Word: kern
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...along in their careers. Rodgers was born on June 28, 1902, on New York's Long Island to a doctor and his wife. He took to music at an early age. The teenage Rodgers spent his allowance going to Saturday matinees of musicals. Thus he grew to idolize Jerome Kern...
...musical, which was only slightly more sophisticated than a vaudeville revue. In the program of his 1924 Broadway show Rose-Marie, for instance, he and the other authors wrote that the musical numbers were too integral to the book to list separately. Three years later, with Jerome Kern, he had his biggest success with Show Boat, the musical he adapted from Edna Ferber's novel of the same name with the express intention of weaving songs seamlessly into a narrative about addictive gambling, alcoholism and miscegenation. Years later, Hammerstein dealt with racial issues again in South Pacific...
...tradition of concert revivals--in which the principals wear evening clothes and hold the show's script in their hands, and a full orchestra saws away at the original orchestrations--is a distinguished one. Jerome Kern's 1985 centenary cued half a dozen glittery restorations. In London an ambitious series called Discover the Lost Musicals has flourished since 1988. The same year, Daykin produced concert versions of two Gershwin musicals, as well as an all-star tribute that featured a gnomic rendition of Soon by Bob Dylan. ("Did he hit even one right note?" Daykin asks today.) When she came...
...Broadway show? Easy enough--just get the sheet music, assemble an orchestra and cast, and start playing. Well, no. A 17th century Monteverdi opera has cleaner, fuller charts than many an old Broadway hit, whose arrangements might have ended up in the garage or garbage. The parts for the Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II Sweet Adeline, which was performed outdoors, had dead mosquitoes stuck to the pages. Says Daykin: "The musicians didn't know if it was a note or a dead...
...biggest change was the rise of American popular culture: not only jazz and its innumerable variants but also what happened onstage, across the airwaves and on the movie screen. America took the European operetta, fused it with burlesque and jazz and created--through the genius of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II and others--a broad, unique musical form. The '20s saw the rise of the Hollywood studio system, which had grown from its humble origins among (mostly immigrant Jewish) nickelodeon proprietors into the most powerful industry for the invention and spread of dreams in human history...