Oklahoma!

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Carter
Keyword(s):  
Musical Theater ◽  
Final Shape ◽  
Broadway Musical ◽  
History Of ◽  
Rodgers And Hammerstein ◽  
Theatre Guild

Oklahoma! premiered on Broadway on 31 March 1943 under the auspices of the Theatre Guild, and today it is performed more frequently than any other Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. When this book was first published in 2007, it offered the first fully documented history of the making of the show based on archival materials, manuscripts, journalism, and other sources. The present revised edition draws still further on newly uncovered sources to provide an even clearer account of a work that many have claimed fundamentally changed Broadway musical theater. It is filled with rich and fascinating details about the play on which Oklahoma! was based (Lynn Riggs’s Green Grow the Lilacs); on what encouraged Theresa Helburn and Lawrence Langner of the Guild to bring Rodgers and Hammerstein together for their first collaboration; on how Rouben Mamoulian and Agnes de Mille became the director and choreographer; on the drafts and revisions that led the show toward its final shape; and on the rehearsals and tryouts that brought it to fruition. It also examines the lofty aspirations and the mythmaking that surrounded Oklahoma! from its very inception, and demonstrates just what made it part of its times.

The Oxford Handbook of Sondheim Studies

2014 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Musical Theatre ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Broadway Musical ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society ◽  
American Musical Theatre ◽  
Opera Houses

This book examines the scope and ambition of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals by drawing on the perspectives of musicological and dramaturgical scholars, literary and film critics, and musical theater practitioners. Consisting of twenty-seven essays, it analyzes Sondheim’s radical re-invention of the artistic form of the Broadway musical in response to various traditions of artistic innovation and popular entertainment and how his work with several collaborators has radically transformed the history of American musical theatre. It explores problematic questions of authorship peculiar to the cultural milieu of Broadway musical theater by focusing on intertextuality in works ranging from Anthony Shaffer’s Sleuth (1970) to the film Hangover Square (1945) and Johann Sebastian Bach’s St Matthew Passion. It also probes the dramaturgical technique of songs that enable comic performers to act out the logic of character and plot in a meta-theatrical style and discusses the notion of the musical as a performance event, patterns of interpretation in the repeated performance of Sondheim’s musicals in the United Kingdom, the pleasures and challenges of performing these musicals in international opera houses, Sondheim’s work for cinema and television and his “cinematic” approach to musical theater, and his subtle and often ironic exploitation of genre conventions such as pastiche and parody. Finally, the book considers questions of cultural, political, and personal identity raised by Sondheim’s musicals in relation to contemporary American society.

scholarly journals Pages of the history of Ossetian art: national opera studio at the moscow conservatory

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Т.Э. Батагова
Keyword(s):  
Musical Theater ◽  
The State ◽  
Educational Process ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
National Opera ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
State Strategy

Данная статья посвящена одному из аспектов становления и раз- вития осетинского национального музыкального театра. Раскрывается исто- рия создания и функционирования Осетинской оперной студии при Московской государственной консерватории. Формирование национальных оперных студий явилось одной из составляющих государственной стратегии по ускоренному развитию музыкального искусства в национальных республиках. Выпускники Осетинской оперной студии составили основу Оперного ансамбля (1951), а за- тем и оперной труппы национального музыкального театра (1958, 1972). Осо- бое внимание автор уделил изучению архивных документов, материалов прес- сы, раскрывающих особенности учебного процесса и творческой деятельности студийцев. This article is devoted to one of the aspects of formation and development of the Ossetian national musical theater. The history of the creation and functioning of the Ossetian Opera Studio at the Moscow State Conservatory is revealed. The formation of national Opera studios was one of the components of the state strategy for the accelerated development of musical art in the national republics. Graduates of the Ossetian opera studio formed the basis of the Opera ensemble (1951), and then the Opera Сompany of the National Musical Theater (1958, 1972). The author paid special attention to the study of archival documents and press materials that reveal the features of the educational process and creative activities of students.

No people like #showpeople : Broadway performers' ethnographic social media

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jennifer Spitulnik
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Musical Theater ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The Public ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
Broadway Musical ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
Group I ◽  
Multiple Audiences

The occupational folk group of Broadway musical theater performers uses folklore in public spaces as a kind of representational strategy for the group as a whole. This strategy is significant in representing the group’s identity to itself as well as to outsiders who are invested in knowing more about them, such as Broadway enthusiasts. That is, the group can and does tell the story of itself, representing itself ethnographically, by way of its individual members. Social media technologies provide a platform for Broadway performers to present these native ethnographies both to the public and to other members of the folk group. I argue that these native, self-conscious ethnographic works by musical theater performers are both concerned with representing themselves as individuals, and with representing the cultural group of musical theater performers as a whole. Exploring the folklore and folk identities performed by members of this group in online social media suggests new ways of understanding the politics and practices of ethnography, particularly on social network sites in our postmodern global economy of attention. In this project, the first in any field to consider musical theater performers as a cultural or folk group, I investigate actors’ recognition of and group use of vernacular creative expressionsâ€"folkloreâ€"as a representational strategy. Through this work, I explore the ways in which self-representation on the part of the ethnographic participants claims voice and authority for the group, while simultaneously performing group membership and identity for multiple audiences.

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