Word: hammersteins
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...part of a generation that wanted to reinvent both the stage musical and the movie musical. It saw no reason why song and dance shouldn't reflect the realities of everyday life--and at the same time illuminate our everynight dream life. On Broadway it was Rodgers and Hammerstein, abetted by Agnes de Mille, who led this movement. In Hollywood it was producer Arthur Freed's "unit" at MGM, staffed mainly by sophisticated refugees from the East that carried the torch--and found in Kelly the dancer and choreographer who could embody their convictions...
There is a connection, though, between the panoramic prettiness of Show Boat and the searchlight grittiness of Smokey Joe's Cafe. Whether or not they realized it, Leiber and Stoller were accomplishing in the '50s what Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein did in the '20s: translating the black music of church halls and barrooms into sophisticated songs that were at once true to the original spirit and acceptable to a mainstream audience. For L&S, that acceptability was a fluky byproduct of their urge to write rhythm and blues for the "race music" market. They didn't need to dilute...
Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II put Edna Ferber's panoramic novel onstage in 1927. It keeps on rollin' in Harold Prince's vigorous Broadway version of the old paddlewheel musical. The story still works, the great score is well sung, and Lonette McKee makes for a lustrous, heartbreaking Julie...
...aspired to be Hamlet or Death of a Salesman is wrong. Even in the heyday of Harrigan and Hart and Cohan, it was the music and the production numbers that drove the action. Who today remembers the plot of a single Gershwin show? True, it was Hammerstein who condensed Ferber and gave her characters sharp, affecting lyrics to sing. But it was Kern, in a majestic score that moves fluidly and freely among such disparate idioms as vaudeville (Life Upon the Wicked Stage), the Viennese waltz (You Are Love) and the flat-out operatic (Make Believe), who gave them life...
Thus the selection of the musical numbers is crucial. But how to choose? In their attempt to embrace nearly the whole of the novel, Kern and Hammerstein wrote a great deal of material that was later discarded. Trying to piece together an "authentic" version of a show with more variant editions than Boris Godunov, therefore, is nearly impossible. Wisely, this production restores one of the early casualties, the chorus Mis'ry's Comin' Aroun', a plaintive lament that acts as a kind of fate motive throughout the show (it is heard in the orchestra, for example, when...