Broadway Musicals Show By Show 2006 2013 Songbook

(Piano/Vocal/Guitar Songbook). 31 shows are covered in the latest addition to this unique series, which showcases piano/vocal arrangements of Broadway's biggest hits year-by-year and show-by-show. A sampling of the shows covered include: Spring Awakening (2006) * Legally Blonde (2007) * In the Heights (2008) * Memphis (2009) * The Addams Family (2010) * The Book of Mormon (2011) * Once (2012) * A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder (2013) * and many more.

The Great American Songbooks shows how popular music shapes and permeates a host of modernism's hallmark texts. Austin Graham begins his study of 20th-century texts with a discussion of American popular music and literature in the 19th century. He posits Walt Whitman as a proto-modernist who drew on his love of opera to create the epic free-verse poetry that would heavily influence his bardic successors. One can witness this in T. S. Eliot, whose poem The Waste Land relies on Whitman's verse style to emphasize how 19th-century structures of feeling regarding music persist into the 20th century. From opera and standards of the Victorian musical hall, Graham moves to the blues to reveal the multifaceted ways it shaped works in the Harlem Renaissance, most notably in the verse of Langston Hughes and Jean Toomer's stream-of-consciousness masterpiece, Cane. The second half of Songbooks advances an argument for a musical eclecticism that arose alongside rapid industrialization. Writers like Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos, Graham argues, developed a notion of musical eclecticism to help them process—or cope—with the unprecedented invasiveness of popular music, particularly in major cities. This eclecticism runs counter to critics like Adorno who equate popular music with mass produced mechanisms such as the phonograph and radio, and thus with degraded, cultural forms. In conclusion, Graham suggests how modernist writers experienced, and sometimes theorized, a more nuanced, sophisticated, and fluid mode of interaction with popular music.

While the 1960s may have been a decade of significant upheaval in America, it was also one of the richest periods in musical theatre history. Shows produced on Broadway during this time include such classics as Bye, Bye Birdie; Cabaret; Camelot; Hello Dolly!; Fiddler on the Roof; How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying; Oliver!; and Man of La Mancha. Performers such as Dick Van Dyke, Anthony Newley, Jerry Orbach, and Barbara Streisand made their marks, and other talents—such as Bob Fosse, John Kander, Fred Ebb, Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe, Jerome Robbins, and Stephen Sondheim—also contributed to shows. In The Complete Book of 1960s Broadway Musicals, Dan Dietz examines every musical and revue that opened on Broadway during the 1960s. In addition to providing details on every hit and flop, Dietz includes revivals and one-man and one-woman shows that centered on stars like Jack Benny, Maurice Chevalier, Marlene Dietrich, Danny Kaye, Yves Montand, and Lena Horne. Each entry consists of: Opening and closing dates Plot summaries Cast members Number of performances Names of all important personnel, including writers, composers, directors, choreographers, producers, and musical directors Musical numbers and the names of performers who introduced the songs Production data, including information about tryouts Source material Critical commentary Tony awards and nominations Details about London and other foreign productions In addition to entries for each production, the book offers numerous appendixes: a discography, film and television versions, published scripts, Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and lists of productions by the New York City Center Light Opera Company, the New York City Opera Company, and the Music Theatre of Lincoln Center. A treasure trove of information,this significant resource will be of use to scholars, historians, and casual fans of one of the greatest decades in musical theatre history.

The Broadway musical came of age in the 1950s, a period in which some of the greatest productions made their debuts. Shows produced on Broadway during this decade include such classics as Damn Yankees, Fiorello!, Guys and Dolls, The King and I, Kismet, The Most Happy Fella, My Fair Lady, The Pajama Game, Peter Pan, The Sound of Music, and West Side Story. Among the performers who made their marks were Julie Andrews, Bob Fosse, Carol Lawrence, and Gwen Verdon, while other talents who contributed to shows include Leonard Bernstein, Oscar Hammerstein II, Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe, Cole Porter, Jerome Robbins, Richard Rodgers, and Stephen Sondheim. In The Complete Book of 1950s Broadway Musicals, Dan Dietz examines in detail every musical and revue which opened on Broadway during the 1950s. In addition to providing details on every hit and flop that debuted during the decade, this book includes revivals, and one-man and one-woman shows. Each entry contains the following information: Opening and closing dates Plot summary Cast members Number of performances Names of all important personnel including writers, composers, directors, choreographers, producers, and musical directors Musical numbers and the names of performers who introduced the songs Production data, including information about tryouts Source material Critical commentary Tony awards and nominations Details about London and other foreign productions Besides separate entries for each production, the book offers numerous appendices, such as a discography, film and television versions, published scripts, Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and lists of productions by the New York City Center Light Opera Company, and the New York City Opera Company. A treasure trove of information, The Complete Book of 1950s Broadway Musicals provides readers with a complete view of each show. This significant resource will be of use to scholars, historians, and casual fans of one of the greatest decades in musical theatre history.

In Songbooks, critic and scholar Eric Weisbard offers a critical guide to books on American popular music from William Billings's 1770 New-England Psalm-Singer to Jay-Z's 2010 memoir Decoded. Drawing on his background editing the Village Voice music section, coediting the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and organizing the Pop Conference, Weisbard connects American music writing from memoirs, biographies, and song compilations to blues novels, magazine essays, and academic studies. The authors of these works are as diverse as the music itself: women, people of color, queer writers, self-educated scholars, poets, musicians, and elites discarding their social norms. Whether analyzing books on Louis Armstrong, the Beatles, and Madonna; the novels of Theodore Dreiser, Gayl Jones, and Jennifer Egan; or varying takes on blackface minstrelsy, Weisbard charts an alternative history of American music as told through its writing. As Weisbard demonstrates, the most enduring work pursues questions that linger across time period and genre—cultural studies in the form of notes on the fly, on sounds that never cease to change meaning.

Hollywood's conversion to sound in the 1920s created an early peak in the film musical, following the immense success of The Jazz Singer. The opportunity to synchronize moving pictures with a soundtrack suited the musical in particular, since the heightened experience of song and dance drew attention to the novelty of the technological development. Until the near-collapse of the genre in the 1960s, the film musical enjoyed around thirty years of development, as landmarks such as The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St Louis, Singin' in the Rain, and Gigi showed the exciting possibilities of putting musicals on the silver screen. The Oxford Handbook of Musical Theatre Screen Adaptations traces how the genre of the stage-to-screen musical has evolved, starting with screen adaptations of operettas such as The Desert Song and Rio Rita, and looks at how the Hollywood studios in the 1930s exploited the publication of sheet music as part of their income. Numerous chapters examine specific screen adaptations in depth, including not only favorites such as Annie and Kiss Me, Kate but also some of the lesser-known titles like Li'l Abner and Roberta and problematic adaptations such as Carousel and Paint Your Wagon. Together, the chapters incite lively debates about the process of adapting Broadway for the big screen and provide models for future studies.

Lively, sophisticated, and filled with first-person tributes and glorious images, Sondheim: His Life, His Shows, His Legacy lifts the curtain on a Broadway legend. "Aside from Sondheim's own exceptional books...this may be the best coffee-table volume devoted to his work."(Shelf Awareness) Brimming with insights from a veritable Who's Who of Broadway Babies and complemented by more than two hundred color and black-and-white images, Sondheim: His Life, His Shows, His Legacy offers a witty, multidimensional look at the musical genius behind Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Into the Woods, Sunday in the Park with George, Sweeney Todd, and the landmark West Side Story and Gypsy. Exploring the unique bond between Sondheim and his audiences, author Stephen M. Silverman further examines the challenging Sondheim works that continue to develop devoted new followings: Anyone Can Whistle, Pacific Overtures, Merrily We Roll Along, Assassins, and Passion. The result is a lavish, highly engrossing documentation of the dynamic force who reshaped twentieth-century American musical history.