Taking the Reins

2021 ◽  
pp. 106-144
Author(s):  
Liza Gennaro
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Peter Pan ◽  
West Side ◽  
West Side Story ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Artistic Vision ◽  
Male Dominated ◽  
Bob Fosse

The genesis of the present-day director-choreographer, starting with de Mille’s role as director-choreographer on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ill-fated Allegro (1947), is explored. How she employed dance as a narrative and metaphorical device in support of the allegorical structure of the libretto, and how her artistic vision conflicted with her collaborators is investigated. De Mille’s directorial oeuvre is considered in the context of the male-dominated world of Broadway. Robbins’ ascendance as the most influential director-choreographer of twentieth-century musical theater is examined in a close analysis of his choreography for and direction of Pajama Game (1954 [co-directed with George Abbott, co-choreographer Bob Fosse]), Peter Pan (1954), Bells Are Ringing (1956 [in which he collaborated with Bob Fosse]), Gypsy (1959), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964). West Side Story (1957) will be discussed here as an anomaly in Robbins’ musical theater career. I argue that Robbins’ interest in movement innovation in relation to his choreography for the “Jets” in West Side Story (1957) differs from his previous musical theater works. In addition, I will examine Robbins’ West Side Story collaboration with co-choreographer Peter Gennaro.

Robbins, Jerome (1918–1998)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia L. Foulkes
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
York City ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
West Side ◽  
West Side Story ◽  
Combine Movement ◽  
Goldberg Variations ◽  
Artistic Director ◽  
The Town

Jerome Robbins was one of the master choreographers of the twentieth century who transformed musical theater and ballet. Beginning with Fancy Free (1944), Robbins left his mark on both disciplines by his use of humor and character, and by his ability to combine movement originating in multiple idioms. This auspicious beginning led to more ballets—Interplay (1945), Afternoon of a Faun (1953), and The Concert (1956)—as well as a number of hit Broadway shows: On the Town (1944), West Side Story (1957), Gypsy (1959), and Fiddler on the Roof (1964). He traversed different genres with ease, moving from Broadway to ballet, dance to choreography, and then to directing plays, films, and television programmes. Although he made his earliest ballets for Ballet Theatre (now the American Ballet Theatre), his longest affiliation was with the New York City Ballet, where he was appointed associate artistic director in 1949, and to which—after a hiatus of more than a decade—he returned in 1969 to choreograph some of his most acclaimed ballets, including Dances at a Gathering (1969) and The Goldberg Variations (1971). Robbins’s work often defined the historic moment, marrying music, movement, and expression with such quality and intensity that his works have endured as historical and artistic landmarks.

“This Cockeyed City Is THEIRS”: Youth at Play in the Dances of West Side Story

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-91
Author(s):  
YING ZHU ◽  
DANIEL BELGRAD
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
West Side ◽  
West Side Story ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Adults And Children

While ethnic rivalry between the Jets and the Sharks in the film West Side Story has long figured as a point of scholarly concern, we argue the musical's main conflict is not between the two gangs, but rather that of youth versus adult authority. Engaging in a close analysis of the dances choreographed by Jerome Robbins, we contend that the gangs' enmity against each other is subsumed by their collective struggle to reject the socially prescribed roles of adults and children in Cold War America, which fetishized childhood innocence. Robbins's complex representations of youthful play participated in defining a “youth counterculture.”

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Winkler
Keyword(s):  
West Side ◽  
West Side Story ◽  
Bob Fosse ◽  
New Generation ◽  
The Way

This introduction looks at the development of the role of director-choreographer, that individual who uses movement to align all elements of a musical into an integrated and cohesive whole. Ned Wayburn’s codified dance routines and Julian Mitchell’s scenic effects and production numbers gave way to Seymour Felix’s and Sammy Lee’s early attempts at integrating dance with narrative. From there, George Balanchine’s introduction of ballet into the structure of musicals and the corresponding requirement for classically trained dancers led to Agnes de Mille’s danced psychological scenarios, which embedded choreography into the composition of musicals. These antecedents paved the way for Jerome Robbins, who with West Side Story defined the role of director-choreographer for a new generation, of which Bob Fosse would be one of the most assertive and authoritative.

Fosse & Verdon and Kander & Ebb

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ethan Mordden
Keyword(s):  
West Side ◽  
Musical Play ◽  
West Side Story ◽  
Musical Comedy ◽  
Show Boat ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Kander And Ebb ◽  
Bob Fosse

This chapter chronicles the rise of Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse as well as John Kander and Fred Ebb in the theatre industry. Their careers reveal how much the musical was transforming itself by the late 1940s, and how comfortably it moved between musical comedy and the musical play, uncovering ways of aligning them in innovative mutations. Moreover, the musical had come to amalgamate the responsibilities of director and choreographer and make the rise of the naturalistic actor not only possible but necessary. In a way, one could say that a Chicago musical was unthinkable until the liberation of Fosse and Verdon and the evolution of Kander and Ebb, out of musical comedy into the commentative show. Like Show Boat, Oklahoma!, and West Side Story, Chicago is an exhibition piece in the development of the elite yet populist and idealistic yet subversive national art form, the musical.

Critical Reflections on the Operatic Canon

2020 ◽  
pp. 524-533
Author(s):  
John Rockwell
Keyword(s):  
Musical Theater ◽  
George Frideric Handel ◽  
Early Music ◽  
West Side ◽  
Half Century ◽  
West Side Story ◽  
The Core ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Music Revival ◽  
Critical Reflections

This chapter looks back at the core canon in opera, tracing its evolution and mutation during the half century when its author served as a professional critic and then festival director. The chapter sees the core canon as either fixed or shrinking over the last ninety years. The public’s resistance to Modernist dissonance led to an explosion of repertory in areas immediately outside what had been the traditional canon. The need for novelty has been sated by directorial innovation (Regietheater), the early music revival (with George Frideric Handel the principal operatic beneficiary), and the ceaseless search for new curiosities to revive from the past. Moreover, the operatic canon has been enlarged by lighter forms of musical theater (West Side story and Sweeney Todd) and also by influence from non-Western cultures bearing their own canonic traditions and repertories. This chapter is paired with Kasper Holten’s “Inside and outside the operatic canon, on stage and in the boardroom.”

Dance in the Broadway Musicals of Shakespeare

2019 ◽  
pp. 302-326
Author(s):  
Ray Miller
Keyword(s):  
Musical Theater ◽  
Leonard Bernstein ◽  
West Side ◽  
Stephen Sondheim ◽  
George Balanchine ◽  
West Side Story ◽  
Broadway Musicals ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Shakespeare’s plays have served as inspiration for a score of Broadway musicals. These musicals have contributed to the development of the musical theater libretto from a loose collection of sketches to an integrated “book musical” that equally values text, music, design, directing, and dance. While many are familiar with some of the most popular hits from those shows—including “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” from the Cole Porter’s musical, Kiss Me, Kate, or the balcony scene song, “Maria,” from the Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim collaboration, West Side Story, the contribution of choreographers and dancers to the translation of Shakespeare-inspired music, text, and scenography to the musical theater stage has not received due scholarly attention. This chapter considers the partnership between text and dance in selected Broadway musicals that have been based on the works of Shakespeare, focusing on choreography for musicals by George Balanchine, Hanya Holm, and Jerome Robbins.

Performing the Commodity-Sign: Dancing in the Gap

2007 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 3-22
Author(s):  
Colleen Dunagan
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
West Side ◽  
Movement Sequences ◽  
West Side Story ◽  
Vernacular Dance

Between 1998 and 2000, the Gap clothing company produced three advertising campaigns whose visual images consisted of choreographed movement sequences based on vernacular dance forms, theatrical jazz dance, and the codes and conventions of the Hollywood musical: “khakis,” “that's holiday,” and “West Side Story.” Each campaign produced a series of commercials that employed dance and musical theater in an attempt to bridge the gap between entertainment and advertising, and between popular culture and art. By manipulating standard advertising conventions, the Gap framed these televisual texts as performances or artworks, rather than as advertisements, creating choreographic, performance-oriented commercials that became the sign of Gap clothing. As a result, the commercials have been identifiable, just as the clothes have been, by style alone.

Sweet Mystery

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen M. Peck
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Full Length ◽  
Working Relationships ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Professional Theater ◽  
Standard Practices

Rida Johnson Young (ca. 1869–1926) was one of the most prolific female playwrights of her time, as well as a lyricist and librettist in the musical theater. She wrote more than thirty full-length plays, operettas, and musical comedies, five hundred songs, and four novels. Despite her extensive output, no significant study of her work has been produced. This book examines her musical theater works with in-depth analyses of her librettos and lyrics, as well as her working relationships with other writers, performers, and producers, particularly Lee and J. J. Shubert. Using archival materials such as original typescripts, correspondence, and reviews, the book contextualizes Young’s work within the milieu of the early-twentieth-century professional theater and provides a window into the standard practices of writing and production of the era. The works examined are Naughty Marietta, Lady Luxury, The Red Petticoat, When Love Is Young, His Little Widows, Her Soldier Boy, Maytime, Sometime, Little Simplicity, and The Dream Girl.

Victorians in the Closet: Oscar Wilde's Monstrous Hollywood Legacy

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 711-729
Author(s):  
Kate Hext
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Visual Effects ◽  
Early American ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Twentieth Century America

This essay offers a new perspective on the Victorians’ representation in early cinema. It argues that the profile of Oscar Wilde and the decadent movement was such, in early twentieth-century America, that its movies often viewed the Victorians through a decadent lens. Situating its discussion in a detailed exposition of Hollywood's interest in late-Victorian decadence, this essay discusses the reciprocal relationship between Oscar Wilde's imagination and cinematic horror. It sketches the inherently cinematic qualities in decadent writing and, focusing on Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), offers a new reading of how it incorporates different cinematic technologies to create a sense of supernatural horror. The essay goes on to examine how Wilde's novel inspired early American horror films, with close analysis of how its dialogue and visual effects were incorporated into the genre-defining adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde (1920).

AT THE ORIGINS OF THE UZBEK MUSIC THEATER (STUDIOS, TEACHERS, FIRST EXPERIMENTS: 1920-1930S)

2021 ◽  
pp. 32-45
Author(s):  
MARFUA KHAMIDOVA
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
The State ◽  
Music Theater ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
National Opera ◽  
National Music

This article is about the origins of the national opera that was born in Uzbekistan in the first half of the twentieth century. It also tells about the studio training of production and performing personnel for the national music scene within the framework of the Moscow, Baku studios, the Uzbek Opera Studio at the Moscow State Conservatory; about the first experiments of staging musical plays in the Uyghur Drama Troupe, the Concert and Ethnographic Troupe of M. Kari-Yakubov and further in the State Uzbek Musical Theater.

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