Knickerbocker Holiday

The Broadway musical has greatly influenced American (and world) culture. Such shows as Oklahoma! and Annie Get Your Gun are as 'American as apple pie,' while the long runs of imports like Cats, The Phantom of the Opera, and Les MisZrables have broken records. Broadway has produced such cultural icons as Ethel Merman, Yul Brynner, and Julie Andrews, and composers and lyricists such as Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Andrew Lloyd Webber, and many others have had their melodies sung on its stages. Visionaries like George Abbott, Agnes de Mille, Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Tommy Tune, and Susan Stroman have brought productions to life through their innovative direction and choreography. Since the latter part of the 19th century, the Broadway musical has remained one of the most popular genres in entertainment and its history is related in detail in The A to Z of the Broadway Musical. Through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and 900 dictionary entries on Broadway shows, playwrights, directors, producers, designers, and actors, this handy desk reference offers quick information on the many aspects of the Broadway musical.

National Theatre, direction Rapley Theatre Company, Edmund Plohn, manager, The Playwrights' Company, Maxwell Anderson, S.N. Behrman, Sidney Howard, Elmer Rice, and Robert E. Sherwood present Walter Huston in "Knickerbocker Holiday," a new musical comedy, book and lyrics by Maxwell Anderson, music by Kurt Weill, entire production staged by Joshua Logan, production designed by Jo Mielziner, costumes designed by Frank Bevan, orchestra under the direction of Maurice De Abravanel, dances by Carl Randall and Edwin Denby.

From the 1920s through the 1950s Maxwell Anderson was one of the most important playwrights in America. His thirty-three produced plays make him a leader among these playwrights of America's most creative era in the theater, and a number of his plays have shown a lasting vitality and importance. What Price Glory (1924) dramatized the disillusionment and horror of World War I . With Elizabeth the Queen (1929), Winterset (1935), and High Tor (1936), Anderson revived poetic drama in the modern theater. His versatility as a playwright was further reflected in the satire Both Your Houses (1933), the historical parable Joan of Lorraine (1946), and the musical play Lost in the Stars (1949). This edition of Anderson's letters spans his adult life -- from 1912, shortly after he graduated from the University of North Dakota, to 1958, just before his death. Arranged chronologically, the letters reveal in full and intimate detail the development of his career, his methods of work, his relationships with theater people, his conceptions of himself as a playwright and of the nature of the theater, and his ideas about his plays, all of which focused on an inner moral struggle. Every aspect of his work and personality emerges in these letters, which serve as an autobiography in the rough. Each letter is fully annotated, permitting the reader to become a party to the correspondence. The editor has provided an informative introduction to the letters and also a substantial chronology of Anderson's life that incorporates the first complete bibliography of his plays, poems, essays, fiction, and screenplays. An appendix includes Anderson's previously unpublished statements about his life and his plays. Dramatist in America, the first edition of letters by a major American playwright, takes on added importance for its representative quality. It reveals the cultural and theatrical conditions under which a vital generation of playwrights created this country's finest period in the drama.

"Knickerbocker Holiday is a 1938 musical with music by composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950) and book and lyrics by Maxwell Anderson (1888-1959), based loosely on Washington Irving's Father Knickerbocker's Stories about life in 17th century New Netherland (old New York). The musical numbers include 'September Song,' now considered a pop standard. The play is both a romantic comedy and a thinly veiled allegory equating the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt with fascism. Playwright Anderson believed that government was necessary in society, but that it must always be watched because it is swayed by the self-interests of those in power. He saw FDR's New Deal as another example of the corporatism and concentration of political power which had given rise to Nazism and Stalinism...."--vendor statement.

This wide-ranging, two-volume encyclopedia of musicals old and new will captivate young fans—and prove invaluable to those contemplating staging a musical production. Written with high school students in mind, The World of Musicals: An Encyclopedia of Stage, Screen, and Song encompasses not only Broadway and film musicals, but also made-for-television musicals, a genre that has been largely ignored. The two volumes cover significant musicals in easily accessible entries that offer both useful information and fun facts. Each entry lists the work's writers, composers, directors, choreographers, and cast, and includes a song list, a synopsis, and descriptions of the original production and important revivals or remakes. Biographical entries share the stories of some of the brightest and most celebrated talents in the business. The encyclopedia will undoubtedly ignite and feed student interest in musical theatre. At the same time, it will prove a wonderful resource for teachers or community theatre directors charged with selecting and producing shows. In fact, anyone interested in theatre, film, television, or music will be fascinated by the work's tantalizing bits of historical and theatre trivia.

“This book, the first scholarly consideration of Weill’s complete output of stage works, is without doubt the most important critical study of the composer’s oeuvre to date in any language. Hinton’s scholarship is superior and his insights original and illuminating. The product of several decades of engagement with Weill’s works, their sources and reception, as well as the secondary literature, the book is a stunning achievement. Brilliantly conceived and executed, it will take its place as one of the cornerstones of Weill studies.”—Kim H. Kowalke, University of Rochester and President, Kurt Weill Foundation for Music “In Weill’s Musical Theater: Stages of Reform, Stephen Hinton reminds us that Kurt Weill was always a revolutionary. The composer’s insistent dedication to a provocative, constantly evolving lyric theater that spoke directly to audiences meant that Weill remained as controversial as he was popular. The celebrity that endeared him to Broadway made him anathema in Berlin. Some sixty years after Weill’s death, Hinton is finally able to demonstrate the consistent brilliance, theatrical power, and coherence of a composer who revolutionized every genre he touched (or used) and whose collaborators read as a who’s who of twentieth-century theater.” —David Savran, author of Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class "Stephen Hinton presents us with an image of Weill that is at once monumental yet still alive. A truly Protean figure, Weill is not an easy man to grasp in his totality; Brecht once wrote that a man thrown into water will have to develop webbed feet, and as a refugee from Nazi Germany, Weill had to become a cultural amphibian. But in Weill's Musical Theater we see the composer from every angle: through the gaze of countless critics and reviewers, through Weill's own eyes, and finally through the filter of Hinton's judicious, focused prose. This account will stand."—Daniel Albright, author of Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts

This comprehensive musical theatre reference book chronicles the work of Broadway's great composers, from 1904 to 1999. Nine hundred shows and almost 9000 show tunes are included, comprising the entire theatrical output of 36 important Broadway composers along with notable musicals by others.