Word: blitzstein
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...Brechtian compilation of songs that depicts the workers of Steeltown, USA standing up the Man. Robbins treats the show as an important cultural moment in which the political and cultural tensions of the decade finally bolted to the surface. The facts of the story are all true and fascinating. Blitzstein, played with suitable gusto by Hank Azaria, wrote the words and music for Cradle in a rush of inspiration, fed up with various forms of prostitution in American life. In Blitzstein's reading of the social climate, virtuous girls were compelled to sell their bodies and young men forced...
...book expertly evokes Welles' wildly inventive productions of the mid-'30s: a "voodoo" Macbeth with the Negro Unit of the WPA's Federal Theater; a Julius Caesar set in Fascist Italy; a violent farce, Horse Eats Hat, with 74 actors; Marc Blitzstein's folk opera The Cradle Will Rock, which the WPA shut down and Welles reopened the same night, marching his cast and audience from the original Broadway house to another, empty one for the triumphant outlaw premiere. There were riots outside Welles' shows--to get in. His work was denounced by the Communist Party and the Hearst papers...
...scholarship to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia gave Rorem entry into the company of the other wunderkinder and their mentors who, from the 1940s on, would do much to define what serious American music was all about: Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Virgil Thomson, Marc Blitzstein, Lukas Foss, Samuel Barber, John Cage. Rorem's feelings of admiration, doubt, jealousy and gratefulness for these figures inspire the sharpest sketches in a book crammed with sharp sketches. On two composers who straddled the concert stage and Broadway: "Lenny Bernstein would never have been quite what he was without the firm example...
...soloist, became the most unexpected classical crossover hit of all time, landing on the British pop charts in 1993. Now Upshaw has another unlikely triumph on her hands: a new album called I Wish It So, which consists of mostly unfamiliar theater songs by Kurt Weill, Marc Blitzstein, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim...
...opera singers have ever seemed so convincing -- and comfortable -- in the Broadway idiom. Upshaw begins with four songs of yearning for love: the album's title number, taken from Blitzstein's 1959 Juno; There Won't Be Trumpets, a song dropped from Sondheim's short-lived 1964 show Anyone Can Whistle; What More Do I Need?, from an unproduced Sondheim musical of 1954, ! Saturday Night; and That's Him, from Weill and Ogden Nash's 1943 One Touch of Venus. Accompanied alternately by small ensembles and an orchestra, Upshaw stakes her claim as theater music's most luminous ingenue since...