P R O F. I R I S H . T U A N
A S S O C I AT E P R O F E S S O R
N C T U
A S S I S T E D B Y TA : A N D Y Y E H

Gerald Bordman
Stanley Green
Cecil Smith
Traditional chroniclers of the stage musical—
Gerald Bordman ,
David Ewen ,
Stanley Green ,
Richard Kislan ,
Cecil Smith , etc.—
David Ewen
Hoofing on Broadway: A History of Show Dancing by Richard Kislan (Mar 1987)
Interpret history toward integration of plot and music.
Some very Berkeleyesque posters in U Street.

Show Boat (1927)
Oklahoma!
(1943)
My Fair Lady (1956)

Perhaps the most influential musical of the twentieth century,
Show Boat combined the talents of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, both of whom had felt for some time that
Broadway musical theatre was suffering from a lack of depth and needed to steer away from the fluffy musical comedies and melodramatic operetta that it was accustomed to.
After choosing for their subject Edna Ferber's sprawling novel of life on the Mississippi,
Kern and Hammerstein set out to deal with issues such as unhappy marriages and racial prejudice.
The story, which spans almost fifty years, deals primarily with the fortunes of an impressionable young woman named Magnolia Hawks, her father who owns a show boat named the Cotton Blossom, and a troubled riverboat gambler/actor named Gaylord Ravenal.
Magnolia and Gaylord fall in love while acting on the showboat and eventually marry and move to Chicago.
They separate, however, after Gaylord loses all of their money gambling.
The subplot involves Magnolia's mulatto friend, the tragic Julie La Verne.
Show Boat opened at the Ziegfeld Theatre on December 27, 1927 and ran for 572 performances.
"Show Boat"(1927)
It has been revived numerous times--most successfully by Hal Prince in 1994--and spawned several film versions including the 1936 film with Irene Dunne and the 1951 version with Ava Gardner and Howard Keel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWqG
The original cast included Charles Winninger, Norma Terris, Howard Marsh and Helen Morgan.
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Show Boat "Ol' Man River "

Oklahoma!
is the first musical written by the team of composer Richard Rodgers and librettist
Oscar Hammerstein II. The musical is based on Lynn Riggs' 1931 play, Green Grow the Lilacs.
Set in Oklahoma Territory outside the town of Claremore in 1906, it tells the story of cowboy Curly
McLain and his romance with farm girl Laurey Williams. A secondary romance concerns cowboy
Will Parker and his flirtatious fiancée, Ado Annie.
The original Broadway production opened on March 31, 1943. It was a box-office smash and ran for an unprecedented 2,212 performances, later enjoying award-winning revivals, national tours, foreign productions and an Academy Award-winning 1955 film adaptation. It has long been a popular choice for school and community productions. Rodgers and Hammerstein won a special
Pulitzer Prize for Oklahoma! in 1944.
This musical, building on the innovations of the earlier Show Boat , epitomized the development of the "book musical", a musical play where the songs and dances are fully integrated into a wellmade story with serious dramatic goals that are able to evoke genuine emotions other than laughter . In addition, Oklahoma!
features musical themes, or motifs, that recur throughout the work to connect the music and story.
A fifteen-minute " dream ballet " reflects Laurey's struggle with her feelings about two men, Curley and Jud.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYYb
6yxRRgE
Oklahoma!"(1943) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuMNv8h4ONU
Billy Elliot, O Musical - Dream Ballet

My Fair Lady is a musical based upon George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion , with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe.
The story concerns Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl who takes speech lessons from Professor Henry Higgins, a phoneticist, so that she may pass as a lady.
The original Broadway, London and Film versions all starred Rex
Harrison.
The musical's 1956 Broadway production was a momentous hit, setting what was then the record for the longest run of any major musical theatre production in history.
It was followed by a hit London production, a popular film version, and numerous revivals.
It has been called "the perfect musical." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZhF-
2iiI9Y
Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews in the
Broadway production of My Fair Lady (1956).

Gerald Bordman
American Musical Theater: A Chronicle :
Gerald Bordman
David Ewen

Broadway Musicals, Show By Show - Stanley Green
Hoofing on Broadway: A History of Show Dancing by Richard Kislan (Mar 1987)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8kV9s0QAnU
Cecil Smith - Struggle On
Cecil Smith

Kislan:
“A more fluid and compact union f song and story.”
“character, situation, mood, and theme were placed ahead of hit song, star, gags, and formula.”
“ Show Boat composer Jerome Kern drew on the “leitmotif” theory from opera composition.”
“Music began to personify character, foreshadow mood, echo emotion, underscore dialogue, and parallel the libretto’s emerging patterns of action and rest.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWqGg-KSgkw
Show Boat "Ol' Man River"

These can be narrativization (Patricia
Mellancamp),
A Fine Romance: Five Ages of Film
Feminism (Culture And The Moving
Image) Paperback – January 29,
1996 by Patricia Mellencamp
Patricia Mellancamp

Thomas Schatz

Stanley J. Solomon

Jacque Schultz

J. P. Telotte

Michael Wood

Rick Altman
Silent Film Sound (Film and Culture Series) / Rick Altman: Books

Timothy E. Scheurer

A crazy (but memorable) poster in which my name battles a lion and Tarzan for prominence.
Between integrative (chiefly narrative) &
Non-integrative (chiefly spectacle) elements.
Unresolved tensions.
19 th -century prototypical forms such as ballad opera, comic opera, and operetta.
Contradictory demands of narrative and spectacle.
Predominantly integration-oriented ones
Berkeleyesque is linked to this spectacle-oriented, nonintegrative tradition.

The spectacle-oriented mode of the musical
A conglomeration , the aggregate
(1) P. T. Barnum’s name is mainly associated with the circus.
So-called dime museum (actually charged a quarter).
Popular attraction by adding educational exhibits diverse elements of the
“freak” show, the circus, and the variety show.
Example of an aggregate entertainment form. Included a theater.
(2) The minstrel show. The most popular American entertainment form in the period 1840-80.
Poster for "Tonight and Every Night". This was a
The central emcee and the two disruptive end men.
and Lee Bowman.
vision of the antebellum South.

(3) Vaudeville. A series of separate acts in the music, comedy, and novelty modes.
(4) the medicine show, the Wild West show, the
Tom Show, and burlesque.
(5) the amusement park
(6) Florenz Ziegfeld, creator of the American spectacular revue. E.g. Ziegfeld girls .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlwZfziaEwg
Jazz Age Beauties (1920s Ziegfeld Girls)

The 1888 Broadway revival of Johann Strauss’s
Prince Methusalem ,
A period Ruritanian operetta set in the requisite mythical European principality.
Audiences of the day were more receptive to the concept of a theatrical show as a collection of powerful, autonomous moments and spectacular effects.
Johann Strauss Jr.'s Overtures - Prinz Methusalem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZsrDg3s7fI

Renaissance perspective as the dominant system in Western representational painting
(and photography),
Based on the use of a single dominant center
(the vanishing point) to direct the viewer’s gaze.
Cubism or Oriental art parascan-cubism https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSZMlfm1Ln0 Oriental Art https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qShuse6dR6Q

Used in alternative representational systems
(such as pre-Renaissance, “Pre-Renaissance,”
Oriental, and Cubist art)
Bear a certain analogy to the 19 th -century aggregate forms discussed above.
Pre-Renaissance
Primitive Art Brushes

Footlight Parade is a 1933 American musical film starring James Cagney, Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell and featuring Frank McHugh, Guy Kibbee, Hugh Herbert and Ruth Donnelly.
The movie was written by Manuel Seff and James Seymour from a story by Robert Lord and Peter Milne, and directed by Lloyd Bacon, with musical numbers created and directed by Busby Berkeley.
The film ‘ s songs were written by Harry Warren (music) and Al Dubin
(lyrics) and Sammy Fain (music) and Irving Kahal (lyrics), and include
"By a Waterfall", "Honeymoon Hotel", and "Shanghai Lil."
In 1992, Footlight Parade was selected for preservation in the United
States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being
"culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."
The snowflake scene from the film is featured in Disney's The Great
Movie Ride as part of the attraction.
" Footlight Parade "(1933) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjHunTgbJSU
Footlight Parade (1933) Trailer

spectacle
The large-scale
Object of display
The “integrated” musical
Ballad opera, opera bouffe, comic opera, operetta, the Princess Theatre shows
Absorb the various elements of the show/film/narrative
Ballad opera opera bouffe
Narrative/integrative impulse
Unresolved suspension between aggregative and conventional narrative impulses.
ONCE AT THE PRINCESS THEATRE MELBOURNE -
LIMITED SUMMER SEASON comic opera
Operetta, le spectacle