The Big Parade

Though Meredith Willson is best remembered for The Music Man, there is a great deal more to his career as a composer and lyricist. In The Big Parade, author Dominic McHugh uses newly uncovered letters, manuscripts, and production files to reveal Willson's unusual combination of experiences in his pre-Broadway career that led him to compose The Music Man.

Eloise and Nanny go to the Fourth of July parade.

The Index of American Periodical Verse is an important work for contemporary poetry research and is an objective measure of poetry that includes poets from the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean as well as other lands, cultures, and times. It reveals trends in the output of particular poets and the cultural influences they represent. The publications indexed cover a broad cross-section of poetry, literary, scholarly, popular, general, and little magazines, journals, and reviews.

In the 1950s, Meredith Willson's The Music Man became the third longest running musical after My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music: a considerable achievement in a decade that saw the premieres of other popular works by Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe, not to mention Frank Loesser's Guys and Dolls and Bernstein and Sondheim's West Side Story. The Music Man remains a popular choice for productions and has been parodied or quoted on television shows ranging from Family Guy to Grace and Frankie. Though Willson is best remembered for The Music Man, there is a great deal more to his career as a composer and lyricist. In The Big Parade, author Dominic McHugh uses newly uncovered letters, manuscripts, and production files to reveal Willson's unusual combination of experiences in his pre-Broadway career that led him to compose The Music Man at the age of 55. McHugh also gives an in depth look at the reception of The Music Man and examines the strengths and weaknesses of Willson's other three musicals, with his sustained commitment to innovation and novelty. The Big Parade is packed with new revelations about the processes involved in writing these works, as well as the trials and tribulations of working in the commercial theatre.

"This is a decodable reader for beginner readers. Lalin is at a big parade. And look! Lalin is in the big parade!"--

A beautiful book that showcases how circus figures and artifacts have been portrayed in art over the past two centuries The circus is a dazzling world filled with acrobats and harlequins, tumblers and riders, monsters and celestial creatures. Now this engaging book sets that world in a new light, examining how painters, sculptors, and photographers from the eighteenth century to the present have used the circus as a springboard for their imaginative expression and have envisioned the clown as a metaphor for the modern artist. The book presents more than 175 works by such artists as Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rouault, Picasso, Chagall, and Léger. Some of these are masterful works shown for the first time; these range from the 18-meter stage curtain Picasso designed in 1917 for Erik Satie's ballet Parade to more intimate works such as Nadar and Tournachon's photographs of Pierrot as played by celebrated mime Charles Debureau.

This book recounts the reception of selected films about the Great War released between 1918 and 1938 in the USA and Great Britain. It discusses the role that popular cinema played in forming and reflecting public opinion about the War and its political and cultural aftermath in both countries. Although the centenary has produced a wide number of studies on the memorialisation of the Great War in Britain and to a lesser degree the USA, none of them focused on audience reception in relation to the Anglo-American ‘circulatory system’ of Trans-Atlantic culture.

Assesses how America’s film industry remembered World War I during the interwar period. This is the definitive account of how America’s film industry remembered and reimagined World War I from the Armistice in 1918 to the outbreak of World War II in 1939. Based on detailed archival research, Michael Hammond shows how the war and the sociocultural changes it brought made their way into cinematic stories and images. He traces the development of the war’s memory in films dealing with combat on the ground and in the air, the role of women behind the lines, returning veterans, and through the social problem and horror genres. Hammond first examines movies that dealt directly with the war and the men and women who experienced it. He then turns to the consequences of the war as they played out across a range of films, some only tangentially related to the conflict itself. Hammond finds that the Great War acted as a storehouse of motifs and tropes drawn upon in the service of an industry actively seeking to deliver clearly told, entertaining stories to paying audiences. Films analyzed include The Big Parade, Grand Hotel, Hell’s Angels, The Black Cat, and Wings. Drawing on production records, set designs, personal accounts, and the advertising and reception of key films, the book offers unique insight into a cinematic remembering that was a product of the studio system as it emerged as a global entertainment industry. “Hammond’s intelligent and insightful account of the formation of cinematic treatments of the Great War in America constitutes a major addition to the critical literature on film. It acts as a prism through which to see refracted multiple themes central to the social and cultural history of the interwar years.” — Jay Winter, author of War beyond Words: Languages of Memory from the Great War to the Present