and his global theatrical circuit in the early twentieth century.
Download or read book Singing Utopia written by Ben Macpherson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2024-12-03 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Singing Utopia is an original study of voice in musical theatre. Rather than focusing on how actors sing or analysing voices using established approaches found in opera studies, this book offers readers ways to understand musical theatre voices from a cultural perspective. It argues that musical theatre singing allows listeners and audiences to escape their everyday lives; and that voices can 'be' utopian. It then considers what this means and uncovers some paradoxes and difficulties in this idea. Introducing a new set of terms, it provides a way to listen to, think about, and even perform, voice in popular musical theatre.
Download or read book The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical written by Jessica Sternfeld and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-08-16 with total page 715 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Companion to the Contemporary Musical is dedicated to the musical’s evolving relationship to American culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the past decade-and-a-half, international scholars from an ever-widening number of disciplines and specializations have been actively contributing to the interdisciplinary field of musical theater studies. Musicals have served not only to mirror the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural tenor of the times, but have helped shape and influence it, in America and across the globe: a genre that may seem, at first glance, light-hearted and escapist serves also as a bold commentary on society. Forty-four essays examine the contemporary musical as an ever-shifting product of an ever-changing culture. This volume sheds new light on the American musical as a thriving, contemporary performing arts genre, one that could have died out in the post-Tin Pan Alley era but instead has managed to remain culturally viable and influential, in part by newly embracing a series of complex contradictions. At present, the American musical is a live, localized, old-fashioned genre that has simultaneously developed into an increasingly globalized, tech-savvy, intensely mediated mass entertainment form. Similarly, as it has become increasingly international in its scope and appeal, the stage musical has also become more firmly rooted to Broadway—the idea, if not the place—and thus branded as a quintessentially American entertainment.
Download or read book Somatic Voices in Performance Research and Beyond written by Christina Kapadocha and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-21 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Somatic Voices in Performance Research and Beyond brings together a community of international practitioner-researchers who explore voice through soma or soma through voice. Somatic methodologies offer research processes within a new area of vocal, somatic and performance praxis. Voice work and theoretical ideas emerge from dance, acting and performance training while they also move beyond commonly recognized somatics and performance processes. From philosophies and pedagogies to ethnic-racial and queer studies, this collection advances embodied aspects of voices, the multidisciplinary potentialities of somatic studies, vocal diversity and inclusion, somatic modes of sounding, listening and writing voice. Methodologies that can be found in this collection draw on: eastern traditions body psychotherapy-somatic psychology Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Method Authentic Movement, Body-Mind Centering, Continuum Movement, Integrative Bodywork and Movement Therapy Fitzmaurice Voicework, Linklater Technique, Roy Hart Method post-Stanislavski and post-Grotowski actor-training traditions somaesthetics The volume also includes contributions by the founders of: Shin Somatics, Body and Earth, Voice Movement Integration SOMart, Somatic Acting Process This book is a polyphonic and multimodal compilation of experiential invitations to each reader’s own somatic voice. It culminates with the "voices" of contributing participants to a praxical symposium at East 15 Acting School in London (July 19–20, 2019). It fills a significant gap for scholars in the fields of voice studies, theatre studies, somatic studies, artistic research and pedagogy. It is also a vital read for graduate students, doctoral and postdoctoral researchers.
Download or read book Polish Theatre Revisited written by Agata Luksza and published by University of Iowa Press. This book was released on 2024-01-19 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Polish Theatre Revisited explores nineteenth-century Polish theatre through the lens of theatre audiences. Agata Łuksza places special emphasis on the most engaged spectators, known as “theatremaniacs”—from what they wore, to what they bought, to what they ate. Her source material is elusive ephemera from fans’ lives, such as notes scribbled on a weekly list of shows in the Warsaw theatres, collections of theatre postcards, and recipes for sweets named after famous actors. The fannish behavior of theatremaniacs was usually deemed excessive or in poor taste by people in positions of power, as it clashed with the ongoing embourgeoisement of the theatre and the disciplining of audiences. Nevertheless, the theatre was one of the key areas where early fan cultures emerged, and theatremaniacs indulged in diverse fan practices in opposition to the forces reforming the theatre and its spectatorship.
