Scenographic Aesthetics and Automated Technologies in Broadway Musicals

2019 ◽  
pp. 130-139
Author(s):  
Christin Essin
Keyword(s):  
Broadway Musicals

‘An Elegant Legacy?’

2019 ◽  
pp. 181-203
Author(s):  
Danielle Birkett
Keyword(s):  
Archival Research ◽  
Animated Film ◽  
Political Message ◽  
Broadway Musicals ◽  
Frank Sinatra

Different issues challenged the screen adaptation of Finian’s Rainbow, which was one of the most successful Broadway musicals of the 1940s but took more than twenty years to be released as a film. Using archival research, this chapter reveals the frustrated early attempts to make Finian’s into an animated film musical, partly blighted by the blacklisting of lyricist E. Y. Harburg in 1951. Ex-Disney animator John Hubley was hired to work on the film and created more than 400 storyboard sketches, designs, and character drafts for the movie. By 1954, ten key songs had been recorded by leading artists such as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong; indeed, in an attempt to make the project as commercial as possible, Sinatra was assigned a part in nearly all the songs. A new prologue was added and changes were made to the story to soften its vigorous political message, but for a mixture of political and financial reasons the production was abruptly closed down; Finian’s Rainbow would not reach the screen until late the following decade.

Enough Already!: It's Deborah Kass's Turn to Take the Stage

2011 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 110-123
Author(s):  
Constance Zaytoun
Keyword(s):  
Andy Warhol ◽  
Jackson Pollock ◽  
Broadway Musicals ◽  
Post War

Contemporary painter Deborah Kass appropriates the forms of post-war masters such as Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and Frank Stella in her work, but her subject choices are often conscious manifestations of her nostalgic identifications with middlebrow Jewish artists and Broadway musicals. Her radical take on nostalgia draws from lyrics, idiomatic sayings, and iconic Jewish figures to promote a progressive rather than conservative agenda. Kass's performative interventions insert her feminist-Jewish-lesbian self squarely at the center of visual culture's frame and on the stage of art's history.

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