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The Shuberts and Their Passing Shows by Jonas Westover Pdf
The Shubert name has been synonymous with Broadway for almost as long as Broadway entertainment itself. In The Shuberts and Their Passing Shows: The Untold Tale of Ziegfeld's Rivals, author Jonas Westover investigates beyond the Shuberts' business empire into their early revues and the centrifugal role they played in developing American theatre as an art form.
All the Years of American Popular Music by David Ewen Pdf
Surveys the history of all categories of American popular music from colonial times to the present, with information on the music, composers, performers, and entrepreneurs.
With the founding of the Shubert Organization some ninety years ago, the Shubert brothers set the stage for Broadway as we know it today. Indeed, their name has become virtually synonymous with the Great White Way. The heart of Manhattan's theatre district--Forty-forth and Forty-fifth Streets between Broadway and Eighth Avenue--is lined with monuments to their extraordinary careers, including the Imperial, Majestic, Booth, Plymouth, and Broadhurst theatres and, of course, Shubert Alley itself. Legendary for their eccentric behavior and their uncanny ability to turn a profit even during the industry's toughest times, the Shuberts are part and parcel of Broadway's colorful lore. In The Shuberts of Broadway, Brooks McNamara combs the holdings of the newly created Shubert Archive--a remarkable collection of some four million papers, playbills, architectural plans, photographs, press clips, scripts, costume designs, letters, and other Shubert memorabilia--to re-create the lives of Sam, Lee, and J. J. Shubert. In lively prose and more than 200 fully captioned illustrations, McNamara follows the Shuberts from their early years, when the teen-aged Sam became head of the box office at the Wieting Theatre in downtown Syracuse, through the building of their empire and the Broadway boom of the 1920s (when the Shuberts owned or operated 104 theatres and booked nearly a thousand more), and on to their last days, when their producing careers ended amid controversy. We see the often-stormy relations among the frail, charismatic Sam (who died in a train crash in 1905), the aloof Lee (dubbed "The Wooden Indian"), and their mercurial brother J.J., and their collective, continual battle against the Syndicate that dominated the theatre scene. Here we learn the real stories behind the popular entertainment that rolled off their theatrical assembly line and earned them fame: La Belle Paree, which featured Al Jolson at the Winter Garden; The Passing Show, a "girlie" revue that was full of such talents as Ed Wynn, Fred and Adele Astaire, George Jessel, and a chorus girl named Lucille Le Sueur, who later became known as Joan Crawford; Blossom Time, one of operetta's greatest hits; and The Student Prince, a theatrical bonanza composed by the great Sigmund Romberg. Filled with real-life plots, intrigues, and characters that capture the imagination, the story of the Shuberts is every bit as entertaining as the Broadway they helped to create.
"Oh, the shark has pretty teeth, dear, And he shows them pearly white. Just a jackknife has Macheath, dear, And he keeps it out of sight. The words are by Bertolt Brecht. The music is by Kurt Weill. The song is "Mack the Knife," the number-one song of Weill's internationally famous "Threepenny Opera, originally performed on a stage in the Weimar Berlin of 1928. Its tough, sexy sound became, a quarter-century later, a signature song of America's greatest recording stars, among them Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra. And when in 1933 Weill, already Germany's most renowned composer, fled the Nazis to come to America ("For every age there is a place about which fantasies are written. In Mozart's time it was Turkey. For Shakespeare, it was Italy. For us in Germany, it was always America"), he joined his appetite for the United States to his European roots and classical training and soon became one of the most admired composers of the American musical stage. He wrote one successful Broadway show after another--"Lady in the Dark, "Knickerbocker Holiday," One Touch of Venus, "Street Scene, "Lost in the Stars, among others. He worked with such theatrical greats as Gertrude Lawrence, Ira Gershwin, Maxwell Anderson, Mary Martin, Agnes de Mille, Joshua Logan, Ogden Nash, Harold Clurman, Walter Huston, E. Y. Harburg, and Elia Kazan. Always at the center of his life was his great love of thirty years, his leading lady, interpreter of his music, his wife (they were divorced in Berlin in 1933 but remarried four years later in America), the actress-singer Lotte Lenya. Foster Hirsch, using Weill's letters, journals, and notes, and interviewing Weill's friends and colleagues, writes about his life, his experimental, political composing in Germany, his Broadway music in America--both aspects of his work being a source of controversy among music lovers for years. Lotte Lenya said, "There is no American Weill, there is no German Weill. There is no difference between them. There is only Weill." Hirsch details the writing, casting, and production of Weill's eleven hit shows. He writes about Weill's years in Hollywood and the friends he made and lost along the way. He evokes Weill's complicated, intense collaborations with Brecht, Maxwell Anderson, Langston Hughes, Alan Jay Lerner, Elmer Rice, Moss Hart, and Ira Gershwin. In "Kurt Weill on Stage, Hirsch has given us a vivid portrayal of a remarkable artist and a fabulous era of American musical theater.