Authors: Ethan Mordden
ISBN-13: 9780195054255, ISBN-10: 0195054253
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Date Published: June 1988
Edition: 1st Edition
Ethan Mordden has taught at Yale University and is the author of eighteen books, including The American Theatre, A Guide to Orchestral Music, Opera in the Twentieth Century, and A Guide to Opera Recording.
Vividly recreating the unique pleasure of experiencing a song-and-dance show, Broadway Babies spotlights the men and women who made a difference in the development of American musical comedy. Mordden's account features such show people as Florenz Ziegfeld, Harold Prince, Bert Lahr, Gwen Verdon, Angela Lansbury, Victor Herbert, Liza Minnelli, and Stephen Sondheim, and such musicals as Sally, Oh Kay!, Anything Goes, Show Boat, Oklahoma!, Follies, Chicago, and countless others.
While theatrical historians traditionally have emphasized the role of the authors of musicals, Mordden also examines the personal styles of the directors, choreographers, and producers, in order to demonstrate not only what the musical became but what it was. The volume includes an extensive discographythe first of its kindwhich offers a virtually self-contained history of recorded show music.
Introduction: Broadway, 1900 | 3 | |
1. | The Score | 7 |
2. | The Urban Ethnic Emergence | 22 |
3. | The Great Glorifier | 34 |
4. | The Heroine | 49 |
5. | The Top Banana | 58 |
6. | The Book | 72 |
7. | The New Style of Score | 81 |
8. | The New Style of Heroine | 108 |
9. | The Jazzmen | 121 |
10. | The Choreographers | 130 |
11. | The Musical Play | 138 |
12. | A Newer Style of Heroine | 153 |
13. | The Superdirectors | 165 |
14. | The State of the Art | 182 |
A Selective Discography | 197 | |
Index | 239 |