Word: hammersteins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...easy to say what's wrong with Show Boat, the seminal 1927 musical by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II that steamed onto Broadway this week in an $8.5 million blaze of spectacular stagecraft. Based on Edna Ferber's novel about a floating theater on the Mississippi River, the show has always been too long and thematically sprawling. The most engaging characters, the light- skinned black Julie and her white husband Steve, virtually disappear before the intermission, while the coincidence-plagued second act rambles episodically from 1889 to 1927. Over the years, some critics have found the treatment of blacks...
...nearly two years a half-century ago, the original version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel played across the street from their original Oklahoma! To most devotees of musical theater, that era seems like heaven. It is obligatory among the ardent to deride today's Broadway blockbusters as vastly inferior to the hits of yesteryear and to cry out, If only they made 'em like they used to. To me, the Broadway opening last week of a revival of Carousel prompts the thought: Thank God they don't. I'd far rather see Miss Saigon for a fifth time...
...music in Carousel is lovely but corny. Anyway, the essence of a book musical is the book. Hammerstein's protege Stephen Sondheim has said even the best musicals have a life of a few decades. Carousel is proof: it's stale...
There's nothing regrettable about a revival per se. Indeed, it's usually regarded as a positive sign when the commercial theater finds room for Hamlet or The Master Builder -- although even Rodgers and Hammerstein did not confuse themselves with Shakespeare and Ibsen. The pleasure can be the same whether the effort is a shrine built to the original, as in 1990's unimaginative but impeccable reproduction of Fiddler on the Roof, or a piece of fey revisionism such as 1992's cartoon reconception of Guys and Dolls, which turned into the hottest ticket in town and helped spark this...
Maybe it's just just me; maybe lots of heterosexuals born since World War II really do love musicals. But I have never knowingly hummed a show tune. I take it only on faith that Rodgers and Hammerstein were geniuses. Ethel Merman's voice was powerful, sure, and powerfully annoying. Each new Andrew Lloyd Webber musical seems like an ice show putting on airs, Siegfried and Roy with bathos. To a majority of people under 50, I'm convinced, the formal conceit of musicals (a so-so play during which the actors inexplicably sing their hearts out every 10 minutes...