Word: kern
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...Kern did his first solo musical in 1912, and during the First World War years pioneered the "intimate musical," designed for the 299-seat Princess Theatre, where big orchestras and casts, elaborate spectacle, and more than two sets were proscribed...
...Jerome Kern (1885-1945) was, with Irving Berlin, one of the two composers chiefly responsible for establishing the modern musical as an important theatrical genre. Kern was also the major stimulus for the young George Gershwin, and has remained an idol for the still-active Richard Rodgers, who celebrates his 75th birthday tomorrow...
There is universal agreement that Show Boat is Kern's supreme achievement and that the work as a whole is a peak in the history of the musical. Those who need to be shown why can catch a new production of it at the Barn Theatre in New London, New Hampshire, from July 19 to 31. In the 1927 original, the singing of "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" and "Bill" elevated Helen Morgan to stardom; and it was expressly for her that Kern and Hammerstein wrote Sweet Adeline two years later...
...which the signing-waitress in her father's Hoboken beer-garden, on losing her boyfriend, essays the New York stage and becomes a celebrity, is based to a considerable degree on the actual life of the show's star, Helen Morgan (1900-41), who told Kern and Hammerstein about her early years as a chanteuse in a German-style beer-garden named Adeline's. (A film biography of Morgan's life was made in 1957, starring Ann Blyth and Paul Newman...
...Kern went out of his way to establish period and atmosphere by opening the show with a potpourri of old-time numbers like "A Bicycle Built for Two," "The Band Played On," and "A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight." There is also, for the piccolo-playing Dorothy, a punningly titled "Play Us a Polka, Dot," and, farther on, an example of the old unaccompanied barbershop quartet (actually a quintet here), "Pretty Jennie Lee." The opening scene, in proprietor Schmidt's beer-garden, provides the endearing folkish song "'Twas Not So Long Ago," which points to Schmidt's immigrant...