- published: 26 Oct 2006
- views: 3058087
- author: timminchin
Vimeo results:
Youtube results:
Loading...
Open Collage in a new Window
Email the Collage
- Loading...
Loading suggestions ...
- 8½
- A Chinese Honeymoon
- A Chorus Line
- A Country Girl
- A Gaiety Girl
- A Little Night Music
- A Runaway Girl
- A Trip to Chinatown
- ABBA
- Abe Burrows
- Act (theatre)
- Adele Astaire
- Adolph Green
- Adrian Ross
- Aeschylus
- African American
- Afterpiece
- Agnes de Mille
- Aida (musical)
- Alain Boublil
- Alan Jay Lerner
- Alfred Cellier
- Ally McBeal
- Amateur theatre
- Amplifier
- Andrew Lamb (writer)
- Andrew Lloyd Webber
- Angela Lansbury
- Angelique (series)
- Anime
- Annie (1999 film)
- Annie (musical)
- Annie Oakley
- Anti-Semitism
- Anyone Can Whistle
- Anything Goes
- Argentina
- Arioso
- Arthur Laurents
- As Thousands Cheer
- Assassins (musical)
- Avenue Q
- B. C. Stephenson
- Babes In Arms
- Ballad Opera
- Ballad operas
- Barbra Streisand
- Bat Boy The Musical
- Baz Luhrmann
- Ben Brantley
- Ben Jonson
- Bernadette Peters
- Betty Comden
- Billy Elliot
- Billy Joel
- Blitz!
- Bob Fosse
- Bollywood
- Broadway theatre
- Brooks Atkinson
- Burlesque (film)
- Burletta
- Burt Shevelove
- Burton Lane
- Cabaret (musical)
- California Gold Rush
- Camelot (musical)
- Cameron Mackintosh
- Carlos Solórzano
- Caroline or Change
- Carousel (musical)
- Cast recording
- Catholic Church
- Cats (musical)
- Chandelier
- Charlemagne
- Charles Frohman
- Charles Hale Hoyt
- Chicago (2002 film)
- Chicago (musical)
- Chinese Opera
- Choreographer
- Choreography
- Chu Chin Chow
- Civil rights
- Clive Barnes
- Cole Porter
- Comic opera
- Commedia dell'arte
- Company (musical)
- Concept album
- Contact (musical)
- Cop Rock
- Costumes
- Daly's Theatre
- Damon Runyon
- Daria
- David Merrick
- Dear World
- Dialogue
- Die Zauberflöte
- Dorothy (opera)
- Dr. Seuss
- Dramatist
- Dreamgirls (film)
- Dreamgirls (musical)
- DuBarry Was a Lady
- DuBose Heyward
- E. Y. Harburg
- Edna Ferber
- Edward Harrigan
- Edward Kleban
- Edward Solomon
- El Capitan
- Elaine Paige
- Elisabeth (musical)
- Elixier
- Elton John
- Enchanted (film)
- Ernest in Love
- Ethan Mordden
- Ethel Merman
- Ethel Waters
- Eva Perón
- Evita (film)
- Evita (musical)
- Extravaganza
- Eydie Gorme
- F. Osmond Carr
- Falsettoland
- Falsettos
- Family Guy
- Fascinating Rhythm
- Fay Templeton
- Federico Fellini
- Fiddler on the Roof
- Finian's Rainbow
- Florenz Ziegfeld
- Florodora
- Follies
- Frank Loesser
- Franz Lehár
- Fred Astaire
- Fred Ebb
- Fred Saidy
- Frederick Loewe
- Fringe theatre
- Funny Face (musical)
- Funny Girl (musical)
- Gaiety Girls
- Gaston Leroux
- Gay Nineties
- George Abbott
- George Bernard Shaw
- George Edwardes
- George Gershwin
- George M. Cohan
- Georges Seurat
- Germany
- Gilbert and Sullivan
- Glee (TV series)
- Godspell
- Grease (musical)
- Great Depression
- Greek chorus
- Greenwich Village
- Guy Bolton
- Gypsy (1993 film)
- Gypsy (musical)
- Gypsy Rose Lee
- H.M.S. Pinafore
- Hair (musical)
- Hairspray (musical)
- Hannah Montana
- Harold Arlen
- Harrigan and Hart
- Harry B. Smith
- Harry Greenbank
- Harry Tierney
- Hello, Dolly! (song)
- Henry Purcell
- Hervé (composer)
- High School Musical
- Hong Kong
- Howard Talbot
- I Do! I Do!
- I'd Rather Be Right
- Ian Bradley
- In Town (musical)
- India
- Industrial musical
- Inigo Jones
- Intermezzo
- Intermission
- Into the Woods
- Ira Gershwin
- Irene (musical)
- Irving Berlin
- Israel
- Italian language
- Italian-American
- Ivan Caryll
- Ivor Novello
- J. C. Williamson
- Jacques Offenbach
- James Kirkwood, Jr.
- Japan
- Jason Robert Brown
- Jazz
- Jean Baptiste Lully
- Jerome Kern
- Jerome Robbins
- Jerry Herman
- Jerry's Girls
- Jersey Boys
- Jessie Bond
- Johann Strauss II
- John Blow
- John Gay
- John Kander
- John Philip Sousa
- John Walter Bratton
- Jonathan Larson
- Joseph Papp
- JSTOR
- Jukebox musical
- Jule Styne
- Julie Andrews
- Kat and the Kings
- Kiss Me, Kate
- Kurt Weill
- La Bohème
- Larry Gelbart
- Leave It to Jane
- Lee Remick
- Legitimate theater
- Leonard Bernstein
- Lerner and Loewe
- Leslie Stuart
- Lewis Hallam
- Libretto
- Light opera
- Lillian Russell
- Lionel Monckton
- List of musicals
- Little Johnny Jones
- Little Mary Sunshine
- Liturgy
- London
- Lorenz Hart
- Louis Armstrong
- Lower East Side
- Ludwig II (musical)
- Mack & Mabel
- Madame Butterfly
- Madness (band)
- Mame (musical)
- Mamma Mia!
- Mamma Mia! (film)
- Man of La Mancha
- Manga
- Manhattan
- Marc Blitzstein
- Marilyn Miller
- Marvin Hamlisch
- Masques
- Maury Yeston
- Melodrama
- Meredith Willson
- Michael Balfe
- Michael Bennett
- Middle Ages
- Minimusical
- Minstrel show
- Minstrel shows
- Miss Saigon
- Mlle. Modiste
- Molière
- Morrie Ryskind
- Moss Hart
- Moulin Rouge!
- Movin' Out (musical)
- Mozart!
- Music hall
- Musical director
- Musical film
- Musical theatre
- My Fair Lady
- My Fair Lady (film)
- My One and Only
- Mystery play
- Nazism
- Nederlander Theatre
- Neil Patrick Harris
- New York City
- New York Times
- Next to Normal
- Nick Dante
- Nine (film)
- Nine (musical)
- No, No, Nanette
- Noh
- Of Thee I Sing
- Off-Broadway
- Oh, Kay!
- Oklahoma!
- On Your Toes
- Once Upon A Mattress
- Opera
- Opera bouffe
- Opera buffa
- Opera in English
- Operetta
- Opéra comique
- Opérette
- Orchestrator
- Orson Welles
- Oscar Asche
- Oscar Hammerstein II
- Oscar Wilde
- Our Boys
- Our House (musical)
- Our Miss Gibbs
- Oz (TV series)
- P. G. Wodehouse
- P.T. Barnum
- Pacific Overtures
- Pageant wagon
- Parade (musical)
- Passion (musical)
- Pathos
- Patti LuPone
- Paul R. Laird
- Petula Clark
- Pippin (musical)
- Plautus
- Playbill
- Popular music
- Porgy and Bess
- Princess Theatre
- Prohibition
- Psyché (play)
- Public Theater
- Puerto Rican people
- Pulitzer Prize
- Purlie
- Pygmalion (play)
- Queen (band)
- Racism
- Rags (musical)
- Ragtime
- Raisin (musical)
- Ray Bolger
- Rebecca (musical)
- Recitative
- Reginald de Koven
- Renaissance
- Rent (musical)
- Renthead
- Revue
- Rex Harrison
- Richard D'Oyly Carte
- Richard Maltby, Jr.
- Richard Rodgers
- Rio (film)
- Roaring Twenties
- Rock music
- Rock musical
- Rock opera
- Rodgers & Hart
- Rodgers and Hart
- Romeo & Juliette
- Rose-Marie
- Rudolf Friml
- Sailor Moon
- Sailor Moon musicals
- Salad Days (musical)
- Sally (musical)
- San Toy
- Sanskrit drama
- Sarafina!
- Savoy opera
- Savoy operas
- Savoy Theatre
- Scrubs (TV series)
- Set design
- Seymour Hicks
- Show Boat
- Show tunes
- Showtune
- Shrek (musical)
- Shubert Brothers
- Sidney Jones
- Sigmund Romberg
- Singspiel
- Smash (TV series)
- Snow.Wolf.Lake
- Sophocles
- Sound film
- South Africa
- South Park
- Spamalot
- Spring Awakening
- Stage design
- Stage lighting
- Standard Cantonese
- Standard Mandarin
- Starlight Express
- Stephen Sondheim
- Sung-through
- Sunny (musical)
- Supper Time
- T. S. Eliot
- Taiwanese opera
- Takarazuka Revue
- Taming of the Shrew
- Tangled (2010 film)
- Tanz der Vampire
- Tap dance
- Tea for Two (song)
- Television film
- Tenimyu
- That '70s Musical
- That '70s Show
- That's So Raven
- The Arcadians
- The Beggar's Opera
- The Black Crook
- The Bohemian Girl
- The Boy Friend
- The Boy from Oz
- The Broadway League
- The Cradle Will Rock
- The Dancing Years
- The Drowsy Chaperone
- The Fantasticks
- The Geisha
- The King and I
- The Merry Widow
- The Mikado
- The Music Man
- The New York Times
- The Orchid
- The Quaker Girl
- The Red Mill
- The Shop Girl
- The Siege of Rhodes
- The Simpsons
- The Sound of Music
- The Student Prince
- The Tempest (Dryden)
- The Threepenny Opera
- The Toreador
- The Wiz
- Theatre
- Theatre director
- Theatrical property
- Theatrical Syndicate
- Thomas Shadwell
- Tin Pan Alley
- Tommy (rock opera)
- Tony Award
- Trade union
- Triple threat
- Tyne Daly
- Urinetown
- Vaudeville
- Victor Herbert
- Victorian burlesque
- Vietnam War
- Vincent Youmans
- Vivienne Segal
- Washington Irving
- West End theatre
- Wicked (musical)
- Wikipedia Media help
- William Davenant
- William Hogarth
- William Shakespeare
- World War I
- Xanadu (musical)
- Xena
- Yahoo! Directory
- Yakshagana
- Yip Harburg
- Zarzuela
- Zero Mostel
- Ziegfeld Follies
- Ziegfeld Theatre
-
Argentina
Argentina
i/ˌɑrdʒənˈtiːnə/, officially the Argentine Republic (Spanish: República Argentina [reˈpuβlika aɾxenˈtina]), is a country in South America, the continent's second largest by land area, after Brazil. It is constituted as a federation of 23 provinces and an autonomous city, Buenos Aires. It is the eighth-largest country in the world by land area and the largest among Spanish-speaking nations.
Argentina's continental area is between the Andes mountain range in the west and the Atlantic Ocean in the east. It borders Paraguay and Bolivia to the north, Brazil and Uruguay to the northeast, and Chile to the west and south. Argentine claims over Antarctica, as well as overlapping claims made by Chile and the United Kingdom, are suspended by the Antarctic Treaty of 1961. Argentina also claims the Falkland Islands (Spanish: Islas Malvinas) and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, which are administered by the United Kingdom as British Overseas Territories.
A recognised middle power, Argentina is Latin America's third-largest economy, with a "very high" rating on the Human development index. Within Latin America, Argentina has the fifth highest nominal GDP per capita and the highest in purchasing power terms. Analysts have argued that the country has a "foundation for future growth due to its market size, levels of foreign direct investment, and percentage of high-tech exports as share of total manufactured goods", and it is classed by investors as middle emerging economy. Argentina is a founding member of the United Nations, Mercosur, the Union of South American Nations, the Organization of Ibero-American States, the World Bank Group and the World Trade Organization, and is one of the G-15 and G-20 major economies.
wn.com/Argentina -
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City. Along with London's West End theatre, Broadway theatre is widely considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world.
The Broadway theatre district is a popular tourist attraction in New York. According to The Broadway League, Broadway shows sold approximately $1.081 billion worth of tickets in calendar year 2011, compared with $1.037 billion for 2010. Attendance in 2011 was 12.13 million.
New York did not have a significant theatre presence until about 1750, when actor-managers Walter Murray and Thomas Kean established a resident theatre company at the Theatre on Nassau Street, which held about 280 people. They presented Shakespeare plays and ballad operas such as The Beggar's Opera. In 1752, William Hallam sent a company of twelve actors from Britain to the colonies with his brother Lewis as their manager. They established a theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia and opened with The Merchant of Venice and The Anatomist. The company moved to New York in the summer of 1753, performing ballad operas and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida. The Revolutionary War suspended theatre in New York, but thereafter theatre resumed in 1798, the year the 2,000-seat Park Theatre was built on Chatham Street (now called Park Row). The Bowery Theatre opened in 1826, followed by others. Blackface minstrel shows, a distinctly American form of entertainment, became popular in the 1830s, and especially so with the arrival of the Virginia Minstrels in the 1840s.
wn.com/Broadway_theatre -
Germany
Germany (i/ˈdʒɜrməni/), officially the Federal Republic of Germany (German: Bundesrepublik Deutschland, pronounced [ˈbʊndəsʁepuˌbliːk ˈdɔʏtʃlant] (
listen)), is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate. With 81.8 million inhabitants, it is the most populous member state and the largest economy in the European Union. It is one of the major political powers of the European continent and a technological leader in many fields.
A region named Germania, inhabited by several Germanic peoples, was documented before AD 100. During the Migration Period, the Germanic tribes expanded southward, and established successor kingdoms throughout much of Europe. Beginning in the 10th century, German territories formed a central part of the Holy Roman Empire. During the 16th century, northern German regions became the centre of the Protestant Reformation while southern and western parts remained dominated by Roman Catholic denominations, with the two factions clashing in the Thirty Years' War, marking the beginning of the Catholic–Protestant divide that has characterized German society ever since. Occupied during the Napoleonic Wars, the rise of Pan-Germanism inside the German Confederation resulted in the unification of most of the German states into the German Empire in 1871 which was Prussian dominated. After the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and the subsequent military surrender in World War I, the Empire was replaced by the Weimar Republic in 1918, and partitioned in the Treaty of Versailles. Amidst the Great Depression, the Third Reich was proclaimed in 1933. The latter period was marked by Fascism and World War II. After 1945, Germany was divided by allied occupation, and evolved into two states, East Germany and West Germany. In 1990 Germany was reunified.
wn.com/Germany -
Hong Kong
Coordinates: 22°16′42″N 114°09′32″E / 22.27833°N 114.15889°E / 22.27833; 114.15889
Hong Kong (Chinese: 香港) is one of two special administrative regions (SARs) of the People's Republic of China (PRC), the other being Macau. A city-state situated on China's south coast and enclosed by the Pearl River Delta and South China Sea, it is known for its expansive skyline and deep natural harbour. With a land mass of 1,104 km2 (426 sq mi) and a population of seven million people, Hong Kong is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. Hong Kong's population is 95 percent ethnic Chinese and 5 percent from other groups. Hong Kong's Han Chinese majority originate mainly from the cities of Guangzhou and Taishan in the neighbouring Guangdong province.
Hong Kong became a colony of the British Empire after the First Opium War (1839–42). Originally confined to Hong Kong Island, the colony's boundaries were extended in stages to the Kowloon Peninsula in 1860 and then the New Territories in 1898. It was occupied by Japan during the Pacific War, after which the British resumed control until 1997, when China resumed sovereignty. The region espoused minimum government intervention under the ethos of positive non-interventionism during the colonial era. The time period greatly influenced the current culture of Hong Kong, often described as "East meets West", and the educational system, which used to loosely follow the system in England until reforms implemented in 2009.
wn.com/Hong_Kong -
India
India (i/ˈɪndiə/), officially the Republic of India (Bhārat Gaṇarājya), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the south, the Arabian Sea on the south-west, and the Bay of Bengal on the south-east, it shares land borders with Pakistan to the west;China, Nepal, and Bhutan to the north-east; and Burma and Bangladesh to the east. In the Indian Ocean, India is in the vicinity of Sri Lanka and the Maldives; in addition, India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands share a maritime border with Thailand and Indonesia.
Home to the ancient Indus Valley Civilisation and a region of historic trade routes and vast empires, the Indian subcontinent was identified with its commercial and cultural wealth for much of its long history. Four of the world's major religions—Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism—originated here, whereas Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam arrived in the 1st millennium CE and also helped shape the region's diverse culture. Gradually annexed by and brought under the administration of the British East India Company from the early 18th century and administered directly by the United Kingdom from the mid-19th century, India became an independent nation in 1947 after a struggle for independence that was marked by non-violent resistance led by Mahatma Gandhi.
wn.com/India -
Israel
Coordinates: 31°N 35°E / 31°N 35°E / 31; 35
Israel, officially the State of Israel (
/ˈɪzriːəl/ or /ˈɪzreɪəl/; Hebrew: מְדִינַת יִשְׂרָאֵל, Medīnat Yisrā'el, IPA: [me̞diˈnät jisʁäˈʔe̞l] ( listen); Arabic: دَوْلَة إِسْرَائِيل, Dawlat Isrāʼīl, IPA: [dawlat ʔisraːˈʔiːl]), is a parliamentary republic in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Lebanon in the north, Syria in the northeast, Jordan and the West Bank in the east, Egypt and the Gaza Strip on the southwest, and the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea to the south, and it contains geographically diverse features within its relatively small area. Israel is defined as a Jewish and Democratic State in its Basic Laws and is the world's only Jewish-majority state.
Following the adoption of a resolution by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 29 November 1947 recommending the adoption and implementation of the United Nations plan to partition Palestine, on 14 May 1948 David Ben-Gurion, the Executive Head of the World Zionist Organization and president of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, declared the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel, to be known as the State of Israel, a state independent from the British Mandate for Palestine. Neighboring Arab states invaded the next day in support of the Palestinian Arabs. Israel has since fought several wars with neighboring Arab states, in the course of which it has occupied the West Bank, Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights. Portions of these territories, including east Jerusalem, have been annexed by Israel, but the border with the neighboring West Bank has not yet been permanently defined.[neutrality is disputed] Israel has signed peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, but efforts to resolve the Israeli–Palestinian conflict have so far not resulted in peace.
wn.com/Israel -
Japan
Japan
i/dʒəˈpæn/ (Japanese: 日本 Nihon or Nippon; formally 日本国 
Nippon-koku or Nihon-koku, literally the State of Japan) is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south. The characters that make up Japan's name mean "sun-origin", which is why Japan is sometimes referred to as the "Land of the Rising Sun".
Japan is an archipelago of 6,852 islands. The four largest islands are Honshū, Hokkaidō, Kyūshū and Shikoku, together accounting for ninety-seven percent of Japan's land area. Japan has the world's tenth-largest population, with over 127 million people. The Greater Tokyo Area, which includes the de facto capital city of Tokyo and several surrounding prefectures, is the largest metropolitan area in the world, with over 30 million residents.
Archaeological research indicates that people lived in Japan as early as the Upper Paleolithic period. The first written mention of Japan is in Chinese history texts from the 1st century AD. Influence from other nations followed by long periods of isolation has characterized Japan's history. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, victory in the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War and World War I allowed Japan to expand its empire during a period of increasing militarism. The Second Sino-Japanese War of 1937 expanded into part of World War II in 1941, which came to an end in 1945 following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since adopting its revised constitution in 1947, Japan has maintained a unitary constitutional monarchy with an emperor and an elected parliament called the Diet.
wn.com/Japan -
London
Londoni/ˈlʌndən/ is the capital city of England and the United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its founding by the Romans, who named it Londinium. London's ancient core, the City of London, largely retains its square-mile mediaeval boundaries. Since at least the 19th century, the name London has also referred to the metropolis developed around this core. The bulk of this conurbation forms the London region and the Greater London administrative area, governed by the elected Mayor of London and the London Assembly.
London is a leading global city, with strengths in the arts, commerce, education, entertainment, fashion, finance, healthcare, media, professional services, research and development, tourism and transport all contributing to its prominence. It is the world's leading financial centre alongside New York City and has the fifth-largest city GDP in the world (and the largest in Europe). London has been described as a world cultural capital. It was the world's most visited city during 2011 and London Heathrow is the world's busiest airport by number of international passengers. London's 43 universities form the largest concentration of higher education in Europe. In 2012 London will become the first city to host the modern Summer Olympic Games three times.
wn.com/London -
Manhattan
Manhattan (/mænˈhætən/) is the most densely populated and the oldest of the five boroughs of New York City. Located primarily on the island of Manhattan at the mouth of the Hudson River, the boundaries of the borough are identical to those of New York County, an original county of the U.S. state of New York. The borough and county consist of Manhattan Island and several small adjacent islands: Roosevelt Island, Randall's Island, Wards Island, Governors Island, Liberty Island, part of Ellis Island,Mill Rock, and U Thant Island; as well as Marble Hill, a very small area on the mainland bordering the Bronx. The original city of New York began at the southern end of Manhattan, expanded northward, and then between 1874 and 1898, annexed land from surrounding counties.
The New York County is the most densely populated county in the United States, and one of the most densely populated areas in the world, with a 2010 population of 1,585,873 living in a land area of 22.96 square miles (59.5 km2), or 69,464 residents per square mile (26,924/km²), more dense than any individual American city. It is also one of the wealthiest counties in the United States, with a 2005 per capita income above $100,000. Manhattan is the third-largest of New York's five boroughs in population, and its smallest borough in land area.
wn.com/Manhattan -
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. The city is referred to as New York City or The City of New York to distinguish it from the State of New York, of which it is a part. As a global power city, New York exerts a significant impact upon commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and entertainment. The home of the United Nations Headquarters, New York is an important center for international diplomacy and has been described as the cultural capital of the world.
Located on one of the world's largest natural harbors, New York City consists of five boroughs, each of which comprises a state county. The five boroughs—The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island—were consolidated into a single city in 1898. With a Census-estimated 2011 population of 8,244,910 distributed over a land area of just 305 square miles (790 km2), New York is the most densely populated major city in the United States. As many as 800 languages are spoken in New York, making it the most linguistically diverse city in the world. The New York City Metropolitan Area's population is the United States' largest, with 18.9 million people distributed over 6,720 square miles (17,400 km2), and is also part of the most populous combined statistical area in the United States, containing 22.1 million people as of the 2010 Census.
wn.com/New_York_City -
Opéra comique
Opéra comique (plural: opéras comiques) is a genre of French opera that contains spoken dialogue and arias. It emerged out of the popular opéra comiques en vaudevilles of the Fair Theatres of St Germain and St Laurent (and to a lesser extent the Comédie-Italienne), which combined existing popular tunes with spoken sections. Associated with the Paris theatre of the same name, the Opéra-Comique, opéra comique is not always comic or light in nature — indeed, Carmen, perhaps the most famous opéra comique, is a tragedy.
The term opéra comique is complex in meaning and cannot simply be translated as "comic opera". It originated in the early 18th century when it was applied to humorous and satirical plays performed at the theatres of the Paris fairs which contained songs with new words set to already existing music (vaudevilles). In the middle of the 18th century, composers began to write original music to replace the vaudevilles, under the influence of the lighter types of Italian opera (especially Giovanni Battista Pergolesi's La serva padrona). This form of opéra comique was often known as comédie mêlée d'ariettes, but the range of subject matter it covered expanded far beyond the merely comic. By the 19th century, opéra comique often meant little more than works with spoken dialogue performed at the Opéra-Comique theatre, as opposed to works with recitative which appeared at the Paris Opéra. Thus the most famous of all opéras comiques, Georges Bizet's Carmen, is on a tragic subject. As Elizabeth Bartlet and Richard Langham Smith note in their Grove article on the subject, composers and librettists frequently rejected the use of the umbrella term opéra comique in favour of more precise labels.
wn.com/Opéra_comique -
Savoy Theatre
The Savoy Theatre is a West End theatre located in the Strand in the City of Westminster, London, England. The theatre opened on 10 October 1881 and was built by Richard D'Oyly Carte on the site of the old Savoy Palace as a showcase for the popular series of comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, which became known as the Savoy Operas as a result.
The theatre was the first theatre, and the first public building in the world, to be lit entirely by electricity. In 1889, Richard D'Oyly Carte built the Savoy Hotel next to the theatre. For many years, the Savoy was the home of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, and it was run by the Carte family for over a century. Richard's son Rupert D'Oyly Carte rebuilt and modernised the theatre in 1929, and it was rebuilt again in 1993 following a fire. It is a Grade II* listed building.
Apart from The Mikado and other famous Gilbert and Sullivan premières, the theatre has hosted such notable premières as Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit in 1941. In recent years it has presented opera, Shakespeare and other non-musical plays, as well as musicals, including revivals of Fiddler on the Roof and Carousel, and new shows like Never Forget. The original London production of Legally Blonde played from December 2009 to April 2012.
wn.com/Savoy_Theatre -
South Africa
Coordinates: 30°S 25°E / 30°S 25°E / -30; 25
South Africa, officially the Republic of South Africa, is a country located at the southern tip of Africa. It is divided into nine provinces and has 2,798 kilometres (1,739 mi) of coastline. To the north of the country lie the neighbouring territories of Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe; to the east are Mozambique and Swaziland; while Lesotho is an enclave surrounded by South African territory.
South Africa is multi-ethnic and has diverse cultures and languages. Eleven official languages are recognised in the constitution. Two of these languages are of European origin: South African English and Afrikaans, a language which originated mainly from Dutch that is spoken by the majority of white and Coloured South Africans. Though English is commonly used in public and commercial life, it is only the fifth most-spoken home language. All ethnic and language groups have political representation in the country's constitutional democracy comprising a parliamentary republic; unlike most parliamentary republics, the positions of head of state and head of government are merged in a parliament-dependent President.
wn.com/South_Africa -
Takarazuka Revue
The Takarazuka Revue (宝塚歌劇団 Takarazuka Kagekidan) is a Japanese all-female musical theater troupe based in Takarazuka, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. Women play all roles in lavish, Broadway-style productions of Western-style musicals, and sometimes stories adapted from shōjo manga and Japanese folktales. The troupe takes its name from the Hankyu Takarazuka rail line in suburban Osaka. The company is a division of the Hankyu Railway company; all members of the troupe are employed by the company.
The Takarazuka Revue was founded by Ichizo Kobayashi, an industrialist-turned-politician and president of Hankyu Railways, in Takarazuka, Japan in 1913. The city was the terminus of a Hankyu line from Osaka and already a popular tourist destination because of its hot springs. Kobayashi believed that it was the ideal spot to open an attraction of some kind that would boost train ticket sales and draw more business to Takarazuka. Since Western song and dance shows were becoming more popular and Kobayashi considered the Kabuki theater to be old and elitist, he decided that an all-female theater group might be well received by the general public.
wn.com/Takarazuka_Revue -
Tin Pan Alley
Coordinates: 40°44′44″N 73°59′22.5″W / 40.74556°N 73.989583°W / 40.74556; -73.989583
Tin Pan Alley is the name given to the collection of New York City music publishers and songwriters who dominated the popular music of the United States in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The name originally referred to a specific place: West 28th Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, and a plaque (see below) on the sidewalk on 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth commemorates it. This block is now considered to be part of Manhattan's NoMad neighborhood and the Flower District.
The start of Tin Pan Alley is usually dated to about 1885, when a number of music publishers set up shop in the same district of Manhattan. The end of Tin Pan Alley is less clear cut. Some date it to the start of the Great Depression in the 1930s when the phonograph and radio supplanted sheet music as the driving force of American popular music, while others consider Tin Pan Alley to have continued into the 1950s when earlier styles of American popular music were upstaged by the rise of rock & roll.
wn.com/Tin_Pan_Alley -
West End theatre
West End theatre is a popular term for mainstream professional theatre staged in the large theatres of London's 'Theatreland', the West End. Along with New York's Broadway theatre, West End theatre is usually considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world. Seeing a West End show is a common tourist activity in London.
Total attendances first surpassed 12 million in 2002 and 13 million in 2007, setting a new record for the West End. Since the late 1990s there has been an increase in the number of famous screen actors on the London stage.
The Theatre in London flourished after the English Reformation. The first permanent public playhouse, known simply as The Theatre, was constructed in 1576 in Shoreditch by James Burbage. It was soon joined by The Curtain. Both are known to have been used by William Shakespeare's company. In 1599, the timber from The Theatre was moved to Southwark, where it was used in building the Globe Theatre in a new theatre district formed, beyond the controls of the City corporation. These theatres were closed in 1642 during the interregnum.
wn.com/West_End_theatre -
Ziegfeld Theatre
Coordinates: 40°45′46″N 73°58′44″W / 40.7627°N 73.97881°W / 40.7627; -73.97881
The Ziegfeld Theatre was a Broadway theater located at the intersection of Sixth Avenue and 54th Street in Manhattan, New York City. It was built in 1927 and, despite public protests, was razed in 1966.
A second Ziegfeld Theatre, named in honor of the original, is located at 141 West 54th Street in Manhattan. Designed as a deluxe single screen movie theater, it opened in 1969 and remains in operation today.
The Ziegfeld Theatre was named for the famed Broadway impresario Florenz Ziegfeld, who built it with financial backing from William Randolph Hearst. Designed by Joseph Urban and Thomas W. Lamb, it opened on February 2, 1927 with the musical Rio Rita. The Ziegfeld's second show was also its most famous, Jerome Kern's landmark musical Show Boat which opened on December 27, 1927.
Due to the decline in new Broadway shows during the Great Depression, the theater became the Loew's Ziegfeld in 1933 and operated as a movie theater until showman Billy Rose bought it in 1944.
wn.com/Ziegfeld_Theatre
-
Abe Burrows
Abe Burrows (December 18, 1910 – May 17, 1985) was an American humorist, author, and director for radio and the stage. He won a Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize.
Born Abram Solman Borowitz in New York City, Burrows graduated from New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn and later attended both City College and New York University. He began working as a runner on Wall Street while at NYU, and he also worked in an accounting firm. After he met Frank Galen in 1938, the two wrote and sold jokes to an impressionist who appeared on the Rudy Vallée radio program.
His radio career gained strength when he collaborated with Ed Gardner, the writer and star of radio legend Duffy's Tavern. The two created the successful series after Gardner's character, Archie, premiered on the earlier radio program, This Is New York. Burrows was made the show's head writer in 1941, and he credited the experience with investing the Runyonesque street characters he fashioned for Guys and Dolls. "The people on that show," Burrows once said about Duffy's Tavern, "were New York mugs, nice mugs, sweet mugs, and like (Damon) Runyon's mugs they all talked like ladies and gentlemen. That's how we treated the characters in Guys and Dolls."
wn.com/Abe_Burrows -
Adele Astaire
Adele Astaire, born Adele Marie Austerlitz, (September 10, 1896 – January 25, 1981), was an American dancer and entertainer. She was Fred Astaire's elder sister.
Adele was born Adele Marie Austerlitz in Omaha, Nebraska, the daughter of Johanna "Ann" (née Geilus), an American-born Lutheran of German descent, and Frederic "Fritz" Emanuel Austerlitz (September, 1868–1924), an Austrian Roman Catholic brewer of Jewish descent from Vienna. Adele became an Episcopalian, like her younger brother.
In 1905 Adele Astaire had a successful vaudeville act with her younger brother, Fred Astaire. They developed it into a celebrated adult career on Broadway and on the London stage. Adele was the bigger star of the two during their time performing together, and she was a special favorite of Great Britain's royalty.
On May 9, 1932, after a successful stint with Fred in the revue The Band Wagon (1931) on Broadway, Adele Astaire retired from the stage to marry Lord Charles Arthur Francis Cavendish (August 29, 1905–March 23, 1944), the second son of the 9th Duke of Devonshire, and moved to Ireland, where they lived at Lismore Castle. She had three children, a daughter in 1933 and twin sons in 1935, each of whom died soon after birth. By this marriage she was properly styled Lady Charles Cavendish and would have been called Lady Charles in social circumstances.
wn.com/Adele_Astaire -
Adolph Green
Adolph Green (December 2, 1914 – October 23, 2002) was an American lyricist and playwright who, with long-time collaborator Betty Comden, penned the screenplays and songs for some of the most beloved movie musicals, particularly as part of Arthur Freed's production unit at MGM, during the genre's heyday. Many people thought the pair were married; they were not, but they shared a unique comic genius and sophisticated wit that enabled them to forge a six-decade-long partnership that produced some of Hollywood and Broadway's greatest hits.
Green was born in The Bronx to Hungarian-Jewish immigrants Daniel and Helen Weiss Green. After high school, he worked as a runner on Wall Street while he tried to make it as an actor. He met Comden through mutual friends in 1938 while she was studying drama at New York University. They formed a troupe called the Revuers, which performed at the Village Vanguard, a club in Greenwich Village. Among the members of the company was a young comedian named Judy Tuvim, who later changed her name to Judy Holliday, and Green's good friend, a young musician named Leonard Bernstein, frequently accompanied them on the piano. The act's success earned them a movie offer and the Revuers traveled west in hopes of finding fame in Greenwich Village, a 1944 movie starring Carmen Miranda and Don Ameche, but their roles were so small they barely were noticed, and they quickly returned to New York.
wn.com/Adolph_Green -
Adrian Ross
For the NFL player see Adrian Ross (American football)
Arthur Reed Ropes (23 December 1859 – 11 September 1933), better known under the pseudonym Adrian Ross, was a prolific writer of lyrics, contributing songs to more than sixty British musical comedies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was the most important lyricist of the British stage during a career that spanned five decades. At a time when few shows had long runs, sixteen of his West End shows ran for over 400 performances.
Starting out in the late 1880s, Ross wrote the lyrics for the earliest British musical theatre hits, including In Town (1892), The Shop Girl (1894) and The Circus Girl (1896). Ross next wrote the lyrics for a string of hit musicals, beginning with A Greek Slave (1898), San Toy (1899), The Messenger Boy (1900) and The Toreador (1901) and continuing without a break through World War I. He also wrote the English lyrics for a series of hit adaptations of European operettas beginning with The Merry Widow in 1907.
wn.com/Adrian_Ross -
Aeschylus
Aeschylus (Ancient Greek: Αἰσχύλος, Aiskhulos; c. 525/524 BC – c. 456/455 BC) was the first of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays can still be read or performed, the others being Sophocles and Euripides. He is often described as the father of tragedy: our knowledge of the genre begins with his work and our understanding of earlier tragedies is largely based on inferences from his surviving plays. According to Aristotle, he expanded the number of characters in plays to allow for conflict amongst them whereas, previously, characters had interacted only with the chorus.
Only seven of his estimated seventy to ninety plays have survived into modern times, and there is a longstanding debate about his authorship of one of these plays, Prometheus Bound. Fragments of some other plays have survived in quotes and more continue to be discovered on Egyptian papyrus, often giving us surprising insights into his work. He was probably the first dramatist to present plays as a trilogy and his Oresteia is the only ancient example of the form to have survived.
wn.com/Aeschylus -
African American
African Americans (also referred to as Black Americans or Afro-Americans, and formerly as American Negroes) are citizens or residents of the United States that have ancestry from any of the native populations of Sub-Saharan Africa.
African Americans make up the single largest racial minority in the United States. Most African Americans are of West and Central African descent and are descendants of enslaved Africans within the boundaries of the present United States. However, some immigrants from African, Caribbean, Central American or South American nations, or their descendants, may be identified or self-identify with the term.
African-American history starts in the 16th century with African slaves who quickly rose up against the Spanish explorer Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón and progresses to the present day, with Barack Obama as the 44th and current President of the United States. Between those landmarks there have been events and issues, both resolved and ongoing, including slavery, racism, Reconstruction, development of the African-American community, participation in the great military conflicts of the United States, racial segregation, and the Civil Rights Movement.
wn.com/African_American -
Agnes de Mille
Agnes George de Mille (September 18, 1905 – October 7, 1993) was an American dancer and choreographer.
Agnes de Mille was born in New York City into a well-connected family of theater professionals. Her father William C. deMille and her uncle Cecil B. DeMille were both Hollywood directors. She was the granddaughter of economist Henry George.
She had a love for acting and originally wanted to be an actress, but was told that she was 'not pretty enough', so she turned her attention to dance. As a child, she had longed to dance, but dance at this time was considered more of an activity, rather than a viable career option, so her parents refused to allow her to dance. When de Mille's younger sister was prescribed ballet classes to cure her flat feet, de Mille joined her. De Mille lacked flexibility and technique, though, and did not have a dancer's body. Classical ballet was the most widely known dance form at this time, and de Mille's apparent lack of ability limited her opportunities. She taught herself from watching film stars on the set with her father in Hollywood; these were more interesting for her to watch than perfectly turned out legs, and she developed strong character work and compelling performances. One of de Mille’s earliest jobs, thanks to her father’s connections, was choreographing the film Cleopatra in 1934, though the dances were later cut from the film. She appeared in The Ragamuffin in 1916, which was her first job.
wn.com/Agnes_de_Mille -
Alain Boublil
Alain Boublil (born in Tunisia in 1941) is a musical theatre lyricist and librettist, best known for his collaborations with the composer Claude-Michel Schönberg for musicals on Broadway and London's West End. These include: La Révolution Française (1973), Les Misérables (1980), Miss Saigon (1989), Martin Guerre (1996), The Pirate Queen (2006), and Marguerite (2008).
Alain Boublil’s first musical, La Révolution Française, was the first-ever staged French rock opera. It was conceived by Boublil in 1973 after he watched the premiere of Jesus Christ Superstar in New York. The composer was Claude-Michel Schönberg, with whom Alain has since collaborated on a number of successful projects, including Les Misérables and Miss Saigon.Les Misérables first opened in Paris in 1980. On October 8, 1985, an English-language production of Les Misérables produced by Cameron Mackintosh and directed by Trevor Nunn premiered in London at The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Barbican Theatre. The show transferred to the West End’s Palace Theatre on December 4, 1985. It is the longest-running musical in West End history.
wn.com/Alain_Boublil -
Alan Jay Lerner
Alan Jay Lerner (August 31, 1918 – June 14, 1986) was an American lyricist and librettist. In collaboration with Frederick Loewe, he created some of the world's most popular and enduring works of musical theatre for both the stage and on film. He won three Tony Awards and three Academy Awards, among other honors.
Born in New York City, he was the son of Edith Adelson Lerner and Joseph Jay Lerner, whose brother, Samuel Alexander Lerner, was founder and owner of the Lerner Stores, a chain of dress shops. One of Lerner's cousins was the radio comedian/television game show panelist Henry Morgan. Alan Jay Lerner was educated at Bedales School in England, The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Wallingford, Connecticut, (where he wrote "The Choate Marching Song") and Harvard. He attended both Camp Androscoggin and Camp Greylock. At both Choate and Harvard, Lerner was a classmate of John F. Kennedy; at Choate they had worked together on the yearbook staff. Like Cole Porter at Yale and Richard Rodgers at Columbia, his career in musical theater began with his collegiate contributions, in Lerner's case to the annual Harvard Hasty Pudding musicals. During the summers of 1936 and 1937, Lerner studied at Juilliard. While attending Harvard, he lost his sight in his left eye due to an accident in the boxing ring. In 1957, Lerner and Leonard Bernstein, another of Lerner's college classmates, collaborated on "Lonely Men of Harvard," a tongue-in-cheek salute to their alma mater.
wn.com/Alan_Jay_Lerner -
Alfred Cellier
Alfred Cellier (1 December 1844 – 28 December 1891) was an English composer, orchestrator and conductor.
In addition to conducting and music directing the original productions of several of the most famous Gilbert and Sullivan works and writing the overtures to some of them, Cellier conducted at many theatres in London, New York and on tour in Britain, America and Australia. He composed over a dozen operas and other works for the theatre, as well as for orchestra, but his 1886 comic opera, Dorothy, was by far his most successful work. It became the longest-running piece of musical theatre in the nineteenth century.
Cellier was born at Hackney, in London. His parents were Arsène Cellier from France, a professor of languages at Hackney grammar school, and his wife Mary Ann. He was educated at the grammar school in Hackney. From 1855 to 1860, he was a chorister at the Chapel Royal, St. James's, under the Rev. Thomas Helmore, where Arthur Sullivan was one of his schoolmates. Cellier later married Harriet Emily. Cellier's brother, François, also became a conductor.
wn.com/Alfred_Cellier -
Andrew Lloyd Webber
Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baron Lloyd-Webber Kt. (born 22 March 1948) is an English composer and impresario of musical theatre.
Lloyd Webber has achieved great popular success in musical theatre. Several of his musicals have run for more than a decade both in the West End and on Broadway. He has composed 13 musicals, a song cycle, a set of variations, two film scores, and a Latin Requiem Mass. He has also gained a number of honours, including a knighthood in 1992, followed by a peerage from the British Government for services to Music, seven Tony Awards, three Grammy Awards, an Academy Award, fourteen Ivor Novello Awards, seven Olivier Awards, a Golden Globe Award, and the Kennedy Center Honors in 2006.
Several of his songs have been widely recorded and were hits outside of their parent musicals, notably "The Music of the Night" from The Phantom of the Opera, "I Don't Know How to Love Him" from Jesus Christ Superstar, "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina" and "You Must Love Me" from Evita, "Any Dream Will Do" from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and "Memory" from Cats.
wn.com/Andrew_Lloyd_Webber -
Angela Lansbury
Angela Brigid Lansbury, CBE (born 16 October 1925) is an English-born US-naturalized actress and singer in theatre, television, and motion pictures. Her career has spanned eight decades and earned an unsurpassed number of performance Tony Awards (tied with Julie Harris), with five wins. Her first film appearance was in the film Gaslight (1944) as a conniving maid, for which she received an Academy Award nomination. Among her other films are The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and Anastasia (1997).
She expanded her repertoire to Broadway musicals and television in the 1950s and was particularly successful in Broadway productions of Gypsy, Mame and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Lansbury is perhaps best known to modern audiences for her twelve-year run starring as writer and sleuth Jessica Fletcher on the American television series Murder, She Wrote (1984–1996). Her recent roles include Lady Adelaide Stitch in the film Nanny McPhee (2005), Leona Mullen in the 2007 Broadway play Deuce, Madame Arcati in the 2009 Broadway revival of the play Blithe Spirit and Madame Armfeldt in the 2010 Broadway revival of the musical A Little Night Music.
wn.com/Angela_Lansbury -
Annie Oakley
Annie Oakley (August 13, 1860 – November 3, 1926), born Phoebe Ann Moses, was an American sharpshooter and exhibition shooter. Oakley's amazing talent and timely rise to fame led to a starring role in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, which propelled her to become the first American female superstar.
Oakley's most famous trick is perhaps being able to repeatedly split a playing card, edge-on, and put several more holes in it before it could touch the ground, while using a .22 caliber rifle, at 90 feet.
Phoebe Ann (Annie) Moses was born in "a cabin less than two miles northwest of Willowdell in Partentown North Star, Ohio", a rural western border county of Ohio. Her birthplace log cabin site is about five miles eastward of North Star. There is a stone-mounted plaque in the vicinity of the cabin site, which was placed by the Annie Oakley Committee in 1981, 121 years after her birth.
Annie's parents were Quakers of English descent from Hollidaysburg, Blair County, Pennsylvania: Susan Wise, age 18, and Jacob Moses (1860 U.S. Census shows his father's name as Mauzy, born 1799), age 49, married in 1848. A fire burned down their tavern in Hollidaysburg, so they moved to a rented farm (later purchased with a mortgage) in Patterson Township, Darke County. The move occurred sometime between 1855 and her sister Sarah Ellen's Darke County birth in 1857.[citation needed]
wn.com/Annie_Oakley -
Arthur Laurents
Arthur Laurents (July 14, 1917 – May 5, 2011) was an American playwright, stage director and screenwriter.
After writing scripts for radio shows after college and then training films for the U.S. Army during World War II, Laurents turned to writing for Broadway, producing a body of work that includes West Side Story (1957), Gypsy (1959), Hallelujah, Baby! (1967) and La Cage Aux Folles (1983), and directing some of his own shows and other Broadway productions.
His early film scripts include Rope (1948) for Alfred Hitchcock, followed by Anastasia (1956), Bonjour Tristesse (1958), The Way We Were (1973) and The Turning Point (1977).
Born Arthur Levine, Laurents was the son of a lawyer and a schoolteacher who gave up her career when she married. He was born and raised in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, a borough of New York City, New York, the elder of two children, and attended Erasmus Hall High School. His sister Edith suffered from chorea as a child.
His paternal grandparents were Orthodox Jews, and his mother's parents, although born Jewish, were atheists. His mother kept a kosher home for her husband's sake, but was lax about attending synagogue and observing the Jewish holidays. His Bar Mitzvah marked the end of Laurents's religious education and the beginning of his rejection of all fundamentalist religions, although he continued to identify himself as Jewish. However, late in life he admitted to having changed his last name from Levine to the less Jewish-sounding Laurents, "to get a job."
wn.com/Arthur_Laurents -
Barbra Streisand
Barbra Joan Streisand (/ˈstraɪsænd/; born April 24, 1942) is an American singer, actress, writer, film producer and director. She has won two Academy Awards, eight Grammy Awards, five Emmy Awards including one Daytime Emmy, a Special Tony Award, an American Film Institute award, a Peabody Award, and is one of the few entertainers who have won an Oscar, Emmy, Grammy, and Tony Award.
She is one of the most commercially and critically successful entertainers in modern entertainment history, with more than 71.5 million albums shipped in the United States and 140 million albums sold worldwide. She is the best-selling female artist on the Recording Industry Association of America's (RIAA) Top Selling Artists list, the only female recording artist in the top ten, and the only artist outside of the rock and roll genre. Along with Frank Sinatra, Cher, and Shirley Jones, she shares the distinction of being awarded an acting Oscar and also recording a number-one single on the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart.
wn.com/Barbra_Streisand -
Baz Luhrmann
Mark Anthony "Baz" Luhrmann (/ˈbæz ˈlʊərmən/; born 17 September 1962) is an Australian film director, screenwriter, and producer best known for The Red Curtain Trilogy, which includes his films Strictly Ballroom, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge!. In 2008, he released his film Australia, starring Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman.
Luhrmann was born in Sydney, Australia to a mother who was a ballroom dance teacher and dress shop owner, and Leonard Luhrmann, a farmer. He was raised in Herons Creek, a tiny rural settlement in northern New South Wales, where his father ran a petrol station and a movie theatre, both of which would influence his son's film-making career. He attended St. Joseph's Hasting Regional School, Port Macquarie 1975-1978 and Balgowlah Boys Campus. He attended Year 11 at Narrabeen Sports High School in Sydney, performing in the school's version of Shakespeare's Henry IV, Part 1. His nickname was given to him because of a perceived resemblance to the character Basil Brush.[citation needed] Luhrmann first auditioned for the National Institute of Dramatic Art in 1980 but didn't get into the prestigious drama school. He successfully auditioned again two years later, starting the three-year acting course in 1983. He graduated from NIDA in 1985, alongside Sonia Todd, Catherine McClements and Justin Monjo.
wn.com/Baz_Luhrmann -
Ben Brantley
Benjamin D. "Ben" Brantley (born October 26, 1954) is an American journalist and the chief theater critic of The New York Times.
Born in Durham, North Carolina, Brantley received a Bachelor of Arts in English from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and is a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
Brantley began his journalism career as a Summer Intern at the Winston-Salem Sentinel and, in 1975, became an Editorial Assistant at The Village Voice. At Women's Wear Daily, he was a reporter and then editor (1978-January 1983), and later became the European Editor, publisher, and Paris Bureau Chief until June 1985.
For the next eighteen months, Brantley freelanced, writing regularly for ELLE, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker before joining The Times as a Drama Critic (August 1993). He was elevated to Chief Theater Critic three years later.
Brantley is the editor of The New York Times Book of Broadway: On the Aisle for the Unforgettable Plays of the Last Century, a compilation of 125 reviews published by St. Martin's Press in 2001. He received the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 1996-1997.
wn.com/Ben_Brantley -
Ben Jonson
Benjamin "Ben" Jonson (c. 11 June 1572 – 6 August 1637) was an English Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor. A contemporary of William Shakespeare, he is best known for his satirical plays, particularly Volpone, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair, which are considered his best, and his lyric poems. A man of vast reading and a seemingly insatiable appetite for controversy, Jonson had an unparalleled breadth of influence on Jacobean and Caroline playwrights and poets.
Jonson claimed his family was of Scottish Border country descent, and this claim may have been supported by the fact that his coat of arms bears three spindles or rhombi, a device shared by a Borders family, the Johnstones of Annandale. His father died a month before Ben's birth, and his mother remarried two years later, to a master bricklayer. Jonson attended school in St. Martin's Lane, and was later paid for by a friend to go to Westminster School, where one of his teachers was William Camden. Jonson remained friendly with Camden, whose broad scholarship evidently influenced his own style, until the latter's death in 1623. On leaving, Jonson was once thought to have gone on to the University of Cambridge, but Jonson himself contradicts this, saying that he did not go to university, but was put to a trade, probably bricklaying, immediately: a legend recorded by Thomas Fuller indicates that he worked on a garden wall in Lincoln's Inn. He soon had enough of the trade and spent some time in the Low Countries as a volunteer with the regiments of Francis Vere. In conversations with poet William Drummond of Hawthornden, subsequently published as the Hawthornden Manuscripts, Jonson reports that while in the Netherlands he killed an opponent in single combat and stripped him of his weapons.
wn.com/Ben_Jonson -
Bernadette Peters
Bernadette Peters (born Bernadette Lazzara; February 28, 1948) is an American actress, singer and children's book author from Ozone Park, Queens, New York. Over the course of a career that has spanned five decades, she has starred in musical theatre, films and television, as well as performing in solo concerts and recordings. She is one of the most critically acclaimed Broadway performers, having received nominations for seven Tony Awards, winning two, and nine Drama Desk Awards, winning three. Four of the Broadway cast albums on which she has starred have won Grammy Awards.
Regarded by many as the foremost interpreter of the works of Stephen Sondheim, Peters is particularly noted for her roles on the Broadway stage, including Mack and Mabel, Sunday in the Park with George, Song and Dance, Into the Woods and Annie Get Your Gun.
Peters first performed on the stage as a child and then a teenage actor in the 1960s, and in film and television in the 1970s. She was praised for this early work and for appearances on The Muppet Show, The Carol Burnett Show and in other television work, and for her roles in films like Silent Movie, The Jerk, Pennies from Heaven and Annie. In the 1980s, she returned to the theatre, where she became one of the best-known Broadway stars over the next three decades. She also has recorded six solo albums and several singles, as well as many cast albums, and performs regularly in her own solo concert act. Peters also continues to act in films and on television, where she has been nominated for three Emmy Awards and three Golden Globe Awards, winning once.
wn.com/Bernadette_Peters -
Betty Comden
Betty Comden (May 3, 1917 – November 23, 2006) was one-half of the musical-comedy duo Comden and Green, who provided lyrics, libretti, and screenplays to some of the most beloved and successful Hollywood musicals and Broadway shows of the mid-20th century. Her writing partnership with Adolph Green lasted for six decades, during which time they collaborated with other leading entertainment figures such as the famed "Freed Unit" at MGM, Jule Styne and Leonard Bernstein.
Betty Comden was born Basya Cohen in New York City, attended Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, and studied drama at New York University. In 1938, mutual friends introduced her to Adolph Green, an aspiring actor. Along with the young Judy Holliday and Leonard Bernstein, Comden and Green formed a troupe called the Revuers, which performed at the Village Vanguard, a club in Greenwich Village. Due to the act's success, the Revuers appeared in the 1944 film Greenwich Village, but their roles were so small they barely were noticed, and they quickly returned to New York.
wn.com/Betty_Comden -
Billy Joel
William Martin "Billy" Joel (born May 9, 1949) is an American pianist, singer-songwriter, and composer. Since releasing his first hit song, "Piano Man," in 1973, Joel has become the sixth best-selling recording artist and the third best-selling solo artist in the United States, according to the RIAA.
Joel had Top 40 hits in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, achieving 33 Top 40 hits in the United States, all of which he wrote himself. He is also a six-time Grammy Award winner, a 23-time Grammy nominee and has sold over 150 million records worldwide. He was inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame (1992), the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1999), the Long Island Music Hall of Fame (2006), and the Hit Parade Hall of Fame (2009). In 2008, Billboard magazine released a list of the Hot 100 All-Time Top Artists to celebrate the US singles chart's 50th anniversary, with Billy Joel positioned at No. 23. With the exception of the 2007 songs "All My Life" and "Christmas in Fallujah," Joel stopped recording pop/rock material after 1993's River of Dreams, but he continued to tour extensively until 2010.
wn.com/Billy_Joel -
Bob Fosse
Robert Louis “Bob” Fosse (June 23, 1927 – September 23, 1987) was an American actor, dancer, musical theater choreographer, director, screenwriter, film editor and film director. He won an unprecedented eight Tony Awards for choreography, as well as one for direction. He was nominated for an Academy Award four times, winning for his direction of Cabaret (beating Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather). He was closely identified with his third wife, Broadway dancing star Gwen Verdon. She was the dancer/collaborator/muse upon whom he choreographed much of his work and, together with dancer/choreographer Ann Reinking, a significant guardian of the Fosse legacy after his death.
Fosse was born in Chicago, Illinois, to a Norwegian American father, Cyril K. Fosse, and Irish-born mother, Sara Alice (Stanton), the second youngest of six children. He teamed up with Charles Grass, another young dancer, and began a collaboration under the name The Riff Brothers. They toured theatres throughout the Chicago area. Eventually Fosse was hired for Tough Situation, which toured military and naval bases in the Pacific.
wn.com/Bob_Fosse -
Brooks Atkinson
Justin Brooks Atkinson (November 28, 1894 – January 14, 1984) was an American theatre critic. He worked for The New York Times from 1925 to 1960. In his obituary, the Times called him "the most important reviewer of his time."
Atkinson was born in Melrose, Massachusetts, where, as a boy, he printed his own newspaper (using movable type), and planned a career in journalism. He graduated from Harvard University in 1917, and worked at The Springfield Daily News and the Boston Evening Transcript, where he was assistant to the drama critic. In 1922, he became the editor of the New York Times Book Review, and in 1925 the drama critic.
Atkinson quickly became known for his commitment to new kinds of theatre—he was one of the first critical admirers of Eugene O'Neill—for his interest in all kinds of drama, including off-Broadway productions, and for his wit. In 1928, he said of the new play The Front Page, "No one who has ground his heels in the grime of a police headquarters press room will complain that this argot misrepresents the gentlemen of the press." Atkinson had covered the police beat for the Evening Transcript.
wn.com/Brooks_Atkinson -
Burt Shevelove
Burt Shevelove (September 19, 1915 - April 8, 1982) was an American musical theater playwright, lyricist, librettist, and director. Born in Newark, New Jersey, he graduated from Brown University and Yale (Master's degree). At Brown in 1935, he acted in the first ever Brownbrokers musical titled Something Bruin. After serving as a volunteer ambulance driver in WWII, he began working as a writer, director and producer for radio and television. At the time of his death he had lived in London for many years.
His Broadway career started in 1948 with writing material, co-producing and directing for the revue Small Wonder. Among his successes were A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum and No, No, Nanette, for which he won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical.
wn.com/Burt_Shevelove -
Burton Lane
Burton Lane (February 2, 1912 – January 5, 1997) was an American composer and lyricist. His most popular and successful works include Finian's Rainbow and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.
Lane was born Burton Levy in New York City and studied classical piano as a child. At age 14 the theatrical producers the Shuberts commissioned him to write songs for a revue, Greenwich Village Follies.
He was known for his Broadway musicals, Finian's Rainbow (1947) and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965). He also wrote the music for the less remembered Broadway shows, Hold On to Your Hats (1940), Laffing Room Only (1944), and Carmelina (1979), the latter with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, who had also written lyrics to Lane's music for On a Clear Day and the film Royal Wedding (1951). Lane mainly wrote music for films, such as Dancing Lady, Babes on Broadway, writing for more than 30 movies.
He was president of the American Guild of Authors and Composers from 1957 and for the next 10 terms, during which period he campaigned against music piracy. He also served three terms on the board of directors of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP).
wn.com/Burton_Lane -
Cameron Mackintosh
Sir Cameron Anthony Mackintosh (born 17 October 1946) is a British theatrical producer notable for his association with many commercially successful musicals. At the height of his success in 1990, he was described as being "the most successful, influential and powerful theatrical producer in the world" by the New York Times. He is the producer of shows such as Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, Mary Poppins, Martin Guerre, Miss Saigon and Cats.
Mackintosh was born in Enfield, London, the son of Diana Gladys (née Tonna), a production secretary, and Ian Robert Mackintosh, a timber merchant and jazz trumpeter. His father was Scottish and his mother, a native of Malta, was of Maltese and French descent. Mackintosh was raised in his mother's Roman Catholic faith[citation needed] and educated at Prior Park College in Bath.
He first knew that he wanted to become a theatre producer after his aunt took him to a matinee of the Julian Slade musical Salad Days when he was 8 years old.
Mackintosh began his theatre career in his late teens, as a stagehand at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, graduating to stage manager on several touring productions. Before long, he began producing his own small scale tours before becoming a London-based producer in the 1970s. His early London productions included Anything Goes (which closed after only two weeks), Side By Side By Sondheim, The Card, My Fair Lady and Tom Foolery.
wn.com/Cameron_Mackintosh -
Carlos Solórzano
Carlos Solórzano (May 1, 1922 – March 30, 2011) was a Guatemalan born Mexican playwright. He is considered one of the most important playwrights in Guatemalan history. His contribution to the theater in Latin America range from his plays to articles in theater journals and encyclopedias, and essays related to the history and anthology of Latin theater.
Carlos Solórzano was born in 1922 to a wealthy family in San Marcos, Guatemala.
In 1939 Carlos Solórzano moved to Mexico. In 1945 he graduated from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México as an architect, as a master and doctor of letters 1946–1948. His first play, Espejo de Novelas, was penned in 1946. In 1948, a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation permitted him to study drama at Sorbonne, Paris, France. During his studies in France, he became acquainted with many prominent men of letters such as Camus and Ghelderode and their influence and dramatic style would be a major influence in his later works as indeed in increasing his interest in theatrical subjects in general.
wn.com/Carlos_Solórzano -
Charlemagne
Charlemagne ( /ˈʃɑrlɨmeɪn/ or /ˈʃɑrləmeɪn/; French pronunciation: [ʃaʁ.lə.maɲ]; c. 742 – 28 January 814), also known as Charles the Great (Latin: Carolus Magnus or Karolus Magnus), was King of the Franks from 768 and Emperor of the Romans (Imperator Romanorum) from 800 to his death in 814. He expanded the Frankish kingdom into an empire that incorporated much of Western and Central Europe. During his reign, he conquered Italy and was crowned Imperator Augustus by Pope Leo III on 25 December 800 in Rome.
His rule is also associated with the Carolingian Renaissance, a revival of art, religion, and culture through the medium of the Catholic Church. Through his foreign conquests and internal reforms, Charlemagne helped define both Western Europe and the European Middle Ages. He is numbered as Charles I in the regnal lists of Germany, the Holy Roman Empire, and France.
The son of King Pepin the Short and Bertrada of Laon, a Frankish queen, he succeeded his father in 768 and was initially co-ruler with his brother Carloman I. It has often been suggested that the relationship between Charlemagne and Carloman was not good, but it has also been argued that tensions were exaggerated by Carolingian chroniclers.
wn.com/Charlemagne -
Charles Frohman
Charles Frohman (July 15, 1856 – May 7, 1915) was an American theatrical producer. Frohman was producing plays by 1889 and acquired his first Broadway theatre by 1892. He discovered and promoted many stars of the American theatre.
In 1896, Frohman co-founded the Theatrical Syndicate, which grew to exert monopoly control over the U.S. theatre industry for nearly two decades. He also leased the Duke of York's Theatre in London, promoting such playwrights as J. M. Barrie, producing Barrie's Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, which he debuted at the Duke of York's in December 1904 and later produced in the United States starring a Frohman favorite, Maude Adams. He partnered with English producers, including Seymour Hicks, with whom he produced a string of London hits prior to 1910, including Quality Street, The Admirable Crichton, The Catch of the Season, The Beauty of Bath, and A Waltz Dream. Many of his London successes also enjoyed runs in New York.
Frohman produced over 700 shows. At the height of his career, he died in the 1915 sinking of the RMS Lusitania.
wn.com/Charles_Frohman -
Charles Hale Hoyt
Charles Hale Hoyt (July 26, 1859 - November 20, 1900) was an American dramatist.
Hoyt was born in Concord, New Hampshire. He had a difficult childhood, as his mother died when he was nine years old. He graduated at the Boston Latin School and, after being engaged in the cattle business in Colorado for a time, took up newspaper work, first with the St. Albans (Vt.) Advertiser, and later becoming musical and dramatic critic of the Boston Post.
Beginning in 1883, Hoyt turned playwright and wrote a series of twenty farcical comedies (roughly one per year until his death) and a comic opera. Hoyt's plays emphasized individualized characters drawn from the everyday experiences of ordinary people. His 10th play, A Trip to Chinatown (1891), with its hit tune "The Bowery" and its then-record 657 performance run, and his 1883 play, A Milk-White Flag, were the most successful. Both were performed at Hoyt's Madison Square Theatre in New York, often called simply "Hoyt's Theatre" during the seven years he ran it. He was a highly popular playwright and producer, and was very financially successful, thanks in part to the assistance of his business partners, Charles W. Thomas and Frank McKee.
wn.com/Charles_Hale_Hoyt -
Clive Barnes
Clive Alexander Barnes CBE (May 13, 1927 – November 19, 2008) was a British-born American writer and critic. From 1965 to 1977 he was the dance and theater critic for the New York Times, the most powerful position he had held, since its theater critics' reviews historically have had great influence on the success or failure of Broadway productions.
Barnes was educated at Emanuel School, and St Catherine's College, Oxford. He was the dance and drama critic at the New York Post since 1978, and senior consulting editor at Dance Magazine, where he wrote a monthly column, "Attitudes". Late in life, he also contributed regularly to the British journal "Dance Now". He also continued to edit and write for British newspapers such as The Times and the Daily Express, and the weekly Spectator magazine.
Barnes authored numerous books related to theater and the performing arts, particularly dance. These include four volumes of 50 Best Plays of the American Theatre, nine series of Best American Plays (with John Gassner), American Ballet Theatre: A 25 Year Retrospective (with Elizabeth Kaye), Masters of Movement: Portraits of America's Great Choreographers (with Rose Eichenbaum), Ballet in Britain Since the War, New York Times Directory of the Theater, Ballet Here and Now, Dance Scene USA, Inside American Ballet Theatre, as well as biographies of Tennessee Williams and Rudolf Nureyev.
wn.com/Clive_Barnes -
Cole Porter
Cole Albert Porter (June 9, 1891 – October 15, 1964) was an American composer and songwriter. Born to a wealthy family in Indiana, he defied the wishes of his domineering grandfather and took up music as a profession. Classically trained, he was drawn towards musical theatre. After a slow start, he began to achieve success in the 1920s, and by the 1930s he was one of the major songwriters for the Broadway musical stage. Unlike most successful Broadway composers, Porter wrote both the lyrics and the music for his songs.
After a serious horseback riding accident in 1937, Porter was left disabled and in constant pain, but he continued to work. His shows of the early 1940s did not contain the lasting hits of his best work of the 1920s and 30s, but in 1948 he made a triumphant comeback with his most successful musical, Kiss Me, Kate.
Porter's other musicals include Fifty Million Frenchmen, DuBarry Was a Lady, Anything Goes and Can-Can, and his numerous hit songs include "Night and Day", "I Get a Kick out of You", "Well, Did You Evah!" and "I've Got You Under My Skin". He also composed scores for films from the 1930s to the 1950s. He was noted for his sophisticated, suggestive lyrics, clever rhymes and complex forms.
wn.com/Cole_Porter -
Damon Runyon
Alfred Damon Runyon (October 4, 1880 – December 10, 1946) was an American newspaperman and author.
He was best known for his short stories celebrating the world of Broadway in New York City that grew out of the Prohibition era. To New Yorkers of his generation, a "Damon Runyon character" evoked a distinctive social type from the Brooklyn or Midtown demi-monde. The adjective "Runyonesque" refers to this type of character as well as to the type of situations and dialog that Runyon depicted. He spun humorous tales of gamblers, hustlers, actors, and gangsters, few of whom go by "square" names, preferring instead colorful monikers such as "Nathan Detroit," "Benny Southstreet," "Big Jule," "Harry the Horse," "Good Time Charley," "Dave the Dude," or "The Seldom Seen Kid." His distinctive vernacular style is known as "Runyonese": a mixture of formal speech and colorful slang, almost always in present tense, and always devoid of contractions.
Runyon's fictional world is also known to the general public through the musical Guys and Dolls based on two of his stories, "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown" and "Blood Pressure". The musical additionally borrows characters and story elements from a few other Runyon stories, most notably "Pick The Winner." The film Little Miss Marker (and its remake, Sorrowful Jones) grew from his short story of the same name.
wn.com/Damon_Runyon -
David Merrick
David Merrick (November 27, 1911 – April 25, 2000) was a prolific Tony Award-winning American theatrical producer.
Born David Lee Margulois to Jewish parents in St. Louis, Missouri, Merrick graduated from Washington University, then studied law at the Jesuit-run Saint Louis University School of Law. In 1940 he left his legal career to become a successful theatrical producer. He often was his own competition for the Tony Award, and he frequently won multiple nominations and/or wins in the same season.
wn.com/David_Merrick -
DuBose Heyward
Edwin DuBose Heyward (August 31, 1885 – June 16, 1940) was a white American author best known for his 1925 novel Porgy. This novel was the basis for the play by the same name (which he co-authored with his wife Dorothy) and, in turn, the opera Porgy and Bess with music by George Gershwin.
Heyward was born in 1885 in Charleston, South Carolina and was a descendant of Thomas Heyward, Jr., who was a signer of the United States Declaration of Independence as a representative of South Carolina. As a child and young man Heyward was frequently ill; he also caught polio when he was eighteen, then two years later contracted typhoid fever and the following year fell ill with pleurisy. Although he described himself as " a miserable student" who was uninterested in learning, and dropped out of high school in his first year, aged fourteen, he had a lifelong and serious interest in literature and passed the time in his sickbed writing verses and stories.
wn.com/DuBose_Heyward -
Edna Ferber
Edna Ferber (August 15, 1885 – April 16, 1968) was an American novelist, short story writer and playwright. Her novels were especially popular and included the Pulitzer Prize-winning So Big (1924), Show Boat (1926; made into the celebrated 1927 musical), and Giant (1952; made into the 1956 Hollywood movie).
Ferber was born August 15, 1885, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to a Hungarian-born Jewish storekeeper and his Milwaukee, Wisconsin-born wife, Jacob Charles and Julia (Neumann) Ferber. After living in Chicago, Illinois, and Ottumwa, Iowa, at the age of 12 Ferber and her family moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, where she graduated from high school and briefly attended Lawrence University. She took newspaper jobs at the Appleton Daily Crescent and the Milwaukee Journal before publishing her first novel. She covered the 1920 Republican National Convention and 1920 Democratic National Convention for the United Press Association.
Ferber's novels generally featured strong female protagonists, along with a rich and diverse collection of supporting characters. She usually highlighted at least one strong secondary character who faced discrimination ethnically or for other reasons; through this technique, Ferber demonstrated her belief that people are people and that the not-so-pretty persons have the best character.
wn.com/Edna_Ferber -
Edward Harrigan
Edward Harrigan (October 26, 1844 – June 6, 1911) was an American actor, playwright, theatre manager, and composer. Harrigan and Tony Hart formed the first famous collaboration in American musical theatre.
Harrigan was born in New York and of Irish lineage. He made his first acting appearance in San Francisco in 1867, and soon afterwards formed a stage partnership with Tony Hart (1855–1891), whose real name was Anthony Cannon. As "Harrigan and Hart," they had a great success on tour in the presentation of comic types of lower class characters drawn from everyday life on the streets of New York, especially the ethnic neighborhood "militias". Beginning as simple vaudeville sketches, Harrigan gradually worked these up into plays, with occasional songs, set to popular music by David Braham. The titles of these plays indicate their character, The Mulligan Guards, Squatter Sovereignty, A Leather Patch, The O'Regans.
By 1878, with The Mulligan Guard Picnic, Harrigan & Hart settled down on Broadway and played in seventeen of their shows over the next seven years (until Harrigan and Hart split up). Though still broad and farcical, these shows featured music that was integrated with a more literary story line, together with the dialogue and dance, and the shows began to resemble modern musical comedy. Harrigan wrote the stories and lyrics, and Braham wrote the music. These shows were very popular especially with New York's immigrant-based lower and middle classes, who were delighted to see themselves comically (but sympathetically) depicted on stage. The action of the plays took place in downtown Manhattan and concerned real-life problems, such as interracial tensions, political corruption, and gang violence, all mixed together with broad, street-smart comedy, puns and ethnic dialects. Harrigan played the politically ambitious Irish saloon owner "Dan Mulligan", and Hart played the African-American washerwoman "Rebecca Allup".
wn.com/Edward_Harrigan -
Edward Kleban
Edward “Ed” Kleban (April 30, 1939 - December 28, 1987) was an American musical theatre composer and lyricist.
Kleban was born in the Bronx, New York in 1939 and graduated from New York's High School of Music & Art and Columbia University, where he attended with future playwright Terrance McNally. Kleban is best known as lyricist of the Broadway hit A Chorus Line. He and composer Marvin Hamlisch won the 1976 Tony Award for Best Original Score, and he shared the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1976 with Hamlisch and three other contributors to the musical. The one-woman Phyllis Newman show, The Madwoman of Central Park West (1979), featured a few tunes with his lyrics. For several years he worked at Columbia Records, where he produced albums by performers as diverse as Igor Stravinsky and Percy Faith and the album for the Off-Broadway musical Now Is The Time For All Good Men.
He was a teacher for many years at the BMI (Broadcast Music Incorporated) Musical Theater Workshop.
In his will, Kleban established the Kleban Foundation which grants annual awards, each in the amount of $100,000 over two years, to the most promising librettist and lyricist in American musical theatre. The awards are administered by BMI. His will also granted rights to his collection of unpublished songs to friends Avery Corman and Wendy Wasserstein with the request that they incorporate them into a new musical. Their attempts failed and the rights reverted to Kleban's longtime companion, librettist Linda Kline. Kline sought someone who did not know or work with Kleban, but who would learn about him through the material. She admired previous work of Lonny Price and sought him as a collaborator.
wn.com/Edward_Kleban -
Edward Solomon
Edward Solomon (25 July 1855 – 22 January 1895) was a prolific English composer, as well as a conductor, orchestrator and pianist. Though he died before his fortieth birthday, he wrote dozens of works produced for the stage, including several for the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, such as The Nautch Girl, among others.
Edward ("Teddy") Solomon was born in London of Jewish descent.
His first comic opera was A Will With a Vengeance (1876), a one-act work with a libretto by Frederick Hay, based on La Vendetta. This was produced at the Globe Theatre. In 1879, he met Henry Pottinger "Pot" Stephens while he was the musical director at the Royalty Theatre conducting, among other works, Arthur Sullivan's The Zoo. With Stephens, he produced his first successes, Billee Taylor (1880), a "nautical comedy opera" in two acts; and Claude Duval (1881, celebrating a well known 18th century highwayman), both of which remained popular for many years in both the UK and US. Other Solomon and Stephens successes were Lord Bateman, or Picotee's Pledge (1882), Virginia, or Ringing the Changes (1883) and later The Red Hussar (1889), a "comedy opera" in three acts. Together, they would also write Popsy Wopsy, a "musical absurdity" (1880) and Pocahontas (1884).
wn.com/Edward_Solomon -
Elaine Paige
Elaine Paige OBE (née Bickerstaff; born 5 March 1948) is an English singer and actress best known for her work in musical theatre. Raised in Barnet, North London, Paige attended the Aida Foster stage school, making her first professional appearance on stage in 1964, at the age of 16. Her appearance in the 1968 production of Hair marked her West End debut.
Following a number of roles over the next decade, Paige was selected to play Eva Perón in the first production of Evita in 1978, which brought her to the attention of the broader public. For this role, she won the Laurence Olivier Award for Performance of the Year in a Musical. She went on to originate the role of Grizabella in Cats and had a Top 10 hit with "Memory", a song from the show. In 1985, Paige released "I Know Him So Well" with Barbara Dickson from the musical Chess, which remains the biggest-selling record by a female duo. She then appeared in the original stage production of Chess, followed by a starring role in Anything Goes which she also co-produced. Paige made her Broadway debut in Sunset Boulevard in 1996, playing the lead role of Norma Desmond, to critical acclaim. She appeared in The King and I from 2000 to 2001, and six years later she returned to the West End stage in The Drowsy Chaperone. She has also worked sporadically in television.
wn.com/Elaine_Paige -
Elton John
Sir Elton Hercules John, CBE (born Reginald Kenneth Dwight on 25 March 1947) is an English rock singer-songwriter, composer, pianist and occasional actor. He has worked with lyricist Bernie Taupin as his songwriter partner since 1967; they have collaborated on more than 30 albums to date.
In his four-decade career John has sold more than 250 million records, making him one of the most successful artists of all time. His single "Candle in the Wind 1997" has sold over 33 million copies worldwide, and is the best selling single in Billboard history. He has more than 50 Top 40 hits, including seven consecutive No. 1 US albums, 56 Top 40 singles, 16 Top 10, four No. 2 hits, and nine No. 1 hits. He has won six Grammy Awards, four Brit Awards, an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award and a Tony Award. In 2004, Rolling Stone ranked him Number 49 on its list of the 100 greatest artists of all time.
John was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1994. Having been named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1996, John received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II for "services to music and charitable services" in 1998.
wn.com/Elton_John -
Ethan Mordden
Ethan Mordden (born January 27, 1949, Pennsylvania) is an American author.
Mordden was raised in Pennsylvania, in Venice, Italy, and on Long Island, and is a graduate of Friends Academy in Locust Valley, New York, and the University of Pennsylvania. He at first sought a career in show business, working as music director on off-Broadway and in regional theatre, and enrolling in the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop run by Lehman Engel. As both composer and lyricist, Mordden wrote musicals based on William Shakespeare's Measure For Measure and on Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson, but he ended up earning his living as a writer of English prose. In the 1970s, he was assistant editor to Dorothy Woolfolk on such DC Comics as The Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love.
His stories, novels, essays, and non-fiction books cover a wide range of topics including the American musical theater, opera, film, and, especially in his fiction, the emergence and development of contemporary American gay culture as manifested in New York City. He has also written for The New Yorker, including fiction, Critic At Large pieces on Cole Porter, Judy Garland, and the musical Show Boat, and reviews of a biography of the Barrymores and Art Spiegelman's graphic novel Maus.
wn.com/Ethan_Mordden -
Ethel Merman
Ethel Merman (January 16, 1908 – February 15, 1984) was an American actress and singer. Known primarily for her powerful voice and roles in musical theatre, she has been called "the undisputed First Lady of the musical comedy stage." Among the many standards introduced by Merman in Broadway musicals are "I Got Rhythm", "Everything's Coming Up Roses", "Some People", "Rose's Turn", "I Get a Kick Out of You", "It's De-Lovely", "Friendship", "You're the Top", "Anything Goes", and "There's No Business Like Show Business", which later became her theme song.
Merman was born Ethel Agnes Zimmermann in her maternal grandmother's house located at 265 4th Street in Astoria, Queens, in New York City in 1908, though she would later emphatically declare that it was actually 1912. Her father, Edward Zimmermann (1879–1977), was an accountant with James H. Dunham & Company, a Manhattan wholesale dry-goods company, and her mother, Agnes (née Gardner; 1883–1974), was a school teacher. Zimmermann had been raised in the Dutch Reformed Church and his wife was Presbyterian, but shortly after they were wed they joined the Episcopalian congregation at Church of the Redeemer, where Merman was baptized. Her parents were strict about church attendance, and every Sunday she spent the day there, first at morning services, followed by Sunday school, an afternoon prayer meeting, and an evening study group for children.
wn.com/Ethel_Merman -
Ethel Waters
Ethel Waters (October 31, 1896 – September 1, 1977) was an American blues, jazz and gospel vocalist and actress. She frequently performed jazz, big band, and pop music, on the Broadway stage and in concerts, although she began her career in the 1920s singing blues.
Her best-known recordings includes, "Dinah", "Stormy Weather", "Taking a Chance on Love", "Heat Wave", "Supper Time", "Am I Blue?", and "Cabin in the Sky", as well as her version of the spiritual "His Eye Is on the Sparrow". Waters was the second African American, after Hattie McDaniel, to be nominated for an Academy Award.
Ethel Waters was born in Chester, Pennsylvania on October 31, 1896, as a result of the rape of her teenaged mother, Louise Anderson (believed to have been thirteen years old at the time, although some sources indicate she may have been slightly older) by John Waters, a pianist and family acquaintance from a mixed-race middle-class background, who played no role in raising Ethel. Ethel Waters was raised in poverty and never lived in the same place for more than 15 months. She said of her difficult childhood, "I never was a child. I never was cuddled, or liked, or understood by my family."[citation needed] Waters grew tall, standing 5'9½" in her teens. According to women-in-jazz historian and archivist Rosetta Reitz, Waters' birth in the North and her peripatetic life exposed her to many cultures.
wn.com/Ethel_Waters -
Eva Perón
María Eva Duarte de Perón (Spanish: [maˈɾi.a ˈeβa ˈðwarte ðe peˈɾon]; 7 May 1919 – 26 July 1952) was the second wife of President Juan Perón (1895–1974) and served as the First Lady of Argentina from 1946 until her death in 1952. She is usually referred to as Eva Perón, or by the affectionate Spanish language diminutive Evita.
She was born in the village of Los Toldos in rural Argentina in 1919, the youngest of five children. In 1934, at the age of 15, she went to the nation's capital of Buenos Aires, where she pursued a career as a stage, radio, and film actress. Eva met Colonel Juan Perón on 22 January 1944, in Buenos Aires during a charity event at the Luna Park Stadium to benefit the victims of an earthquake in San Juan, Argentina. The two were married the following year. In 1946, Juan Perón was elected President of Argentina. Over the course of the next six years, Eva Perón became powerful within the pro-Peronist trade unions, primarily for speaking on behalf of labor rights. She also ran the Ministries of Labor and Health, founded and ran the charitable Eva Perón Foundation, championed women's suffrage in Argentina, and founded and ran the nation's first large-scale female political party, the Female Peronist Party.
wn.com/Eva_Perón -
Fay Templeton
Fay Templeton (December 25, 1865 - October 3, 1939) was an American stage actress.
Her parents were actors/vaudevillians and she followed in their footsteps, making her Broadway debut in 1900. She continued to appear there until 1934. For a time she dated Sam Shubert, of the famous Shubert family of theatre owners, up until his death in a railroad accident.
Some of her notable performances were in HMS Pinafore and Roberta.
After her death at the age of 73, she was interred in Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York.
Born into a theatrical family, Fay Templeton excelled on the legitimate and vaudeville stages for more than half a century. As an actress, singer, and comedian, she was a favorite headliner and heroine of popular theater.
Fay Templeton was born on December 25, 1865, in Little Rock, Arkansas, where her parents were starring with the Templeton Opera Company. John Templeton, Fay’s father, was a well-known Southern manager, comedian, and author. Helen Alice Vane, Fay’s mother, starred with her husband. At age three, Templeton, dressed as Cupid, sang fairy tale songs between the acts of her father’s plays. Gradually, she was incorporated into the productions as a bit player and then, at five, had actual lines to recite. At eight, she played Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at New York’s Grand Opera House. She sang a contemporary tune, “Up in a Balloon,” and created a sensation.
wn.com/Fay_Templeton -
Federico Fellini
Federico Fellini (Italian pronunciation: [fedeˈriːko felˈliːni]; January 20, 1920 – October 31, 1993) was an Italian film director and scriptwriter. Known for a distinct style that blends fantasy and baroque images, he is considered one of the most influential filmmakers of the 20th century, and is widely revered. He won five Academy Awards and was nominated for 12 in a career that spanned over forty years.
Fellini was born on January 20, 1920 to middle-class parents in Rimini, then a small town on the Adriatic Sea. His father, Urbano Fellini (1894–1956), born to a family of Romagnol peasants and small landholders from Gambettola, moved to Rome in 1915 as a baker apprenticed to the Pantanella pasta factory. His mother, Ida Barbiani (1896–1984), came from a bourgeois Catholic family of Roman merchants. Despite her family’s vehement disapproval, she eloped with Urbano in 1917 to live at his parents' home in Gambettola. A civil marriage followed in 1918 with the religious ceremony held at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome a year later. The couple settled in Rimini where Urbano became a traveling salesman and wholesale vendor. Fellini had two siblings: Riccardo (1921–1991), a documentary director for RAI Television, and Maria Maddalena (m. Fabbri; 1929–2002).
wn.com/Federico_Fellini -
Frank Loesser
Frank Henry Loesser (June 29, 1910 – July 28, 1969) was an American songwriter who wrote the lyrics and music to the Broadway hits Guys and Dolls and How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, among others. He won separate Tony Awards for the music and lyrics in both shows, as well as sharing the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the latter. He also wrote numerous songs for films and Tin Pan Alley, many of which have become standards, and was nominated for five Academy Awards for best song, winning once, for "Baby, It's Cold Outside".
Loesser was born in New York City to Henry Loesser, a pianist, and Julia Ehrlich. He left City College of New York in 1925 after one year. After trying various jobs, by 1935 he was performing in a club with singer Lynn Blankenbaker Garland, whom he married in 1936.
After signing with Universal Pictures in 1936 he moved to Hollywood, and then worked for Paramount Pictures. He wrote the lyrics for many songs during this period, including "Two Sleepy People" and “I Hear Music.” He stayed in Hollywood until World War II, when he joined the Army Air Force.
wn.com/Frank_Loesser -
Franz Lehár
Franz Lehár (30 April 1870 – 24 October 1948) was an Austro-Hungarian composer. He is mainly known for his operettas of which the most successful and best known is The Merry Widow (Die lustige Witwe).
Lehár was born in the northern part of Komárom, Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary (now Komárno, Slovakia), the eldest son of an Austrian bandmaster in the Infantry Regiment No. 50 of the Austro-Hungarian Army and a Hungarian woman from a family of German descent. He grew up speaking only Hungarian until the age of 12. Later he put a diacritic above the "a" of his father's name "Lehar" to indicate the long vowel in Hungarian phonology.
While his younger brother Anton entered cadet school in Vienna to become a professional officer, Franz studied violin and composition at the Prague Conservatory, where his violin teacher was Antonín Bennewitz, but was advised by Antonín Dvořák to focus on composing music. After graduation in 1899 he joined his father's band in Vienna, as assistant bandmaster. In 1902 he became conductor at the historic Vienna Theater an der Wien, where his first opera Wiener Frauen was performed in November of that year.
wn.com/Franz_Lehár -
Fred Astaire
Fred Astaire (born Frederick Austerlitz; May 10, 1899 – June 22, 1987) was an American film and Broadway stage dancer, choreographer, singer and actor. His stage and subsequent film career spanned a total of 76 years, during which he made 31 musical films. He was named the fifth Greatest Male Star of All Time by the American Film Institute. He is particularly associated with Ginger Rogers, with whom he made ten films.
Gene Kelly, another major innovator in filmed dance, said that "the history of dance on film begins with Astaire". Beyond film and television, many classical dancers and choreographers, Rudolf Nureyev, Sammy Davis, Jr., Michael Jackson, Gregory Hines, Mikhail Baryshnikov, George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins among them, also acknowledged his importance and influence.
Astaire was born in Omaha, Nebraska, the son of Johanna "Ann" (née Geilus) and Frederic "Fritz" Austerlitz (born September 8, 1868, as Friedrich Emanuel Austerlitz). Astaire's mother was born in the United States to Lutheran German immigrants from East Prussia and Alsace, while Astaire's father was born in Linz, Austria, to Jewish parents who had converted to Catholicism.
wn.com/Fred_Astaire -
Fred Ebb
Fred Ebb (April 8, 1928 – September 11, 2004) was an American musical theatre lyricist who had many successful collaborations with composer John Kander. The Kander and Ebb team frequently wrote for such performers as Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera.
Ebb was born in Manhattan to a Jewish family, the son of Anna Evelyn (née Gritz) and Harry Ebb. He worked during the early 1950s bronzing baby shoes, as a trucker's assistant, and was also employed in a department store credit office and at a hosiery company. He graduated from New York University with a bachelor’s degree in English Literature, and also earned his Master’s Degree in English from Columbia University.
One of his early collaborators was Phil Springer, and a song they wrote together ("I Never Loved Him Anyhow") was recorded by Carmen McRae in 1956. Another song Ebb wrote with Springer was "Heartbroken" (1953), which was recorded by Judy Garland, the mother of his future protégée, Liza Minnelli. Other Springer-Ebb tunes include "Moonlight Gambler" and "Nevertheless I Never Lost the Blues". "Don't Forget", which he wrote with Norman Leyden, was recorded by singer Eddy Arnold in 1954.
wn.com/Fred_Ebb -
Fred Saidy
Fred Saidy (February 11, 1907 - May 14, 1982) was an American playwright and screenwriter.
Born in Los Angeles, California, Saidy began his writing career in 1943 with the screenplay for the Red Skelton comedy I Dood It. The following year, he scripted both the Lucille Ball-Dick Powell feature film Meet the People and the book for the Harold Arlen-E. Y. Harburg musical Bloomer Girl. It was the first of several collaborations with Harburg, which included Finian's Rainbow (1947), Flahooley (1951), Jamaica (1957), and The Happiest Girl in the World (1961). He was nominated for the Tony Award for Best Musical for Jamaica.
Finian's Rainbow has had three major revivals (1955, 1960 and 1967), and was also made into a film starring Fred Astaire and Petula Clark, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, in 1968. Saidy's last project was the screenplay for the film, for which he was nominated for the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written American Musical. In 2004 the Irish Repertory Theatre staged a well-received Off-Broadway production. New York's City Center Encores! series performed a critically acclaimed concert version of the piece in March 2009. Directed and choreographed by Warren Carlyle, it starred Tony Award-winner Jim Norton and Kate Baldwin as Finian and Sharon, with Cheyenne Jackson as Woody and Jeremy Bobb as Og, the leprechaun. A Broadway revival will begin on October 8, 2009, with opening scheduled for October 29 at the St. James Theatre with most of the Encores! cast. Newly added to the Broadway cast are Christopher Fitzgerald as Og and Chuck Cooper as Billboard; Jim Norton, Kate Baldwin and Cheyenne Jackson all reprise their roles
wn.com/Fred_Saidy -
Frederick Loewe
Frederick Loewe (/ˈloʊ/, originally German Friedrich (Fritz) Löwe [ˈløːvə]; June 10, 1901 – February 14, 1988), was an Austrian-American composer. He collaborated with lyricist Alan Jay Lerner on the long running Broadway musicals My Fair Lady and Camelot, with book and lyrics by Lerner, both of which were made into films.
Loewe was born in Berlin, Germany, to Viennese parents Edmond and Rosa Loewe. His father was a noted Jewish operetta star who performed throughout Europe and in North and South America; he starred as Count Danilo in the original production of The Merry Widow.
Frederick Loewe grew up in Berlin and attended a Prussian cadet school from the age of five until he was thirteen. At an early age Loewe learned to play piano by ear and helped his father rehearse, and he began composing songs at age seven. He eventually attended a music conservatory in Berlin, one year behind virtuoso Claudio Arrau, and studied with Ferruccio Busoni and Eugene d'Albert. He won the coveted Hollander Medal awarded by the school and gave performances as a concert pianist while still in Germany. At 13, he was the youngest piano soloist ever to appear with the Berlin Philharmonic.
wn.com/Frederick_Loewe -
Gaston Leroux
Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux (6 May 1868 – 15 April 1927) was a French journalist and author of detective fiction.
In the English-speaking world, he is best known for writing the novel The Phantom of the Opera (Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, 1910), which has been made into several film and stage productions of the same name, notably the 1925 film starring Lon Chaney; and Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1986 musical.
Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux was born in Paris in 1868. He went to school in Normandy and studied law in Paris, graduating in 1889. He inherited millions of francs and lived wildly until he nearly reached bankruptcy. Subsequently in 1890, he began working as a court reporter and theater critic for L'Écho de Paris. His most important journalism came when he began working as an international correspondent for the Paris newspaper Le Matin. In 1905, he was present at, and covered, the Russian Revolution.
Another case he was present at involved the investigation and in-depth coverage of the former Paris Opera (presently housing the Paris Ballet). The basement contained a cell that held prisoners of the Paris Commune.[citation needed]
wn.com/Gaston_Leroux -
George Abbott
George Francis Abbott (June 25, 1887 – January 31, 1995) was an American theater producer and director, playwright, screenwriter, and film director and producer whose career spanned more than nine decades.
Abbott was born in Forestville, New York, and later moved to the town of Salamanca, which twice elected his father mayor. In 1898, his family moved to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where he attended Kearney Military Academy. Within a few years, his family returned to New York, and he graduated from Hamburg High School in 1907. Four years later, he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Rochester, where he wrote his first play, Perfectly Harmless, for the University Dramatic Club.
Abbott then went to Harvard University, where he studied playwriting under George Pierce Baker. Under his tutelage, he wrote The Head of the Family, which was performed at the Harvard Dramatic Club in 1912. He then worked for a year as assistant stage manager at the Bijou Theatre in Boston, where his play The Man in the Manhole won a contest.
wn.com/George_Abbott -
George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw (26 July 1856 – 2 November 1950) was an Irish playwright and a co-founder of the London School of Economics. Although his first profitable writing was music and literary criticism, in which capacity he wrote many highly articulate pieces of journalism, his main talent was for drama, and he wrote more than 60 plays. Nearly all his writings address prevailing social problems, but have a vein of comedy which makes their stark themes more palatable. Shaw examined education, marriage, religion, government, health care, and class privilege.
He was most angered by what he perceived as the exploitation of the working class. An ardent socialist, Shaw wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian Society. He became an accomplished orator in the furtherance of its causes, which included gaining equal rights for men and women, alleviating abuses of the working class, rescinding private ownership of productive land, and promoting healthy lifestyles. For a short time he was active in local politics, serving on the London County Council.
wn.com/George_Bernard_Shaw -
George Edwardes
George Joseph Edwardes (born as Edwards) (8 October 1855 – 4 October 1915) was an English theatre manager of Irish ancestry who brought a new era in musical theatre to the British stage and beyond.
Edwardes started out in theatre management, soon working at a number of West End theatres. By the age of 20, he was managing theatres for Richard D'Oyly Carte. In 1885, Edwardes became a manager at the Gaiety Theatre with John Hollingshead, who soon retired.
For the next three decades, Edwardes ruled a theatrical empire including the Gaiety, Daly's Theatre, the Adelphi Theatre and others, and sent touring companies around Britain and abroad. In the early 1890s, Edwardes recognized the changing tastes of musical theatre audiences and led the movement away from burlesque and comic opera to Edwardian musical comedy.
Edwardes was born at Great Grimsby, Lincolnshire, England. He was the eldest of four sons and three daughters of James Edwards, comptroller of customs, and his wife, Eleanor Widdup. Edwardes' parents were Roman Catholics from Wexford, Ireland. He attended St James's College, in Clee, after which he was sent to London to take the examination for the Royal Military Academy. However, his cousins were Irish theatre managers John and Michael Gunn, and they obtained a job for him at Leicester's Royal Opera House.
wn.com/George_Edwardes -
George Gershwin
George Gershwin (September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937) was an American composer and pianist. Gershwin's compositions spanned both popular and classical genres, and his most popular melodies are widely known. Among his best known works are the orchestral compositions Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris, as well as the opera Porgy and Bess.
Born in Brooklyn to a Ukrainian father of Jewish descent and a Russian mother, Gershwin studied piano under Charles Hambitzer and composition with Rubin Goldmark and Henry Cowell. He began his career as a song plugger, but soon thereafter started composing Broadway theatre works with his brother Ira Gershwin and Buddy DeSylva. He moved to Paris in an attempt to study with Nadia Boulanger, where he began to compose An American in Paris. After returning to New York City, he wrote Porgy and Bess with Ira and author DuBose Heyward. Initially a commercial failure, Porgy and Bess is now considered one of the most important American operas of the Twentieth Century. Gershwin moved to Hollywood and composed numerous film scores until his death in 1937 from a brain tumor.
wn.com/George_Gershwin -
Georges Seurat
Georges Pierre Seurat (French pronunciation: [ʒɔʁʒ pjɛʁ søʁa]; 2 December 1859 – 29 March 1891) was a French Post-Impressionist painter and draftsman. He is noted for his innovative use of drawing media and for devising a technique of painting known as pointillism. His large-scale work A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886) altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-impressionism, and is one of the icons of 19th century painting.
Seurat was born into a wealthy family in Paris, France. His father, Antoine Chrysostome Seurat, was a legal official and a native of Champagne; his mother, Ernestine Faivre, was Parisian. Georges Seurat first studied art with Justin Lequien, a sculptor. Seurat attended the École des Beaux-Arts in 1878 and 1879. After a year of service at Brest Military Academy, he returned to Paris in 1880. He shared a small studio on the Left Bank with two student friends before moving to a studio of his own. For the next two years he devoted himself to mastering the art of black-and-white drawing. He spent 1883 on his first major painting—a huge canvas titled Bathers at Asnières.
wn.com/Georges_Seurat -
Guy Bolton
Guy Reginald Bolton (23 November 1884 – 4 September 1979) was a British-American playwright and writer of musical comedies. Born in England and educated in France and the U.S., he trained as an architect but turned to writing. Bolton preferred working in collaboration with others, principally the English writers P. G. Wodehouse and Fred Thompson, with whom he wrote 21 and 14 shows respectively, and the American playwright George Middleton, with whom he wrote ten shows. Among his other collaborators in Britain were George Grossmith Jr., Ian Hay and Weston and Lee. In the U.S., he worked with George and Ira Gershwin, Kalmar and Ruby and Oscar Hammerstein II.
Bolton is best known for his early work on the Princess Theatre musicals during the First World War with Wodehouse and the composer Jerome Kern. These shows moved the American musical away from the traditions of European operetta to small scale, intimate productions with what the Oxford Encyclopedia of Popular Music calls, "smart and witty integrated books and lyrics, considered to be a watershed in the evolution of the American musical." Among his 50 plays and musicals, most of which were considered "frothy confections", additional hits included Primrose (1924), the Gershwins' Lady, Be Good (1925), and especially Cole Porter's Anything Goes (1935).
wn.com/Guy_Bolton -
Gypsy Rose Lee
Gypsy Rose Lee (January 9, 1911 – April 26, 1970) was an American burlesque entertainer famous for her striptease act. She was also an actress, author, and playwright whose 1957 memoir was made into the stage musical and film Gypsy.
Gypsy Rose Lee was born Ellen June Hovick, (Her name was changed to Rose Louise when her sister was born and given her name, Ellen June) in Seattle, Washington, in 1911, although her mother later shaved three years off both of her daughters' ages. She was initially known by her middle name, Louise. Her mother, Rose Hovick (née Rose Evangeline Thompson), was a teenage bride fresh from a convent school when she married Norwegian-American John Olaf Hovick, who was a newspaper advertising salesman and a reporter at The Seattle Times. Louise's sister, Ellen June Hovick (better known as actress June Havoc), was born in 1913.
After their parents divorced, the girls supported the family by appearing in Vaudeville[when?], where June's talent shone while Louise remained in the background. At the age of 15 in December 1928, June eloped with Bobby Reed, a dancer in the act, much to her mother's displeasure, going on to a brief career in marathon dancing, which was more profitable than tap dancing at the time.
wn.com/Gypsy_Rose_Lee -
Harold Arlen
Harold Arlen (February 15, 1905 - April 23, 1986) was an American composer of popular music, having written over 500 songs, a number of which have become known the world over. In addition to composing the songs for The Wizard of Oz, including the classic 1938 song, "Over the Rainbow,” Arlen is a highly regarded contributor to the Great American Songbook. "Over the Rainbow," in fact, was voted the twentieth century's No. 1 song by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).
Arlen was born Hyman Arluck, in Buffalo, New York, the child of a Jewish cantor. His twin brother died the next day. He learned the piano as a youth and formed a band as a young man. He achieved some local success as a pianist and singer and moved to New York City in his early 20s. He worked as an accompanist in vaudeville. At this point, he changed his name to Harold Arlen. Between 1926 and about 1934, Arlen appeared occasionally as a band vocalist on records by The Buffalodians, Red Nichols, Joe Venuti, Leo Reisman and Eddie Duchin, usually singing his own compositions.
wn.com/Harold_Arlen -
Harry Greenbank
Harry Greenbank (11 September 1865 – 26 February 1899) was an English author and dramatist best known for contributing lyrics to the successful series musicals produced at Daly's Theatre by George Edwardes in the 1890s.
Harry Greenbank was born Henry Harveston Greenbank in London, England and had an extraordinarily productive, but short, life.
Greenbank first placed one of his works, Captain Billy, at the Savoy Theatre, set to music by the company's musical director François Cellier. The piece was staged as a curtain-raiser to The Nautch Girl beginning in 1891. He continued to write such small-scale pieces over the following couple of years, both for the Savoy (Mr. Jericho in 1893 and Old Sarah in 1897) and for the Lyric Theatre, where Horace Sedger asked him to supply the English lyrics to F. C. Burnand's adaptation of the French operetta Le Coeur et la main (Incognita).
After that, George Edwardes put Greenbank together as lyricist with music director Sidney Jones and dramatist Owen Hall to create the hit musical comedy A Gaiety Girl in 1893. After the worldwide success of that piece, the three stayed together and subsequently formed the backbone of the team which produced the famous series of very successful series of Daly's Theatre musicals, including An Artist's Model (1895), The Geisha (1896), A Greek Slave (1898), and San Toy (1899).
wn.com/Harry_Greenbank -
Harry Tierney
Harry Austin Tierney (May 21, 1890 – March 22, 1965) was a successful American composer of musical theatre, best known for long-running hits such as Irene (1919), Broadway's longest-running show of the era (620 performances), Kid Boots (1923) and Rio Rita (1927), one of the first musicals to be turned into a talking picture (and later remade starring Abbott and Costello).
Born in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, he was most active between about 1910 and 1930, often collaborating with the lyricist Joseph McCarthy. His mother was a pianist, his father a trumpeter, and he himself toured as a concert pianist in his early years. After a brief spell working in London for a music publisher, he returned to the United States in 1916. Over the next couple of decades many of his songs were used in the famous Ziegfeld Follies, and were performed by the premier singers of the day, such as Eddie Cantor, Anna Held and Edith Day.
The year 1919 saw his greatest Broadway hit, the show Irene, which contained perhaps his most well-known song, "Alice Blue Gown", as well as "Castle of Dreams," an adaptation of Chopin's Minute Waltz. This same show was made into a film in 1926, then remade in 1940 with Anna Neagle and Ray Milland, and again for the stage in 1973 with Debbie Reynolds. The original show broke the then record for the longest running show, at 620 performances.
wn.com/Harry_Tierney -
Henry Purcell
Henry Purcell ( /ˈpɜrsəl/; 10 September 1659 (?)– 21 November 1695), was an English composer. Although incorporating Italian and French stylistic elements into his compositions, Purcell's legacy was a uniquely English form of Baroque music. He is generally considered to be one of the greatest English composers; no other native-born English composer approached his fame until Edward Elgar.
Purcell was born in St Ann's Lane Old Pye Street, Westminster. Henry Purcell Senior, whose older brother Thomas Purcell (d. 1682) was also a musician, was a gentleman of the Chapel Royal and sang at the coronation of King Charles II of England. Henry the elder had three sons: Edward, Henry and Daniel. Daniel Purcell (d. 1717), the youngest of the brothers, was also a prolific composer who wrote the music for much of the final act of The Indian Queen after Henry Purcell's death. Henry Purcell's family lived just a few hundred yards west of Westminster Abbey from the year 1659 and onward.
After his father's death in 1664, Purcell was placed under the guardianship of his uncle who showed him great affection and kindness. Thomas was himself a gentleman of His Majesty's chapel, and arranged for Henry to be admitted as a chorister. Henry studied first under Captain Henry Cooke (d. 1672),Master of the Children, and afterwards under Pelham Humfrey (d. 1674), Cooke's successor. Henry was a chorister in the Chapel Royal until his voice broke in 1673, when he became assistant to the organ-builder John Hingston, who held the post of keeper of wind instruments to the King.
wn.com/Henry_Purcell -
Howard Talbot
Richard Lansdale Munkittrick, better known as Howard Talbot (9 March 1865 – 12 September 1928), was an American-born, English-raised conductor and composer of Irish descent. He was best known for writing the music to several hit Edwardian musical comedies, including A Chinese Honeymoon, The Arcadians and The Boy, as well as a number of other successful British musicals during the first two decades of the 20th century.
Of Irish descent, Talbot was born in America in Yonkers, New York but moved to London at the age of four. His parents were Alexander Munkittrick and his wife, Lillie. Originally planning to enter the medical profession, he studied at King's College, London but switched to music and pursued a musical education at the Royal College of Music. There he studied under Sir Hubert Parry, Sir Frederick Bridge and Sir Walter Parratt. For some years, although Talbot had had works staged by amateurs in Hunstanton, Oxford and King's Lynn, professionally he only succeeded in having a few of his individual songs performed in other people's productions. In 1895, Talbot married an actress known as Amy Clare Betts (birthname Ada Bellamy; 1871?–1895), but his bride died only eight months after their wedding. He later married Dorothy Maud Cross from Sandringham, Norfolk. The couple produced four daughters.
wn.com/Howard_Talbot -
Ian Bradley
Ian Campbell Bradley (born 28 May 1950) is a British academic, author, theologian, Church of Scotland minister, journalist and broadcaster. At the University of St Andrews, he is Reader in Practical Theology and Church History and a University chaplain. He is also the Associate Minister of Holy Trinity Church, St Andrews.
He has researched and written widely on religious matters, from Celtic Christianity to the theology of sacrifice and the future of spirituality in Britain. In addition, he has published works on the subjects of hymnody, monarchy, the Victorian era, Gilbert and Sullivan and musical theatre.
Ian Bradley was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire on Whit Sunday 1950. He grew up in the southeast of England and was educated at Tonbridge School and New College, Oxford, from which he graduated with a first-class honours degree in modern history. He remained at University of Oxford to complete a doctoral thesis on religion and politics in early nineteenth-century Britain, earning his DPhil degree.
wn.com/Ian_Bradley -
Inigo Jones
Inigo Jones (or Íñigo Jones) (15 July 1573 – 21 June 1652) is the first significant British architect of the modern period, and the first to bring Italianate Renaissance architecture to England. He left his mark on London by single buildings, such as the Banqueting House, Whitehall, and in area design for Covent Garden square which became a model for future developments in the West End. He also made major contributions to stage design by his work as theatrical designer for several dozen masques, most by royal command and many in collaboration with Ben Jonson.
Beyond the fact that he was born in Smithfield in central London, the son of a Welsh Catholic cloth worker, and christened at the church of St Bartholomew-the-Less, little is known about Jones's early years. Jones did not approach the architectural profession in the traditional way, namely either by rising up from a craft or through early exposure to the Office of Works, although there is evidence that Sir Christopher Wren obtained information that recorded Inigo Jones as an apprentice joiner in St Paul's Churchyard. Regardless, he unquestionably appears in the household accounts of the Earl of Rutland in 1603 as “Henygo Jones, a picture maker”. His early career seems to have been devoted to the devising of costumes and scenery for masques, plays and other court entertainment.
wn.com/Inigo_Jones -
Ira Gershwin
Ira Gershwin (December 6, 1896 – August 17, 1983) was an American lyricist who collaborated with his younger brother, composer George Gershwin, to create some of the most memorable songs of the 20th century.
With George he wrote more than a dozen Broadway shows, featuring songs such as "I Got Rhythm", "Embraceable You", "The Man I Love" and "Someone to Watch Over Me". He was also responsible, along with DuBose Heyward, for the libretto to George's opera Porgy and Bess.
The success the brothers had with their collaborative works has often overshadowed the creative role that Ira played. However, his mastery of songwriting continued after the early death of George. He wrote additional hit songs with composers Jerome Kern ("Long Ago (and Far Away)"), Kurt Weill and Harold Arlen.
His critically acclaimed book Lyrics on Several Occasions of 1959, an amalgam of autobiography and annotated anthology, is an important source for studying the art of the lyricist in the golden age of American popular song.
wn.com/Ira_Gershwin -
Irving Berlin
Irving Berlin (May 11, 1888 – September 22, 1989) was an American composer and lyricist of Jewish heritage, widely considered one of the greatest songwriters in American history. He published his first song, "Marie from Sunny Italy", in 1907 and had his first major international hit, "Alexander's Ragtime Band" in 1911.
"Alexander's Ragtime Band" sparked an international dance craze in places as far away as Berlin's native Russia, which also "flung itself into the ragtime beat with an abandon bordering on mania." Over the years he was known for writing music and lyrics in the American vernacular: uncomplicated, simple and direct, with his aim being to "reach the heart of the average American" whom he saw as the "real soul of the country."
He wrote hundreds of songs, many becoming major hits, which made him "a legend" before he turned thirty. During his 60-year career he wrote an estimated 1,500 songs, including the scores for 19 Broadway shows and 18 Hollywood films, with his songs nominated eight times for Academy Awards. Many songs became popular themes and anthems, including "Easter Parade", "White Christmas", "Happy Holiday", "This is the Army, Mr. Jones", and "There's No Business Like Show Business". His Broadway musical and 1942 film, This is the Army, with Ronald Reagan, had Kate Smith singing Berlin's "God Bless America" which was first performed in 1938. Smith still performed the song on her 1960 CBS television series, The Kate Smith Show. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, Celine Dion recorded it as a tribute, making it #1 on the charts.
wn.com/Irving_Berlin -
Ivan Caryll
Félix Marie Henri Tilkin (12 May 1861 – 29 November 1921), better known by his pen name Ivan Caryll, was a Belgian composer of operettas and Edwardian musical comedies in the English language. He composed (or contributed to) some forty musical comedies and operettas.
Caryll's career encompassed three eras of the musical theatre, and unlike some of his contemporaries, he adapted readily to each new development. After composing a few musical burlesques, his first great successes were made in light musical comedies, epitomised by the George Edwardes productions at London's Gaiety Theatre, such as The Shop Girl, The Circus Girl, The Girl from Paris, and A Runaway Girl. He continued to write musical comedies throughout the next decade, including such hits as The Messenger Boy, The Toreador, The Girl From Kays, The Earl and the Girl, The Orchid, The Spring Chicken, The Girls of Gottenberg and Our Miss Gibbs. He also wrote some operetta scores, such as The Duchess of Dantzic. After this, he moved to New York City where his post-war works, incorporating new fox-trot and one-step rhythms, included The Girl Behind the Gun (later a London hit as Kissing Time). At the peak of his career, he had the unparalleled distinction of having five musicals running at the same time in the West End.
wn.com/Ivan_Caryll -
Ivor Novello
David Ivor Davies (15 January 1893 – 6 March 1951), better known as Ivor Novello, was a Welsh composer, singer and actor who became one of the most popular British entertainers of the first half of the 20th century. Born into a musical family, his first successes were as a songwriter. His first big hit was "Keep the Home Fires Burning", which was enormously popular during the First World War. After the war, Novello contributed numbers to several successful musical comedies and was eventually commissioned to write the scores of complete shows. In the 1920s, he turned to acting, first in films and then on stage, with considerable success in both.
Novello was born in Cardiff, Wales, to David Davies (c. 1852 — 1931), a rent collector for the city council, and his wife, Clara Novello Davies, an internationally-known singing teacher and choral conductor. As a boy, Novello was a successful singer in the Welsh Eisteddfod. His mother set up as voice teacher in London, where he met leading performers, including members of George Edwardes's Gaiety Theatre company, classical musicians such as Landon Ronald, and singers such as Adelina Patti. Another of his mother's associates was Clara Butt, who taught him to sing "Abide with Me" when he was a boy of six.
wn.com/Ivor_Novello -
Jacques Offenbach
Jacques Offenbach (20 June 1819 – 5 October 1880) was a German-born French composer, cellist and impresario of the romantic period. He is remembered for his nearly 100 operettas of the 1850s–1870s and his uncompleted opera The Tales of Hoffmann. He was a powerful influence on later composers of the operetta genre, particularly Johann Strauss, Jr. and Arthur Sullivan. His best-known works were continually revived during the 20th century, and many of his operettas continue to be staged in the 21st. The Tales of Hoffman remains part of the standard opera repertory.
Born in Cologne, the son of a synagogue cantor, Offenbach showed early musical talent. At the age of 14, he was accepted as a student at the Paris Conservatoire but found academic study unfulfilling and left after a year. From 1835 to 1855 he earned his living as a cellist, achieving international fame, and as a conductor. His ambition, however, was to compose comic pieces for the musical theatre. Finding the management of Paris's Opéra-Comique company uninterested in staging his works, in 1855 he leased a small theatre in the Champs-Élysées. There he presented a series of his own small-scale pieces, many of which became popular.
wn.com/Jacques_Offenbach -
Jason Robert Brown
Jason Robert Brown (born June 20, 1970 in Ossining, New York) is an American musical theater composer, lyricist, and playwright. Brown's music sensibility fuses pop-rock stylings with theatrical lyrics. An accomplished pianist, Brown has often served as music director, conductor, orchestrator, and pianist for his own productions.
Brown grew up in the suburbs of New York City, and attended the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York for 2 years. During summer, he attended French Woods Festival of the Performing Arts in Hancock, New York. He said Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and Sunday in the Park with George were two of his biggest influences, and had it not been for them, he would have joined a rock band and tried to be Billy Joel.
When Brown was 23, he and a friend were invited to see Stephen Sondheim's show Passion by Sondheim himself. Brown's friend, whom he refers to only as "Franz Liszt", wrote to Sondheim, and that is how they both got the tickets. Sondheim also invited them to dinner afterward. At the show, they sat in front of the New York Times' Frank Rich. They went to dinner, and after twenty minutes, Sondheim asked them what they thought of the show: they both were silent. Brown described the dinner after that moment as "many extremely awkward silences punctuated by bursts of frantic, desperate conversation about anything other than the slaughtered elephant in the room." Brown called mutual friend Daisy Prince the next day, asking if there might be any way to repair the damage after the dinner. She and her family decided that Brown should call Sondheim. Brown paraphrased what Sondheim said:
wn.com/Jason_Robert_Brown -
Jean Baptiste Lully
Jean-Baptiste de Lully (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃batist də lyˈli]; Italian: Giovanni Battista Lulli; 28 November 1632 – 22 March 1687) was an Italian-born French composer who spent most of his life working in the court of Louis XIV of France. He is considered the chief master of the French Baroque style. Lully disavowed any Italian influence in French music of the period. He became a French subject in 1661.
Lully, son of a working-class miller, was born in Florence, Italy. Lully had little education, but he learned basic techniques on the guitar, originally taught by a Franciscan friar of Florence. Later in France, he learned how to play the violin, and to dance. In 1646, he was discovered by Roger de Lorraine, the chevalier de Guise, son of Charles, Duke of Guise, and was taken to France, where he entered the services of Mademoiselle de Montpensier (la Grande Mademoiselle) as a scullery-boy and Italian-language teacher. With the help of this princess, his talent increased. He studied the theory of music under Nicolas Métru. It has been said that a scurrilous song on his patroness (the doggerel he set to music refers to a "sigh" she produced while at stool) resulted in his dismissal. It is far more likely that he did not want to moulder out in the provinces with the exiled princess.[citation needed]
wn.com/Jean_Baptiste_Lully -
Jerome Kern
Jerome David Kern (January 27, 1885 – November 11, 1945) was an American composer of musical theatre and popular music. One of the most important American theatre composers of the early 20th century, he wrote more than 700 songs, used in over 100 stage works, including such classics as "Ol' Man River", "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man", "A Fine Romance", "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", "All the Things You Are", "The Way You Look Tonight", "Long Ago (and Far Away)" and "Who?". He collaborated with many of the leading librettists and lyricists of his era, including George Grossmith Jr., Guy Bolton, P. G. Wodehouse, Otto Harbach, Oscar Hammerstein II, Dorothy Fields, Johnny Mercer, Ira Gershwin and E. Y. Harburg.
A native New Yorker, Kern created dozens of Broadway musicals and Hollywood films in a career that lasted for more than four decades. His musical innovations, such as 4/4 dance rhythms and the employment of syncopation and jazz progressions, built on, rather than rejected, earlier musical theatre tradition. He and his collaborators also employed his melodies to further the action or develop characterization to a greater extent than in the other musicals of his day, creating the model for later musicals. Although dozens of Kern's musicals and musical films were hits, only Show Boat is now regularly revived. Songs from his other shows, however, are still frequently performed and adapted. Although Kern detested jazz arrangements of his songs, many have been adopted by jazz musicians to become standard tunes.
wn.com/Jerome_Kern -
Jerome Robbins
Jerome Robbins (October 11, 1918 – July 29, 1998) was an American theater producer, director, and choreographer known primarily for Broadway Theater and Ballet/Dance, but who also occasionally directed films and directed/produced for television. His work has included everything from classical ballet to contemporary musical theater. Among the numerous stage productions he worked on were On the Town, Peter Pan, High Button Shoes, The King And I, The Pajama Game, Bells Are Ringing, West Side Story, Gypsy: A Musical Fable, and Fiddler on the Roof. Robbins is a five time Tony Award winner and a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors. He also received two Academy Awards, including the 1961 Academy Award for Best Director with Robert Wise for West Side Story. A documentary about his life and work, Something to Dance About, featuring excerpts from his journals, archival performance and rehearsal footage and interviews with Robbins and his colleagues, premiered on PBS in 2009.
Robbins was born Jerome Wilson Rabinowitz, exactly one month before the end of World War I, in the Jewish Maternity Hospital in the heart of Manhattan’s Lower East Side – a neighborhood populated by many immigrants. The Rabinowitz family lived in a large apartment house at 51 East 97th at the northeast corner of Madison Avenue. Known as "Jerry" to those close to him, Robbins was given a middle name that reflected his parents' patriotic enthusiasm for the then-president. Rabinowitz, however, translates to “son of a rabbi”, a name Robbins never liked, since it marked him as the son of an immigrant. So he took the name "Robbins".
wn.com/Jerome_Robbins -
Jerry Herman
Jerry Herman (born July 10, 1931) is an American composer and lyricist, known for his work in Broadway musical theater. He composed the scores for the hit Broadway musicals Hello, Dolly!, Mame, and La Cage aux Folles. He has been nominated for the Tony Award five times, and won twice, for Hello, Dolly! and La Cage aux Folles. In 2009, Herman received the Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre. He is a recipient of the 2010 Kennedy Center Honors.
wn.com/Jerry_Herman -
Jessie Bond
Jessie Bond (10 January 1853 – 17 June 1942) was an English singer and actress best known for creating the mezzo-soprano soubrette roles in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas. She spent twenty years on the stage, the bulk of them with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
Musical from an early age, Bond began a concert singing career in Liverpool by 1870. At the age of 17, she entered into a brief, unhappy marriage. After leaving her abusive husband, she continued her concert career and studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London with such famous singing teachers as Manuel García.
At the age of 25, in 1878, Bond began her theatrical career, creating the role of Cousin Hebe in Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore, which became an international success. After this, she created roles of increasing importance with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in a series of successful comic operas, including the title role in Iolanthe (1882), Pitti Sing in The Mikado (1885), Mad Margaret in Ruddigore (1887), Phoebe in The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), Tessa in The Gondoliers (1889) and others.
wn.com/Jessie_Bond -
Johann Strauss II
Johann Strauss II (October 25, 1825 – June 3, 1899), also known as Johann Baptist Strauss or Johann Strauss, Jr., the Younger, or the Son (German: Sohn), was an Austrian composer of light music, particularly dance music and operettas. He composed over 500 waltzes, polkas, quadrilles, and other types of dance music, as well as several operettas and a ballet. In his lifetime, he was known as "The Waltz King", and was largely then responsible for the popularity of the waltz in Vienna during the 19th century.
Strauss was born in St. Ulrich (now a part of Neubau), the son of Johann Strauss I, another composer of dance music. His father did not wish him to become a composer, but rather a banker; however, the son defied his father's wishes, and went on to study music with the composer Joseph Drechsler and the violin with Anton Kollmann, the ballet répétiteur of the Vienna Court Opera. Strauss had two younger brothers, Josef and Eduard Strauss, who became composers of light music as well, although they were never as well known as their elder brother.
wn.com/Johann_Strauss_II -
John Blow
John Blow (baptised 23 February 1649 – 1 October 1708) was an English Baroque composer and organist, appointed to Westminster Abbey in 1669. His pupils included William Croft, Jeremiah Clarke and Henry Purcell. In 1685 he was named a private musician to James II. His only stage composition, Venus and Adonis (c. 1680–1687), was thought to influence Henry Purcell's later opera Dido and Aeneas. In 1687 he became choirmaster at St Paul's Cathedral, where many of his pieces were performed. In 1699 he was appointed to the newly created post of Composer to the Chapel Royal.
Blow was probably born at Newark-on-Trent in Nottinghamshire. The parish registers at Newark record the baptisms of Blow and of his brother and sister, the marriage of his parents, and the burial of his father. The register of Lambeth degrees notes that in 1677, on taking his doctorate, Blow said that his birthplace was ‘the faithful borough of Newark’. As he was baptised 23 February 1649, he was likely born only a short while before. As a boy, he was selected as a chorister of the Chapel Royal, and distinguished himself by his proficiency in music.
wn.com/John_Blow -
John Gay
John Gay (30 June 1685 – 4 December 1732) was an English poet and dramatist and member of the Scriblerus Club. He is best remembered for The Beggar's Opera (1728), a ballad opera. The characters, including Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum, became household names.
Gay was born in Barnstaple, England and was educated at the town's grammar school. On leaving school he was apprenticed to a silk mercer in London, but being weary, according to Samuel Johnson, "of either the restraint or the servility of his occupation", he soon returned to Barnstaple, where he was educated by his uncle, the Rev. John Hanmer, the Nonconformist minister of the town. He then returned to London.
The dedication of his Rural Sports (1713) to Alexander Pope was the beginning of a lasting friendship. In 1714, Gay wrote The Shepherd's Week, a series of six pastorals drawn from English rustic life. Pope had urged him to undertake this task in order to ridicule the Arcadian pastorals of Ambrose Philips, who had been praised by a short-lived contemporary publication The Guardian, to the neglect of Pope's claims as the first pastoral writer of the age and the true English Theocritus. Gay's pastorals achieved this goal and his ludicrous pictures of the English country lads and their loves were found to be entertaining on their own account.
wn.com/John_Gay -
John Kander
John Harold Kander (born March 18, 1927) is the American composer of a number of musicals as part of the songwriting team of Kander and Ebb.
Kander was born in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of Bernice (née Aaron) and Harold S. Kander. Kander attended The Pembroke Country-Day School and Oberlin College before earning a Master's degree at Columbia University where he was a protégé of Douglas Moore and studied composition with Jack Beeson.
Kander began his Broadway career as substitute rehearsal pianist for West Side Story. The stage manager for West Side Story then asked Kander to play the auditions for her next show, Gypsy. During the auditions, Kander met the choreographer, Jerome Robbins, who suggested that Kander compose the dance music for the show in 1959. After that experience, he wrote dance arrangements for Irma la Douce in 1960.
His first produced musical was A Family Affair, written with James and William Goldman. He met lyricist Fred Ebb in 1962 and began a songwriting collaboration that would last for more than four decades. Later that year rising star Barbra Streisand recorded two of the duo's songs, "My Coloring Book" and "I Don't Care Much." In 1965, Kander and Ebb landed their first show on Broadway, Flora the Red Menace, produced by Hal Prince, directed by George Abbott, and with book by George Abbott and Robert Russell,[disambiguation needed
] in which Liza Minnelli made her initial Broadway appearance. Kander and Ebb have since been associated with writing material for both Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera, and have produced special material for their appearances live and on television.
wn.com/John_Kander -
John Philip Sousa
John Philip Sousa (/ˈsuːsə/; November 6, 1854 – March 6, 1932) was an American composer and conductor of the late Romantic era, known particularly for American military and patriotic marches. Because of his mastery of march composition, he is known as "The March King" or the "American March King" due to his British counterpart Kenneth J. Alford also being known as "The March King". Among his best known marches are "The Washington Post", "Semper Fidelis" (Official March of the United States Marine Corps), and "The Stars and Stripes Forever" (National March of the United States of America).
His father was Portuguese, and his mother of Bavarian ancestry. Sousa began his career playing violin and studying music theory and composition under John Esputa and George Felix Benkert. His father eventually enlisted him in the United States Marine Band as an apprentice in 1868. After departing the band in 1875, Sousa eventually learned to conduct. From 1880 until his death, Sousa began focusing exclusively on conducting and wrote marches during this time. He eventually rejoined the Marine Band and served there for 12 years as director. Upon leaving the Marine Band, Sousa organized his own band. He toured Europe and Australia and also developed the sousaphone, a large brass instrument similar to the tuba. On the outbreak of World War I, Sousa was commissioned as a Lieutenant Commander and led the Naval Reserve Band in Illinois. Following his tenure there, Sousa returned to conduct the Sousa Band until his death in 1932.
wn.com/John_Philip_Sousa -
John Walter Bratton
John Walter Bratton (January 21, 1867 – February 7, 1947) was an American Tin Pan Alley composer and theatrical producer who became popular during the era known as the Gay Nineties
Raised by his grandmother, Mary Bratton, in New Castle, Delaware, near Wilmington, John Walter Bratton (sometimes spelled Bratten) was the son of John F. and Emma Bratton, of which little is known. He was educated at the Harkness Academy in Wilmington and later attended the Philadelphia College of Music before embarking on a career as a baritone singer.
John Bratton's career soon moved from performer to composer and producer. He began in the chorus of a show called Ship Ahoy for $18 a week and not before too long was selling songs written with his friend, lyricists Walter H. Ford, for as little as $10 a title. Over the years Bratton would collaborate on over 250 songs with Ford and Paul West. One of their earlier tunes was a tribute to veterans of the Spanish-American War called Hats off to the Boys Who Made Good, that years later Bratton conceded was "terrible". Today he is remembered for his 1907 composition Teddy Bears' Picnic the only one of his songs to be a lasting hit. Although most of his compositions had lyrics, he left Teddy Bears' Picnic as an instrumental. Perhaps because it sold so well as sheet music he never felt little need to do anything else with it except over the silent film ere as background music for a number of popular movies. Many years later British based, but Irish born Jimmy Kennedy wrote the lyrics. This explains why an American composition contains the British term “Mummies and Daddies" rather than "Mommies and Daddies”, though the latter does crop up from time to time in copies printed in the former colony.
wn.com/John_Walter_Bratton -
Jonathan Larson
Jonathan Larson (February 4, 1960 – January 25, 1996) was an American composer and playwright noted for the serious social issues of multiculturalism, addiction, and homophobia explored in his work. Typical examples of his use of these themes are found in his works, Rent and tick, tick... BOOM!. He received three posthumous Tony Awards and a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the rock opera Rent.
Larson was born to Jewish parents, Allan and Nanette Larson, in White Plains, New York. He was exposed to the performing arts, especially music and theatre from an early age, as he played the trumpet, tuba, was involved in his school's choir, and took formal piano lessons. His early musical influences were his favorite rock musicians such as Elton John, The Beatles, The Doors, The Who, and Billy Joel, as well as the classic composers of musical theatre, especially Stephen Sondheim. Larson was also involved in acting in high school, performing in lead roles in various productions at White Plains High School.
wn.com/Jonathan_Larson -
Joseph Papp
Joseph Papp (June 22, 1921 – October 31, 1991) was an American theatrical producer and director. Papp established The Public Theater in what had been the Astor Library Building in downtown New York (still located there as of 2011). "The Public," as it is known, has many small theatres within it. There, Papp created a year-round producing home to focus on new creations, both plays and musicals. Among numerous examples of these creations were the works of David Rabe, Ntozake Shange's "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf", Charles Gordone's No Place to Be Somebody (the first off-Broadway play to win the Pulitzer Prize), and Papp's production of Michael Bennett's Pulitzer-Prize winning musical, "A Chorus Line." At Papp's death, The Public Theatre was renamed The Joseph Papp Public Theatre.
Papp was born Joseph Papirofsky in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Yetta (née Miritch), a seamstress, and Samuel Papirofsky, a trunkmaker. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia. He was a high school student of Harlem Renaissance playwright Eulalie Spence. Papp founded the New York Shakespeare Festival in 1954 with the aim of making Shakespeare's works accessible to the public. In 1957, he was granted the use of Central Park for free productions of Shakespeare's plays. This legacy of Papp has continued (through 2010) at the open-air Delacorte Theatre every summer in Central Park.
wn.com/Joseph_Papp -
Jule Styne
Jule Styne (December 31, 1905 – September 20, 1994) was a British-born American songwriter especially famous for a series of Broadway musicals, which included several very well known and frequently revived shows.
Styne was born in London, England as Julius Kerwin Stein of Jewish immigrants from Ukraine. At the age of eight he moved with his family to Chicago, where at an early age he began taking piano lessons. He proved to be a prodigy and performed with the Chicago, St. Louis, and Detroit Symphonies before he was ten years old.
Styne attended Chicago Musical College, but before then he had already attracted attention of another teenager, Mike Todd, later a successful film producer, who commissioned him to write a song for a musical act that he was creating. It would be the first of over 1,500 published songs Styne would compose in his career.
Styne established his own dance band, which brought him to the notice of Hollywood, where he was championed by Frank Sinatra and where he began a collaboration with lyricist Sammy Cahn, with whom he wrote many songs for the movies, including "It's Been a Long, Long Time" (#1 for 3 weeks for Harry James and His Orchestra in 1945), "Five Minutes More," and the Oscar-winning "Three Coins in the Fountain". He collaborated on the score for the 1955 musical film My Sister Eileen with Leo Robin. Ten of his songs were nominated for the Oscar, many written with Cahn, including "I've Heard That Song Before" (#1 for 13 weeks for Harry James and His Orchestra in 1943), "I'll Walk Alone", "It's Magic" (a #2 hit for Doris Day in 1948) and "I Fall in Love Too Easily".
wn.com/Jule_Styne -
Julie Andrews
Dame Julia Elizabeth Andrews, DBE (née Wells; born 1 October 1935) is an English film and stage actress, singer, and author. She is the recipient of Golden Globe, Emmy, Grammy, BAFTA, People's Choice Award, Theatre World Award, Screen Actors Guild and Academy Award honours.
Andrews is a former child actress and singer who made her Broadway debut in a 1954 production of The Boy Friend, and rose to prominence starring in musicals such as My Fair Lady and Camelot, both of which earned her Tony Award nominations. In 1957, she made her television debut with the title role in Cinderella, which was seen by over 100 million viewers.
Andrews made her feature film debut in Mary Poppins (1964), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. She received her second Academy Award nomination for The Sound of Music (1965). Adjusted for inflation, these two films are the 25th and 3rd highest grossing films of all time, respectively. From 1964 to 1967, Andrews was the biggest film star in the world, with the additional box office successes of her films The Americanization of Emily, Hawaii, Torn Curtain, and Thoroughly Modern Millie.
wn.com/Julie_Andrews -
Kurt Weill
Kurt Julian Weill (March 2, 1900 – April 3, 1950) was a German-Jewish composer, active from the 1920s, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, he developed productions such as his most well known work The Threepenny Opera, a Marxist critique of capitalism, which included the ballad "Mack the Knife". Weill was a socialist[unreliable source?] who held the ideal of writing music that served a socially useful purpose. He also wrote a number of works for the concert hall, as well as several Judaism-themed pieces.
Kurt Julian Weill was born on March 2, 1900, the third of four children to Albert Weill (1867–1950) and Emma Weill née Ackermann (1872–1955). He grew up in a religious Jewish family in the "Sandvorstadt", the Jewish quarter in Dessau, Germany, where his father was a cantor. At the age of twelve, Kurt Weill started taking piano lessons and made his first attempts at writing music; his earliest preserved composition was written in 1913 and is titled Mi Addir. Jewish Wedding Song.
wn.com/Kurt_Weill -
Larry Gelbart
Larry Simon Gelbart (February 25, 1928 – September 11, 2009) was an American television writer, playwright, screenwriter and author.
Gelbart was born in Chicago to Jewish immigrants Harry Gelbart ("a barber since his half of a childhood in Latvia") and Frieda Sturner, who migrated to America from Dombrowa,[disambiguation needed]Poland. Marcia Gelbart Walkenstein was his sister.
Gelbart began as a writer at the age of sixteen for Danny Thomas' radio show after his father, who was Thomas' barber, showed Thomas some jokes Gelbart had written. During the 1940s Gelbart also wrote for Jack Paar and Bob Hope. In the 1950s, his most important work in television involved writing for Red Buttons, Sid Caesar on Caesar's Hour, in Celeste Holm's Honestly, Celeste!, as well as with writers Mel Tolkin, Michael Stewart, Selma Diamond, Neil Simon, Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and (on two Caesar specials) Woody Allen.
In 1972, Gelbart was one of the main forces behind the creation of the television series M*A*S*H, writing the pilot (for which he received a "Developed for Television by..." credit) and then producing, often writing and occasionally directing the series for its first four seasons (1972–1976). M*A*S*H earned Gelbart a Peabody Award and an Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series and went on to considerable commercial and critical success.
wn.com/Larry_Gelbart -
Lee Remick
Lee Ann Remick (December 14, 1935 – July 2, 1991) was an American film and television actress. Among her best-known films are Anatomy of a Murder (1959), Days of Wine and Roses (1962), and The Omen (1976).
Remick was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, the daughter of Gertrude Margaret (née Waldo), an actress, and Francis Edwin "Frank" Remick, who owned a department store. Her maternal great-grandmother, Eliza Duffield, was an English-born preacher. Remick attended the Swaboda School of Dance, The Hewitt School and studied acting at Barnard College and the Actors Studio, making her Broadway theatre debut in 1953 with Be Your Age.
Remick made her film debut in Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd (1957). While filming the movie in Arkansas, Remick lived with a local family and practiced baton twirling so that she would be believable as the teenager who wins the attention of Lonesome Rhodes (played by Andy Griffith).
After appearing as Eula Varner, the hot-blooded daughter-in-law of Will Varner (Orson Welles) in 1958's The Long, Hot Summer, she appeared in These Thousand Hills as a dance hall girl. Remick came to prominence as a rape victim whose husband is tried for killing her attacker in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder. She made a second film with Elia Kazan called Wild River (1960), co-starring with Montgomery Clift and Jo Van Fleet.
wn.com/Lee_Remick -
Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein ( /ˈbɜrnstaɪn/ US dict: bûrn′·stīn; August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American composer, conductor, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim. According to The New York Times, he was "one of the most prodigiously talented and successful musicians in American history."
His fame derived from his long tenure as the music director of the New York Philharmonic, from his conducting of concerts with most of the world's leading orchestras, and from his music for West Side Story, as well as Candide, Wonderful Town, On the Town and his own Mass.
Bernstein was also the first conductor to give numerous television lectures on classical music, starting in 1954 and continuing until his death. In addition, he was a skilled pianist, often conducting piano concertos from the keyboard.
As a composer he wrote in many styles encompassing symphonic and orchestral music, ballet, film and theatre music, choral works, opera, chamber music and pieces for the piano. Many of his works are regularly performed around the world, although none has matched the tremendous popular and commercial success of West Side Story.
wn.com/Leonard_Bernstein -
Leslie Stuart
Leslie Stuart (15 March 1863 – 27 March 1928) was an English composer of Edwardian musical comedy, best known for the hit show Florodora (1899) and many popular songs.
He began in Manchester as a church organist, for 14 years, and taught music while beginning to compose church music and secular songs in the late 1870s. In the 1880s, he began to promote and conduct orchestral and vocal concerts of popular and theatre music as "Mr. T. A. Barrett's Concerts". He began to focus his composition on music hall, including songs for blackface performers, such as "Lily of Laguna"; songs for musical theatre, such as pantomimes and London shows touring through Manchester; and ballads such as "Soldiers of the King". Stuart later campaigned against the interpolation of new songs into musical theatre scores and for better enforcement of musical copyrights.
In 1895, Stuart began to write songs for George Edwardes's London shows at the Gaiety Theatre and Daly's Theatre. His first full musical comedy score was Florodora in 1899. The show became an international hit, and its song "Tell me, pretty maiden", became a vaudeville standard. Other musical comedy successes followed, including The School Girl (1903), The Belle of Mayfair (1906) and Havana (1908). Of his later shows, only Peggy made much of an impact. By 1911, Stuart's gambling debts sent him into bankruptcy. Unable to adapt to changing musical tastes, he was no longer in demand as a composer, although he had some success as a piano sketch artist in variety theatre.
wn.com/Leslie_Stuart -
Lewis Hallam
Lewis Hallam (circa 1714–1756) was an English-born actor and theatre director in the colonial United States.
He arrived in North America in 1752 with his theatrical company, organized by his brother William, who was joint owner of the company with him. Lewis had been an actor in William's company in England, but it had failed, prompting the North American venture. The new company landed at Yorktown, Virginia.
The company began their performances in Williamsburg, then the capital of Virginia Colony. Here they hired a large wooden structure, which was roughly altered to suit their purposes. It was so near the forest that the players were able to shoot wild fowl from the windows of the building. Their opening performance was The Merchant of Venice. Music was supplied by a single player on a harpsichord. From Williamsburg, the troupe traveled to Annapolis and Philadelphia.
In 1754, Hallam built the first theater in New York City, New York, on Nassau Street. He and his theatre company also toured throughout the thirteen colonies.
wn.com/Lewis_Hallam -
Lillian Russell
Lillian Russell (December 4, 1860 – June 6, 1922) was an American actress and singer. She became one of the most famous actresses and singers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, known for her beauty and style, as well as for her voice and stage presence.
Russell was born in Iowa but raised in Chicago. Her parents separated when she was eighteen, and she moved to New York with her mother. She quickly began to perform professionally, singing for Tony Pastor and playing roles in comic opera, including Gilbert and Sullivan works. She married composer Edward Solomon in 1884 and created roles in several of his operas in London, but in 1886 he was arrested for bigamy. Russell was married four times, but her longest relationship was with Diamond Jim Brady, who supported her extravagant lifestyle for four decades.
In 1885, Russell returned to New York and continued to star in operetta and musical theatre. For many years, she was the foremost singer of operettas in America, performing continuously through the end of the 19th century. In 1899, she joined the Weber and Fields's Music Hall, where she starred for five years. After 1904, she began to have vocal difficulties and switched to dramatic roles. She later returned to musical roles in vaudeville, however, finally retiring from performing around 1919. In later years, Russell wrote a newspaper column, advocated women's suffrage and was a popular lecturer.
wn.com/Lillian_Russell -
Lionel Monckton
Lionel John Alexander Monckton (18 December 1861 – 15 February 1924) was an English writer and composer of musical theatre. He was Britain's most popular musical theatre composer of the early years of the 20th century.
Monckton was born in London, the eldest son of the Town Clerk of London, Sir John Braddick Monckton, and Lady Monckton, the former Maria Louisa Long (1837–1920), an "enthusiastic amateur actress". His sister was Mrs Augusta Moore, who wrote popular novels as Martin J. Pritchard.
He was educated at Charterhouse School and Oriel College at Oxford University, graduating in 1885. There he acted in college theatrical productions and composed music for productions of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, of which he was a founder, and the Phil-Thespian Club. He initially joined the legal profession at Lincoln's Inn and began to practise law, but gained part-time work as a song writer and a theatre and music critic, first for the Pall Mall Gazette and later for the Daily Telegraph. His first theatre work was Mummies and Marriage, an operetta produced by amateurs in 1888. At the age of 29, in 1891, he finally managed to place the song "What will you have to Drink?", with lyrics by Basil Hood, in a professional musical burlesque called Cinder Ellen up too Late. After this, his songs were included in several other London shows.
wn.com/Lionel_Monckton -
Lorenz Hart
Lorenz Milton Hart (May 2, 1895 – November 22, 1943) was the lyricist half of the famed Broadway songwriting team Rodgers and Hart. Some of his more famous lyrics include "Blue Moon," "Mountain Greenery," "The Lady Is a Tramp," "Manhattan," "Where or When," "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered," "Falling in Love with Love," "My Funny Valentine," "I Could Write a Book", "This Can't Be Love", "With a Song in My Heart", "It Never Entered My Mind", and "Isn't It Romantic?".
Hart was born in Harlem, the older of two sons, to Jewish immigrant parents, Max M. and Frieda (Isenberg) Hart, of German background. His father, a business promoter, sent Hart and his brother to private schools. (His brother, Teddy Hart, also went into theater and became a musical comedy star. His wife, Dorothy Hart, wrote a biography of Lorenz Hart.)
Hart attended Columbia University School of Journalism for two years. A friend introduced him to Richard Rodgers, and the two joined forces to write songs for a series of amateur and student productions.
wn.com/Lorenz_Hart -
Louis Armstrong
Louis Armstrong (August 4, 1901 – July 6, 1971), nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter and singer from New Orleans, Louisiana.
Coming to prominence in the 1920s as an "inventive" cornet and trumpet player, Armstrong was a foundational influence in jazz, shifting the music's focus from collective improvisation to solo performance. With his instantly recognizable deep and distinctive gravelly voice, Armstrong was also an influential singer, demonstrating great dexterity as an improviser, bending the lyrics and melody of a song for expressive purposes. He was also greatly skilled at scat singing (vocalizing using sounds and syllables instead of actual lyrics).
Renowned for his charismatic stage presence and voice almost as much as for his trumpet-playing, Armstrong's influence extends well beyond jazz music, and by the end of his career in the 1960s, he was widely regarded as a profound influence on popular music in general. Armstrong was one of the first truly popular African-American entertainers to "cross over," whose skin-color was secondary to his music in an America that was severely racially divided. It allowed him socially acceptable access to the upper echelons of American society that were highly restricted for a black man. While he rarely publicly politicized his race, often to the dismay of fellow African-Americans, he was privately a strong supporter of the Civil Rights movement in America.[citation needed]
wn.com/Louis_Armstrong -
Marc Blitzstein
Marcus Samuel Blitzstein, better known as Marc Blitzstein (March 2, 1905 – January 22, 1964), was an American composer. He won national attention in 1937 when his pro-union musical The Cradle Will Rock, directed by Orson Welles, was shut down by the Works Progress Administration. He is known for The Cradle Will Rock and for his Off-Broadway translation/adaptation of The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. His works also include the opera Regina, an adaptation of Lillian Hellman's play The Little Foxes; the Broadway musical Juno, based on Seán O'Casey's play Juno and the Paycock; and No for an Answer. He completed translation/adaptations of Brecht's and Weill's musical play Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and of Brecht's play Mother Courage and Her Children with music by Paul Dessau. Blitzstein also composed music for films, such as Surf and Seaweed (1931) and The Spanish Earth (1937), and he contributed two songs to the original 1960 production of Hellman's play Toys in the Attic.
wn.com/Marc_Blitzstein -
Marilyn Miller
Marilyn Miller (September 1, 1898 - April 7, 1936) was one of the most popular Broadway musical stars of the 1920s and early 1930s. She was an accomplished tap dancer, singer and actress, but it was the combination of these talents that endeared her to audiences. On stage she usually played rags-to-riches Cinderella characters who lived happily ever after. Miller's enormous popularity and famed image were in distinct contrast to her personal life, which was marred by disappointment, tragedy, frequent illness, and ultimately her sudden death due to complications of nasal surgery at age 37.
Miller was born Mary Ellen Reynolds in Evansville, Indiana, the youngest daughter of Edwin D. Reynolds, a telephone lineman, and his first wife, the former Ada Lynn Thompson. The tiny, delicate-featured blonde beauty was only four years old when, as "Mademoiselle Sugarlump," she debuted at Lakeside Park in Dayton, Ohio as a member of her family's vaudeville act, the Columbian Trio, which then included Marilyn's step-father, Oscar Caro Miller, and two older sisters, Ruth and Claire. They were re-christened the Five Columbians after Marilyn and her mother joined the routine. From their home base in Findlay, Ohio, they toured the Midwest and Europe in variety for ten years, skirting the child labor authorities, before Lee Shubert discovered Marilyn at the Lotus Club in London in 1914.
wn.com/Marilyn_Miller -
Marvin Hamlisch
Marvin Frederick Hamlisch (born June 2, 1944) is an American composer. He is one of only eleven people to have been awarded Emmys, Grammys, Oscars, and a Tony. He is also one of only two people to have won those four prizes and also a Pulitzer Prize (the other is Richard Rodgers). Hamlisch has also won two Golden Globes.
Hamlisch was born in New York City to Viennese Jewish parents: Lilly Schachter and Max Hamlisch. His father was an accordionist and bandleader. Hamlisch was a child prodigy, and by age five he began mimicking music he heard on the radio on the piano. A few months before he turned seven, in 1951, he was accepted into what is now the Juilliard School Pre-College Division. His first job was as a rehearsal pianist for Funny Girl with Barbra Streisand. Shortly after that, he was hired by producer Sam Spiegel to play piano at Spiegel's parties. This connection led to his first film score, The Swimmer. His favorite musicals growing up were My Fair Lady, Gypsy, West Side Story, and Bye Bye Birdie.
wn.com/Marvin_Hamlisch -
Maury Yeston
Maury Yeston (born October 23, 1945) is an American composer, lyricist, educator and musicologist.
He is known for writing the music and lyrics to Broadway musicals, including Nine in 1982, and Titanic in 1997, both of which won Tony Awards for best musical and best score. He also won a Drama Desk Award for Nine. Yeston also wrote a significant amount of the music and most of the lyrics to the Tony-nominated musical Grand Hotel in 1989, which was nominated for best score. His musical version of the novel The Phantom of the Opera called Phantom (not to be confused with Andrew Lloyd Webber's version) has enjoyed numerous productions in the U.S. and around the world. He has also written a number of other Off-Broadway musicals, a song cycle, a Cello Concerto, and other pieces.
Yeston serves on the Board of the Songwriters Hall of Fame. He is also President of the Kleban Foundation, serves on the editorial boards of Musical Quarterly and the Kurt Weill Foundation Publication Project and on the advisory board of the Yale University Press Broadway Series. He was the Director of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop in New York City for two decades beginning in 1982.
wn.com/Maury_Yeston -
Meredith Willson
Robert Meredith Willson (May 18, 1902 – June 15, 1984) was an American composer, songwriter, conductor and playwright, best known for writing the book, music and lyrics for the hit Broadway musical The Music Man. He wrote three other Broadway musicals, composed symphonies and popular songs, and his film scores were twice nominated for Academy Awards.
He was born in Mason City, Iowa to John David Willson and Rosalie Reiniger Willson, and had a brother two years older, John Cedrick, and a sister 12 years older, Lucille. He attended Frank Damrosch's Institute of Musical Art (later The Juilliard School) in New York City. He married his high school sweetheart, Elizabeth "Peggy" Wilson on August 29, 1920. A flute and piccolo player, Willson was a member of John Philip Sousa's band (1921–1923), and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra under Arturo Toscanini (1924–1929). Willson then moved to San Francisco, California as the concert director for radio station KFRC, and then as a musical director for the NBC radio network in Hollywood.
wn.com/Meredith_Willson -
Michael Bennett
Michael Bennett (April 8, 1943 – July 2, 1987) was an American musical theater director, writer, choreographer, and dancer. He won seven Tony Awards for his choreography and direction of Broadway shows and was nominated for an additional eleven.
Bennett choreographed Promises, Promises, Follies and Company. In 1976, he won the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical and the Tony Award for Best Choreography for the Pulitzer Prize–winning phenomenon A Chorus Line. Bennett, under the aegis of producer Joseph Papp, created A Chorus Line based on a precedent-setting workshop process which he pioneered. He also directed and co-choreographed Dreamgirls with Michael Peters.
Bennett was born Michael Bennett DiFiglia in Buffalo, New York, the son of Helen (Ternoff), a secretary, and Salvatore Joseph DiFiglia, a factory worker. His father was Roman Catholic and his mother was Jewish. He studied dance and choreography in his teens and staged a number of shows in his local high school before dropping out to accept the role of Baby John in the US and European tours of West Side Story.
wn.com/Michael_Bennett -
Molière
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, known by his stage name Molière, (French pronunciation: [mo.ljɛːʁ]; baptised January 15, 1622 – February 17, 1673) was a French playwright and actor who is considered to be one of the greatest masters of comedy in Western literature. Among Molière's best-known works are Le Misanthrope (The Misanthrope), L'École des femmes (The School for Wives), Tartuffe ou L'Imposteur, (Tartuffe or the Hypocrite), L'Avare (The Miser), Le Malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid), and Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (The Bourgeois Gentleman).
Born into a prosperous family and having studied at the Collège de Clermont (now Lycée Louis-le-Grand), Molière was well suited to begin a life in the theatre. Thirteen years as an itinerant actor helped him polish his comic abilities while he began writing, combining Commedia dell'arte elements with the more refined French comedy.
Through the patronage of a few aristocrats, including Philippe I, Duke of Orléans – the brother of Louis XIV – Molière procured a command performance before the King at the Louvre. Performing a classic play by Pierre Corneille and a farce of his own, Le Docteur amoureux (The Doctor in Love), Molière was granted the use of salle du Petit-Bourbon near the Louvre, a spacious room appointed for theatrical performances. Later, Molière was granted the use of the Palais-Royal. In both locations he found success among the Parisians with plays such as Les Précieuses ridicules (The Affected Ladies), L'École des maris (The School for Husbands) and L'École des femmes (The School for Wives). This royal favor brought a royal pension to his troupe and the title "Troupe du Roi" (The King's Troupe). Molière continued as the official author of court entertainments.
wn.com/Molière -
Morrie Ryskind
Morrie Ryskind (born October 20, 1895, New York City — died August 24, 1985, Washington, D.C.) was an American dramatist, lyricist and writer of theatrical productions and motion pictures, who became a conservative political activist later in life.
Ryskind attended Columbia University but was suspended shortly before he was due to graduate after he called university president Nicholas Murray Butler "Czar Nicholas" in the pages of the humor magazine Jester in 1917. Ryskind was criticizing Butler for refusing to allow Count Nikolai Tolstoy, nephew of Leo Tolstoy, to speak on campus.
From 1927 to 1945, Ryskind was author of numerous scripts and musical lyrics for Broadway theatrical productions and Hollywood motion pictures, and, later, directed a number of such productions, as well. He collaborated with George S. Kaufman on several Broadway hits. In 1933, he earned the Pulitzer Prize (receiving the prize from the same Nicholas Murray Butler who had suspended him from Columbia University) for Drama for the Broadway production Of Thee I Sing, a musical written in collaboration with composer George Gershwin.
wn.com/Morrie_Ryskind -
Moss Hart
Moss Hart (October 24, 1904 – December 20, 1961) was an American playwright and theatre director, best known for his interpretations of musical theater on Broadway.
Hart was born in New York City and grew up at 74 East 105th Street in Manhattan, “a neighborhood not of carriages and hansom cabs, but of dray wagons, pushcarts, and immigrants.” He was also raised, in relative poverty, by his English-born Jewish immigrant parents in the Bronx, New York, and in the Seagate area of Brooklyn, near Coney Island.
Early on he had a strong relationship with his Aunt Kate, with whom he later lost contact due to a falling out between her and his parents, and her weakening mental state. She piqued his interest in the theater and took him to see performances often. Hart even went so far as to create an "alternate ending" to her life in his book Act One. He writes that she died while he was working on out-of-town tryouts for The Beloved Bandit. Later, Kate became quite eccentric, vandalizing Hart's home, writing threatening letters and setting fires backstage during rehearsals for Jubilee. But his relationship with Kate was life-forming. He understood that the theater made possible "the art of being somebody else… not a scrawny boy with bad teeth, a funny name… and a mother who was a distant drudge."
wn.com/Moss_Hart -
Neil Patrick Harris
Neil Patrick Harris (born June 15, 1973) is an American actor, singer, director, and magician. He is best known for the title role in Doogie Howser, M.D., the womanizing Barney Stinson in How I Met Your Mother, a fictionalized version of himself in the Harold & Kumar series, and the title role in Joss Whedon's musical web series Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.
Harris was named as one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in 2010, and was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in September 2011.
Harris was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico and grew up in Ruidoso, New Mexico. His parents, Sheila and Ron Harris, ran a restaurant. He attended La Cueva High School in Albuquerque, where he acted in school plays and musicals. Harris graduated as an honors student in 1991.
Harris began his career as a child actor and was discovered by playwright Mark Medoff at a drama camp in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Medoff later cast him in his 1988 film Clara's Heart, a drama starring Whoopi Goldberg based on the novel of the same name by Joseph Olshan. Clara's Heart won Harris a Golden Globe nomination. The same year, he starred in Purple People Eater, a children's fantasy.
wn.com/Neil_Patrick_Harris -
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles (May 6, 1915 – October 10, 1985) was an American actor, director, writer and producer who worked extensively in theater, radio and film. He is best remembered for his innovative work in all three media, most notably Caesar (1937), a groundbreaking Broadway adaption of Julius Caesar and the debut of the Mercury Theatre; The War of the Worlds (1938), the most famous broadcast in the history of radio; and Citizen Kane (1941), which many critics and scholars name as the best film of all time.
After directing a number of high-profile theatrical productions in his early twenties, including an innovative adaptation of Macbeth and The Cradle Will Rock, Welles found national and international fame as the director and narrator of a 1938 radio adaptation of H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds performed for the radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was reported to have caused widespread panic when listeners thought that an invasion by extraterrestrial beings was occurring. Although these reports of panic were mostly false and overstated, they rocketed Welles to instant notoriety.
wn.com/Orson_Welles -
Oscar Asche
John Stange(r) Heiss Oscar Asche (26 January 1871 – 23 March 1936), better known as Oscar Asche, was an Australian actor, director and writer, best known for having written, directed, and acted in the record-breaking musical Chu Chin Chow, both on stage and film, and for acting in, directing, or producing many Shakespeare plays and successful musicals.
Asche was born in Geelong, Victoria, Australia. His father, Thomas, was born in Norway, was a law graduate at Christiania (now Oslo) University; he was a barrister but did not practise in Australia. After being a digger, a mounted police officer and a storekeeper, Thomas Asche became a prosperous hotel-keeper and publican in Melbourne and Sydney.
Asche was educated at Laurel Lodge, Dandenong and the Melbourne Grammar School, which he left at 16. He then went on a holiday voyage to China, and after his return to Australia was articled to an architect who died soon afterwards. A few months later, he ran away and lived in the bush for some weeks and then obtained a position as a jackaroo. He returned to his parents and obtained a position in an office, but he had now decided to become an actor and made a beginning by getting up private theatricals at his home. He travelled to Fiji and on his return his father agreed to send him to Norway to study acting.
wn.com/Oscar_Asche -
Oscar Hammerstein II
Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hammerstein II ( /ˈhæmərstaɪn/; July 12, 1895 – August 23, 1960) was an American librettist, theatrical producer, and (usually uncredited) theatre director of musicals for almost forty years. Hammerstein won eight Tony Awards and was twice awarded an Academy Award for "Best Original Song". Many of his songs are standard repertoire for singers and jazz musicians. He co-wrote 850 songs. Hammerstein was the lyricist and playwright in his partnerships; his collaborators wrote the music. Hammerstein collaborated with composers Jerome Kern, Vincent Youmans, Rudolf Friml and Sigmund Romberg, but his most famous collaboration was with Richard Rodgers.
Hammerstein was born Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hammerstein in New York City, the son of Alice (née Nimmo) and William Hammerstein. His grandfather was German-born Jewish theater impresario Oscar Hammerstein I, and his mother was the daughter of Scottish and English parents. Hammerstein was raised an Episcopalian.[citation needed]
wn.com/Oscar_Hammerstein_II -
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, plays and the circumstances of his imprisonment, followed by his early death.
Wilde's parents were successful Dublin intellectuals. Their son became fluent in French and German early in life. At university Wilde read Greats; he proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Oxford. He became known for his involvement in the rising philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles. As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of poems, lectured in the United States of America and Canada on the new "English Renaissance in Art", and then returned to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress, and glittering conversation, Wilde had become one of the most well-known personalities of his day.
wn.com/Oscar_Wilde -
Patti LuPone
Patti Ann LuPone (born April 21, 1949) is an American singer and actress, known for her Tony Award-winning performance as Eva Perón in the 1979 stage musical Evita and for her Olivier Award-winning performance as Fantine in the original London cast of Les Misérables.
LuPone was born in Northport, New York, on Long Island, the daughter of Angela Louise (née Patti), a college library administrator, and Orlando Joseph LuPone, a school administrator. Her great-grand-aunt was the celebrated nineteenth-century opera singer Adelina Patti. Her brother Robert LuPone is an actor, dancer, and director who originated the role of Zach the choreographer in A Chorus Line. Her other brother William LuPone is a teacher. When they were young, they performed on Long Island as the LuPone Trio. She is of Italian/Abruzzese descent and a graduate of Northport High School, where she studied under the musical direction of voice coach Esther Scott.
LuPone was part of the first graduating class of Juilliard's Drama Division (1968-1972: Group 1), which also included actors Kevin Kline and David Ogden Stiers. She graduated from Juilliard in 1972 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.
wn.com/Patti_LuPone -
Petula Clark
Petula Clark, CBE (born 15 November 1932) is an English singer, actress and composer whose career has spanned eight decades.
Clark's professional career began as an entertainer on BBC Radio during World War II. During the 1950s she started recording in French and having international success in both French and English, with such songs as "The Little Shoemaker", "Baby Lover", "With All My Heart" and "Prends Mon Coeur". During the 1960s she became known globally for her popular upbeat hits, including "Downtown", "I Know a Place", "My Love", "Colour My World", "A Sign of the Times", and "Don't Sleep in the Subway". She has sold in excess of 68 million records throughout her career.
Born to English father Leslie Norman Clark and Welsh mother Doris (née Phillips), both nurses at Long Grove Hospital, in Epsom, Surrey, England, she was christened Petula Sally Olwen Clark. Her father Leslie coined her first name, jokingly alleging it was a combination of the names of two former girlfriends, Pet and Ulla. As a child, she sang in the chapel choir and showed a talent for mimicry, frequently impersonating Vera Lynn, Carmen Miranda and Sophie Tucker for the amusement of family and friends. Her father introduced her to theatre when he took her to see Flora Robson in a 1938 production of Mary Tudor; she later recalled that after the performance "I made up my mind then and there I was going to be an actress ... I wanted to be Ingrid Bergman more than anything else in the world." However, her first public performances were as a singer, performing with an orchestra in the entrance hall of Bentall's Department Store in Kingston upon Thames for a tin of toffee and a gold wristwatch, in 1939.
wn.com/Petula_Clark -
Plautus
Titus Maccius Plautus (c. 254–184 BC), commonly known as "Plautus", was a Roman playwright of the Old Latin period. His comedies are the earliest surviving intact works in Latin literature. He wrote Palliata comoedia, the genre devised by the innovator of Latin literature, Livius Andronicus. The word Plautine ( /ˈplɔːtaɪn/) refers to both Plautus's own works and works similar to or influenced by his.
Not much is known about Titus Maccius Plautus' early life. It is believed that he was born in Sarsina, a small town in Umbria in central Italy, in around 254 BC. According to Morris Marples, Plautus worked as a stage-carpenter or scene-shifter in his early years. It is from this work, perhaps, that his love of the theater originated. His acting talent was eventually discovered; and he adopted the names "Maccius" (a clownish stock-character in popular farces) and "Plautus" (a term meaning either "flat-footed" or "flat-eared," like the ears of a hound). Tradition holds that he made enough money to go into the nautical business, but that the venture collapsed. He is then said to have worked as a manual laborer and to have studied Greek drama—particularly the New Comedy of Menander—in his leisure. His studies allowed him to produce his plays, which were released between c. 205 and 184 BC. Plautus attained such a popularity that his name alone became a hallmark of theatrical success.
wn.com/Plautus -
Puerto Rican people
A Puerto Rican (Spanish: puertorriqueño) (Taíno term: boricua) is a person who was born in Puerto Rico.
People born and raised in other parts of the world, most notably in the continental United States, of Puerto Rican parents are also sometimes referred to as Puerto Ricans, even though they were not born in Puerto Rico themselves. Since 2007, the government of Puerto Rico has been granting Certificates of Puerto Rican citizenship to any person born on the island as well as to those born outside of the island that have at least one parent who was born on the island.
Puerto Ricans, who also commonly refer to themselves as "boricuas", are largely the descendants of Europeans, Taíno, Africans or a blend of these groups which has produced a very diversified population. The population of Puerto Ricans and descendants is estimated to be between 8 to 10 million worldwide, with most living within the islands of Puerto Rico, Central Florida, Chicago Metropolitan Area and in New York City, where there is a large Nuyorican community.
wn.com/Puerto_Rican_people -
Ray Bolger
Raymond Wallace "Ray" Bolger (January 10, 1904 – January 15, 1987) was an American entertainer of stage and screen, best known for his portrayal of the Scarecrow and Kansas farmworker Hunk in The Wizard of Oz.
Bolger was born into an Irish Catholic family in Dorchester, a section of Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Anne (née Wallace) and James Edward Bolger. He was inspired by the vaudeville shows he attended when he was young to become an entertainer himself. He began his career in a vaudeville tab show, creating the act "Sanford & Bolger" with his dance partner. In 1926, he danced at New York City's legendary Palace Theatre, the top vaudeville theatre in the country. His limber body and ability to ad lib movement won him many starring roles on Broadway in the 1930s. Eventually, his career would also encompass film, television and nightclub work.
Bolger's film career began when he signed a contract with MGM in 1936. His best-known film appearance prior to The Wizard of Oz was The Great Ziegfeld (1936), in which he portrayed himself. He also appeared in Sweethearts, (1938) the first MGM film in Technicolor, starring Nelson Eddy, Jeanette MacDonald, and Bolger's future Oz co-star, Frank Morgan, as well as the 1937 Eleanor Powell vehicle Rosalie, which also starred Eddy and Morgan. Following Oz, Bolger moved to RKO.
wn.com/Ray_Bolger -
Reginald de Koven
Henry Louis Reginald De Koven (April 3, 1859 – January 16, 1920) was an American music critic and prolific composer, particularly of comic operas.
De Koven was born in Middletown, Connecticut, and moved to Europe in 1870, where he received the majority of his education. He graduated from St John's College of Oxford University in England in 1879. He undertook various musical studies at Stuttgart with Speidel and with Lebert and Pruckner. He studied composition at Frankfurt with Dr. Hauff, and after staying there for six months moved on to Florence, Italy, where he studied singing with Vanuccini. Study in operatic composition followed, first with Richard Genée, in Vienna, and then with Léo Delibes, in Paris.
De Koven returned to the U.S. in 1882 to live in Chicago, Illinois, and later lived in New York. He was able to find scope for his wide musical knowledge as a critic with Chicago's Evening Post, Harper's Weekly and New York World. Many of his songs became popular, especially "Oh Promise Me", with words by Clement Scott, which was one of the biggest song successes of its time and remains a wedding standard.
wn.com/Reginald_de_Koven -
Rex Harrison
Sir Reginald Carey "Rex" Harrison (5 March 1908 – 2 June 1990) was an English actor of stage and screen. One of Harrison's best remembered film roles was that of Professor Henry Higgins in the stage and film versions of My Fair Lady. The role earned him a Tony Award, a Golden Globe Award and Best Actor Oscar.
Harrison was born in Huyton, Lancashire, and educated at Liverpool College. After a bout of childhood measles, Harrison lost most of the sight in his left eye, which on one occasion caused some on-stage difficulty. He first appeared on the stage in 1924 in Liverpool. Harrison's acting career was interrupted during World War II while serving in the Royal Air Force, reaching the rank of Flight Lieutenant. He acted in various stage productions until 11 May 1990. He acted in the West End of London when he was young, appearing in the Terence Rattigan play French Without Tears, which proved to be his breakthrough role.
wn.com/Rex_Harrison -
Richard Rodgers
Richard Charles Rodgers (June 28, 1902 – December 31, 1979) was an American composer of music for more than 900 songs and for 43 Broadway musicals. He also composed music for films and television. He is best known for his songwriting partnerships with the lyricists Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II. His compositions have had a significant impact on popular music down to the present day, and have an enduring broad appeal.
Rodgers was the first person to win what are considered the top show business awards in television, recording, movies and Broadway—an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony—now known collectively as an EGOT. He has also won a Pulitzer Prize, making him one of two people (Marvin Hamlisch is the other) to receive each award.
Born into a prosperous ethnic German Jewish family in Arverne, Queens, New York City, Rodgers was the son of Mamie Levy and Dr. William Abrahams Rodgers, a prominent physician who had changed the family name from Abrahams. Richard began playing the piano at age six. He attended P.S. 10, Townsend Harris Hall and DeWitt Clinton High School. Rodgers spent his early teenage summers in Camp Wigwam (Waterford, Maine) where he composed some of his first songs.
wn.com/Richard_Rodgers -
Rudolf Friml
Rudolf Friml (December 7, 1879 – November 12, 1972) was a composer of operettas, musicals, songs and piano pieces, as well as a pianist. After musical training and a brief performing career in his native Prague, Friml moved to the United States, where he became a composer. His best-known works are Rose-Marie and The Vagabond King, each of which enjoyed success on Broadway and in London and were adapted for film.
Born in Prague, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and now capital of the Czech Republic, Friml showed aptitude for music at an early age. He entered the Prague Conservatory in 1895, where he studied the piano and composition with Antonín Dvořák. Friml was expelled from the conservatory in 1901 for performing without permission. In Prague and later in America he composed and published songs, piano pieces and other music, including the prize-winning set of songs, Pisne Zavisovy. The last of these, Za tichych noci, later became the basis for a famous film in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1941.
wn.com/Rudolf_Friml -
Seymour Hicks
Sir Arthur Seymour Hicks (30 January 1871 – 6 April 1949), better known as Seymour Hicks, was a British actor, music hall performer, playwright, screenwriter, theatre manager and producer. He became known, early in his career, for writing, starring in and producing Edwardian musical comedy, often together with his famous wife, Ellaline Terriss. His most famous acting role was that of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol.
Making his stage début at the age of nine and performing professionally by sixteen, Hicks joined a theatrical company and toured America before starring in Under the Clock in 1893, the first musical revue ever staged in London. Following this, he starred in a revival of Little Jack Sheppard at the Gaiety Theatre, London which brought him to the attention of impresario George Edwardes. Edwardes cast Hicks in his next show, The Shop Girl, in 1894. Its success led to his participation in two more of Edwardes's hit "girl" musicals, The Circus Girl (1896) and A Runaway Girl (1898), both starring Terriss. He first played the role of Ebenezer Scrooge in 1901 and eventually played it thousands of times onstage. Hicks, along with his wife, joined the producer Charles Frohman in his theatre company and wrote and starred in a series of extraordinarily successful musicals, including Bluebell in Fairyland (1901), Quality Street (1902), The Earl and the Girl (1903) and The Catch of the Season (1904).
wn.com/Seymour_Hicks -
Sidney Jones
James Sidney Jones (17 June 1861 - 29 January 1946), usually credited as Sidney Jones, was an English conductor and composer, most famous for producing the musical scores for a series of musical comedy hits in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods.
Jones's most famous musical was The Geisha, but several of his musicals were among the most popular shows of the era, enjoying long runs, international tours and revivals.
Jones was born in Islington, London. His father, James Sidney Jones, Sr. (1837-1914) originally of Suffolk, was a military bandmaster. His mother was Ann Jones, née Eycott. As a child, Jones moved frequently as his father was transferred to new military stations in England and Ireland. The young Jones learned to play a variety of instruments in the band. In Dublin, he studied with Sir Robert Stewart (1825-1894) of Trinity College. The family later moved to Leeds, where his father became conductor of the Leeds Rifles, was the musical director of the Leeds Grand Theatre and later conducted a band and the Spa Orchestra at Harrogate. Jones was the eldest son and second of six children. His youngest brother, Guy Sidney Jones (1875-1959), also became a conductor and composer whose musical scores included The Gay Gordons (1907).
wn.com/Sidney_Jones -
Sigmund Romberg
Sigmund Romberg (July 29, 1887 – November 9, 1951) was a Austro-Hungarian-born American composer, best known for his operettas.
Romberg was born as Siegmund Rosenberg to a Jewish family, Adam and Clara Rosenberg, in Gross-Kanizsa (Hungarian: Nagykanizsa) during the Austro-Hungarian kaiserlich und königlich (Imperial and Royal) monarchy period. In 1889 Romberg and his family moved to Belišće, which was then in Hungary, where he attended a primary school. Influenced by his father, Romberg learned to play the violin at six, and piano at eight years of age. He enrolled at Osijek gymnasium in 1897, where he was a member of the high school orchestra. He went to Vienna to study engineering, but he also took composition lessons while living there. He moved to the United States in 1909 and, after a brief stint working in a pencil factory, was employed as a pianist in cafés. He eventually founded his own orchestra and published a few songs, which, despite their limited success, brought him to the attention of the Shubert brothers, who in 1914 hired him to write music for their Broadway theatre shows. That year he wrote his first successful Broadway revue, The Whirl of the World.
wn.com/Sigmund_Romberg -
Sophocles
Sophocles ( /ˈsɒfəkliːz/; Ancient Greek: Σοφοκλῆς, Sophoklēs, Greek pronunciation: [sopʰoklɛ̂ːs]; c. 497/6 BC – winter 406/5 BC) is one of three ancient Greek tragedians whose plays have survived. His first plays were written later than those of Aeschylus, and earlier than or contemporary with those of Euripides. According to the Suda, a 10th century encyclopedia, Sophocles wrote 123 plays during the course of his life, but only seven have survived in a complete form: Ajax, Antigone, The Women of Trachis, Oedipus the King, Electra, Philoctetes and Oedipus at Colonus. For almost 50 years, Sophocles was the most-fêted playwright in the dramatic competitions of the city-state of Athens that took place during the religious festivals of the Lenaea and the Dionysia. He competed in around 30 competitions, won perhaps 24, and was never judged lower than second place. Aeschylus won 14 competitions, and was sometimes defeated by Sophocles, while Euripides won only 4 competitions.
The most famous tragedies of Sophocles feature Oedipus and Antigone: they are generally known as the Theban plays, although each play was actually a part of a different tetralogy, the other members of which are now lost. Sophocles influenced the development of the drama, most importantly by adding a third actor, thereby reducing the importance of the chorus in the presentation of the plot. He also developed his characters to a greater extent than earlier playwrights such as Aeschylus.
wn.com/Sophocles -
Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Joshua Sondheim ( /ˈsɒnd.haɪm/) (born March 22, 1930) is an American composer and lyricist known for his contributions to musical theatre. He is the winner of an Academy Award, eight Tony Awards (more than any other composer) including the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, multiple Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and the Laurence Olivier Award. Described by Frank Rich of the New York Times as "the greatest, and perhaps best-known artist working in musical theatre", his most famous works include (as composer/lyricist) A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Sweeney Todd, Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods. He also wrote the lyrics for West Side Story and Gypsy.
Sondheim has also written material for movies, including the 1981 Warren Beatty film Reds, contributing the song "Goodbye For Now". He also wrote five songs for the 1990 movie Dick Tracy, including "Sooner or Later (I Always Get My Man)", which won the Academy Award for Best Song.
wn.com/Stephen_Sondheim -
The Bohemian Girl
The Bohemian Girl is an opera composed by Michael William Balfe with a libretto by Alfred Bunn. The plot is loosely based on a Cervantes tale, La Gitanilla.
The opera was first produced in London at the Drury Lane Theatre on November 27, 1843. The production ran for more than 100 nights and enjoyed many revivals worldwide including: New York (25 November 1844), Dublin (1844), Philadelphia (1844) and Madrid (1845).
Several versions in different languages were also staged during Balfe’s life. The German version, Die Zigeunerin, premiered in Vienna in 1846, the Italian adaptation and translation, titled La zingara, was originally staged in Trieste in 1854, and finally a four-act French version, "La Bohemienne", was mounted in Rouen in 1862, conducted by composer Jules Massenet, then aged only 20, and with the celebrated mezzo-soprano Celestine Galli-Marie in the role of the Gypsy Queen. If Die Zigeunerin enjoyed fairly widespread circulation in the countries of German language or culture, La zingara was often revived also in English-speaking towns, such as London, Dublin, New York, Boston and San Francisco. The very successful 1858 run at Her Majesty's Theatre in London, for which Balfe was rewarded with an extra cheque for fifty pounds, starred Marietta Piccolomini, Marietta Alboni and Antonio Giuglini.
wn.com/The_Bohemian_Girl -
Thomas Shadwell
Thomas Shadwell (c. 1642 – 19 November 1692) was an English poet and playwright who was appointed poet laureate in 1689.
Shadwell was born at Stanton Hall, Norfolk, and educated at Bury St Edmunds School, and at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, which he entered in 1656. He left the university without a degree, and joined the Middle Temple. At the Whig triumph in 1688, he superseded John Dryden as poet laureate and historiographer royal. He died at Chelsea on 19 November 1692.
In 1668 he produced a prose comedy, The Sullen Lovers, or the Impertinents, based on Les Fâcheux by Molière, and written in open imitation of Ben Jonson's comedy of humours. His best plays are Epsom Wells (1672), for which Sir Charles Sedley wrote a prologue, and the Squire of Alsatia (1688). Alsatia was the cant name for the Whitefriars area of London, then a kind of sanctuary for persons liable to arrest, and the play represents, in dialogue full of the local argot, the adventures of a young heir who falls into the hands of the sharpers there.
wn.com/Thomas_Shadwell -
Tyne Daly
Tyne Daly (born February 21, 1946) is an American stage and screen actress, widely known for her work as Detective Mary Beth Lacey in the television series Cagney & Lacey and as Maxine Gray in the television series Judging Amy. She is also known for her role as Alice Henderson in television series Christy. She has won six Emmy Awards for her television work, and the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical in Gypsy: A Musical Fable in 1989.
Daly was born Ellen Tyne Daly in Madison, Wisconsin, into a creative family; she is the daughter of actor James Daly. Her younger brother is actor Timothy Daly. Her sister-in-law, Amy Van Nostrand, is also an actress. She was raised in Westchester County, New York, where she started her career by performing in summer stock with her family; she earned her Equity Card at age 15. She studied at Brandeis University and The American Musical and Dramatic Academy.
Daly was married to actor/director Georg Stanford Brown from 1966 to 1990.
wn.com/Tyne_Daly -
Victor Herbert
Victor August Herbert (February 1, 1859 – May 26, 1924) was an Irish-born, German-raised American composer, cellist and conductor. Although Herbert enjoyed important careers as a cello soloist and conductor, he is best known for composing many successful operettas that premiered on Broadway from the 1890s to World War I. He was also prominent among the tin pan alley composers and was later a founder of the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP). A prolific composer, Herbert produced two operas, a cantata, 43 operettas, incidental music to 10 plays, 31 compositions for orchestra, nine band compositions, nine cello compositions, five violin compositions with piano or orchestra, 22 piano compositions and numerous songs, choral compositions and orchestrations of works by other composers, among other music.
In the early 1880s, Herbert began a career as a cellist in Vienna, Austria, and Stuttgart, Germany, during which he began to compose orchestral music. Herbert and his opera singer wife, Therese Förster, moved to the U.S. in 1886 when both were engaged by the Metropolitan Opera. In the U.S., Herbert continued his performing career, while also teaching at the National Conservatory of Music, conducting and composing. His most notable instrumental compositions were his Cello Concerto No. 2 in E minor, Op. 30 (1894), which entered the standard repertoire, and his Auditorium Festival March (1901). He led the Pittsburgh Symphony from 1898 to 1904 and then founded the Victor Herbert Orchestra, which he conducted throughout the rest of his life.
wn.com/Victor_Herbert -
Vincent Youmans
Vincent Youmans (September 27, 1898 - April 5, 1946) was an American popular composer and Broadway producer.
Vincent Millie Youmans was born in New York City on September 27, 1898, and grew-up on Central Park West on the site where the Mayflower Hotel once stood. His father, a prosperous hat manufacturer, moved the family to upper-class Larchmont, New York. Youmans attended the Trinity School in Mamaroneck, NY and Heathcote Hall in Rye, New York. Originally, his ambition was to become an engineer and he attended Yale for a short time. He dropped out to become a runner for a Wall Street brokerage firm before he was drafted to fight in World War I. He took an interest in the theatre when he produced troop shows for the Navy. After the war, he was a Tin Pan Alley song plugger for the TB Harms Company and then as a rehearsal pianist for famed composer Victor Herbert’s operettas.
No, No, Nanette was the biggest musical-comedy success of the 1920s in both Europe and the USA and his two songs "Tea for Two" and "I Want to Be Happy" are considered standards. From 1927, Youmans also produced his own shows. He had another major success with Hit the Deck! (1927; including ‘Hallelujah’), but his subsequent productions were failures, though many of their songs remain popular. His last contributions to Broadway were some songs for Take a Chance (1932).
wn.com/Vincent_Youmans -
Vivienne Segal
Vivienne Sonia Segal (April 19, 1897 - December 29, 1992) was an American actress and singer.
Segal was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is best remembered for creating the role of Vera Simpson in Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart's Pal Joey and introduced the song "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered". Pal Joey opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre December 25, 1940, with a cast that included Gene Kelly and June Havoc. She also starred as Morgan LeFay in the Rodgers and Hart revival of A Connecticut Yankee in 1942. One of Lorenz Hart's last songs, To Keep My Love Alive, was written specifically for her in this show.[citation needed]
Since the 1940 production went unrecorded, a studio cast was assembled in 1950 to record the musical. In 2003, this recording was reissued by Columbia Broadway Masterworks in a release featuring such Rodgers and Hart tunes as “I Could Write a Book”, “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”, “Zip”, and “Take Him,” as well as two bonus tracks: Lang singing “I Could Write a Book” (from the CBS TV show Shower of Stars) and Segal—interviewed by Mike Wallace on the CBS Radio show Stage Struck -- recalled Hart's promise to write her a show and then sings “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”. She was also a performer on the CBS Radio program Accordiana in 1934.
wn.com/Vivienne_Segal -
Washington Irving
Washington Irving (April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859) was an American author, essayist, biographer and historian of the early 19th century. He is best known for his short stories "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle", both of which appear in his book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. His historical works include biographies of George Washington, Oliver Goldsmith and Muhammad, and several histories of 15th-century Spain dealing with subjects such as Christopher Columbus, the Moors, and the Alhambra. Irving also served as the U.S. ambassador to Spain from 1842 to 1846.
He made his literary debut in 1802 with a series of observational letters to the Morning Chronicle, written under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle. After moving to England for the family business in 1815, he achieved international fame with the publication of The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819. He continued to publish regularly—and almost always successfully—throughout his life, and completed a five-volume biography of George Washington just eight months before his death, at age 76, in Tarrytown, New York.
wn.com/Washington_Irving -
William Davenant
Sir William Davenant (baptised 3 March 1606 – 7 April 1668), also spelled D'Avenant, was an English poet and playwright. Along with Thomas Killigrew, Davenant was one of the rare figures in English Renaissance theatre whose career spanned both the Caroline and Restoration eras and who was active both before and after the English Civil War and during the Interregnum.
Davenant is believed to have been born in late February, 1606 in Oxford, the son of Jane Shepherd Davenant and John Davenant, proprietor of the Crown Tavern (or Crown Inn) and mayor of Oxford. He was baptised on 3 March, his godfather sometimes being said to have been William Shakespeare,[citation needed] who had stayed frequently at the Crown during his travels between London and Stratford-upon-Avon. It was even rumoured that he was the Bard's biological son as well. However, it seems that this rumour stemmed from a comment attributed to Davenant by Samuel Butler: "It seemed to him [Davenant] that he writ with the very same spirit that Shakespeare [did], and seemed content enough to be called his son."
wn.com/William_Davenant -
William Hogarth
William Hogarth (10 November 1697 – 26 October 1764) was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects". Knowledge of his work is so pervasive that satirical political illustrations in this style are often referred to as "Hogarthian."
William Hogarth was born at Bartholomew Close in London to Richard Hogarth, a poor Latin school teacher and textbook writer, and Anne Gibbons. In his youth he was apprenticed to the engraver Ellis Gamble in Leicester Fields, where he learned to engrave trade cards and similar products. Young Hogarth also took a lively interest in the street life of the metropolis and the London fairs, and amused himself by sketching the characters he saw. Around the same time, his father, who had opened an unsuccessful Latin-speaking coffee house at St John's Gate, was imprisoned for debt in Fleet Prison for five years. Hogarth never spoke of his father's imprisonment.[citation needed]
wn.com/William_Hogarth -
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare (baptised 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon". His surviving works, including some collaborations, consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.
Shakespeare was born and brought up in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord Chamberlain's Men, later known as the King's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613 at age 49, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others.
wn.com/William_Shakespeare -
World War I
World War I (WWI), which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939 (World War II), and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918. It involved all the world's great powers, which were assembled in two opposing alliances: the Allies (based on the Triple Entente of the United Kingdom, France and Russia) and the Central Powers (originally centred around the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy; but, as Austria–Hungary had taken the offensive against the agreement, Italy did not enter into the war). These alliances both reorganised (Italy fought for the Allies), and expanded as more nations entered the war. Ultimately more than 70 million military personnel, including 60 million Europeans, were mobilised in one of the largest wars in history. More than 9 million combatants were killed, largely because of enormous increases in lethality of weapons, thanks to new technology, without corresponding improvements in protection or mobility. It was the sixth-deadliest conflict in world history, subsequently paving the way for various political changes such as revolutions in the nations involved.
wn.com/World_War_I -
Xena
Xena is a fictional character from Robert Tapert's Xena: Warrior Princess franchise. She first appeared in the 1995–1999 television series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, before going on to appear in Xena: Warrior Princess TV show and subsequent comic book of the same name. The character has also appeared in the spin-off animated movie The Battle for Mount Olympus, as well as numerous non-canon expanded universe material, such as books and video games. Xena was played by New Zealand actress Lucy Lawless, although the original choice was the British actress Vanessa Angel. She commonly wore a tight leather skirted outfit.
Xena is the protagonist of the story, and the series depicts her quest to seek redemption for her past sins as a ruthless warlord by using her formidable fighting skills to help people. Xena was raised as the daughter of Cyrene and Atrius in Amphipolis, though the episode "The Furies" raised the possibility that Ares, might be Xena's biological father. She has a brother who is dead; she visits his grave to speak with him in "Sins of the Past." In Hercules, during her two first episodes, Xena was an outlaw, but in the third episode she appears in, she joins Hercules to defeat Darphus, who had taken her army. Once accompanied by her lover Borias and known as the "Destroyer of Nations," she is accompanied by the young Gabrielle and becomes "Defender of the Elijans," and of numerous unnamed others. Aware that the character of Xena had been very successful with the public, the producers of the series decided to create a spin-off series based on her adventures.
wn.com/Xena -
Yip Harburg
Edgar Yipsel Harburg (April 8, 1896 – March 5, 1981), known as E.Y. Harburg or Yip Harburg, was an American popular song lyricist who worked with many well-known composers. He wrote the lyrics to the standards, "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?", "April in Paris", and "It's Only a Paper Moon", as well as all of the songs in The Wizard of Oz, including "Over the Rainbow".
Harburg, the youngest of four surviving children (out of ten), was born Isidore Hochberg on the Lower East Side of New York City on April 8, 1896. His parents, Lewis Hochberg and Mary Ricing, were faithful, Yiddish-speakingOrthodox Jews who had emigrated from Russia. Harburg's nickname "Yipsel" (often shortened to "Yip") came about as "Yipsel" is how people pronounced "YPSL" -- the acronym for the Young People's Socialist League of which he was a member. Some have incorrectly believed that "Yipsel" is a Yiddish word meaning "squirrel."
Later, he adopted the name Edgar Harburg. He was best known as Edgar "Yip" Harburg. He attended Townsend Harris High School, where he and Ira Gershwin, who met over a shared fondness for Gilbert and Sullivan, worked on the school paper and became life-long friends. They went on to attend City College (later part of the City University of New York) together.
wn.com/Yip_Harburg -
Zero Mostel
Samuel Joel “Zero” Mostel (February 28, 1915 – September 8, 1977) was an American actor of stage and screen, best known for his portrayal of comic characters such as Tevye on stage in Fiddler on the Roof, Pseudolus on stage and on screen in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and Max Bialystock in the original film version of The Producers. He was blacklisted during the 1950s, and his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities was well-publicized. He was a Tony Award and Obie Award winner.
Mostel was born to Israel Mostel, an Eastern European Jew, and Cina "Celia" Druchs, also from a Jewish family, who was born in Poland and raised in Vienna. The two immigrated to the United States (separately: Israel in 1898 and Cina in 1908), where they met and married. Israel already had four children from his first wife; he had four more children with Cina. Samuel, later known as Zero, was Israel's seventh child.
It is said that Samuel Mostel got his nickname "Zero" since his parents were not kind with words and always told him that he would only ever amount to "Gournisht," which is Yiddish for "zero" or "nothing." The rest is history.
wn.com/Zero_Mostel
Send this Playlist by SMS
Email this Page
Inflatable You by Tim Minchin
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:09
- Updated: 18 Jan 2013
Performed at the Royal Albert Hall for the Tickled Pink Breast Cancer Fundraiser, Sept 2005
http://wn.com/Inflatable_You_by_Tim_Minchin
Performed at the Royal Albert Hall for the Tickled Pink Breast Cancer Fundraiser, Sept 2005
Musical Comedian Mike Rayburn
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:50
- Updated: 09 Jan 2013
Visit www.funny-business.com to Hire Mike Rayburn for your Corporate Party or Event.
http://wn.com/Musical_Comedian_Mike_Rayburn
Visit www.funny-business.com to Hire Mike Rayburn for your Corporate Party or Event.
- published: 11 Feb 2010
- views: 20664
- author: FunnyBusinessAgency
Axis of Awesome - 4 Four Chord Song (with song titles)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:31
- Updated: 19 Jan 2013
Australian comedy group 'Axis Of Awesome' perform a sketch from the 2009 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Footage courtesy of Network Ten Australia. See www.axisofawesome.net for more details of the comedy trio including Jordan Raskopoulos, Lee Naimo, & Benny Davis. Journey - Don't Stop Believing James Blunt - You're Beautiful Alphaville - Forever Young Jason Mraz - I'm Yours Mika - Happy Ending Alex Lloyd - Amazing The Calling - Wherever You WIll Go Elton John - Can You Feel The Love Tonight Maroon 5 - She Will Be Loved The Last Goodnight - Pictures Of You U2 - With Or Without You Crowded House - Fall At Your Feet Kasey Chambers - Not Pretty Enough The Beatles - Let it Be Red Hot Chili Peppers - Under the Bridge Daryl Braithwaite - The Horses Bob Marley - No Woman No Cry Marcy Playground - Sex and Candy Men At Work - Land Down Under Banjo Patterson's Waltzing Matilda A Ha - Take On Me Green Day - When I Come Around Eagle Eye Cherry - Save Tonight Toto - Africa Beyonce - If I Were A Boy The Offspring - Self Esteem The Offspring - You're Gonna Go Far Kid Pink - You and Your Hand Lady Gaga - Poker Face Aqua - Barbie Girl The Fray - You Found Me 30h!3 - Don't Trust Me MGMT - Kids Tim Minchin - Canvas Bags Natalie Imbruglia - Torn Five For Fighting - Superman Axis Of Awesome - Birdplane Missy Higgins - Scar
http://wn.com/Axis_of_Awesome_4_Four_Chord_Song_with_song_titles
Australian comedy group 'Axis Of Awesome' perform a sketch from the 2009 Melbourne International Comedy Festival. Footage courtesy of Network Ten Australia. See www.axisofawesome.net for more details of the comedy trio including Jordan Raskopoulos, Lee Naimo, & Benny Davis. Journey - Don't Stop Believing James Blunt - You're Beautiful Alphaville - Forever Young Jason Mraz - I'm Yours Mika - Happy Ending Alex Lloyd - Amazing The Calling - Wherever You WIll Go Elton John - Can You Feel The Love Tonight Maroon 5 - She Will Be Loved The Last Goodnight - Pictures Of You U2 - With Or Without You Crowded House - Fall At Your Feet Kasey Chambers - Not Pretty Enough The Beatles - Let it Be Red Hot Chili Peppers - Under the Bridge Daryl Braithwaite - The Horses Bob Marley - No Woman No Cry Marcy Playground - Sex and Candy Men At Work - Land Down Under Banjo Patterson's Waltzing Matilda A Ha - Take On Me Green Day - When I Come Around Eagle Eye Cherry - Save Tonight Toto - Africa Beyonce - If I Were A Boy The Offspring - Self Esteem The Offspring - You're Gonna Go Far Kid Pink - You and Your Hand Lady Gaga - Poker Face Aqua - Barbie Girl The Fray - You Found Me 30h!3 - Don't Trust Me MGMT - Kids Tim Minchin - Canvas Bags Natalie Imbruglia - Torn Five For Fighting - Superman Axis Of Awesome - Birdplane Missy Higgins - Scar
- published: 10 Dec 2009
- views: 25977121
- author: random804
Pitch Perfect Trailer (2012) Musical Comedy Movie
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:31
- Updated: 19 Jan 2013
Pitch Perfect Trailer (2012) Musical Comedy Movie A comedy set in the middle of a war between rival a cappella groups and centered on a rebellious girl who joins one of the groups as an escape from her unhappy life at school. tags: "pitch perfect" "pitch perfect trailer" "pitch perfect trailer 2012" "fat amy" musical comedy movie Pitch Perfect Trailer (2012) [HD] Musical Comedy Movie Pitch Perfect Trailer (2012) [HD] Musical Comedy Movie
http://wn.com/Pitch_Perfect_Trailer_2012_Musical_Comedy_Movie
Pitch Perfect Trailer (2012) Musical Comedy Movie A comedy set in the middle of a war between rival a cappella groups and centered on a rebellious girl who joins one of the groups as an escape from her unhappy life at school. tags: "pitch perfect" "pitch perfect trailer" "pitch perfect trailer 2012" "fat amy" musical comedy movie Pitch Perfect Trailer (2012) [HD] Musical Comedy Movie Pitch Perfect Trailer (2012) [HD] Musical Comedy Movie
- published: 15 Jun 2012
- views: 8367507
- author: PlayTraiIers
90's Music - Comedy Time
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:17
- Updated: 11 Dec 2012
Ace hates 80's music and prefers the drug fueled rock of the 90's!
http://wn.com/90's_Music_Comedy_Time
Ace hates 80's music and prefers the drug fueled rock of the 90's!
- published: 18 May 2007
- views: 147064
- author: ComedyTimeDir
Classical Music In The Key Of Comedy
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:20
- Updated: 18 Jan 2013
http://wn.com/Classical_Music_In_The_Key_Of_Comedy
Paganini: Classical Music Comedy Quartet
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:39
- Updated: 23 Oct 2012
The members of Paganini hail from Spain and Lebanon. The group's goal is simple: infuse classical music with a bit of comedy and fun. The World's Gerry Hadden shot this video at a recent Paganini concert in Spain. Hear his radio report at www.theworld.org
http://wn.com/Paganini_Classical_Music_Comedy_Quartet
The members of Paganini hail from Spain and Lebanon. The group's goal is simple: infuse classical music with a bit of comedy and fun. The World's Gerry Hadden shot this video at a recent Paganini concert in Spain. Hear his radio report at www.theworld.org
- published: 30 Nov 2009
- views: 25503
- author: PRI
Rachmaninov had big Hands
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:39
- Updated: 18 Jan 2013
To see upcoming performances of Igudesman & Joo "A Little Nightmare Music" visit our website www.igudesmanandjoo.com
http://wn.com/Rachmaninov_had_big_Hands
To see upcoming performances of Igudesman & Joo "A Little Nightmare Music" visit our website www.igudesmanandjoo.com
- published: 26 Dec 2006
- views: 4816903
- author: HirnW
Jeremy Lin The Musical: Comedy Short
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:30
- Updated: 18 Jan 2013
REPOST! An epic musical about the (fictional?) teenaged life of Jeremy Lin. Made in under a week with absolutely no budget... but with talented and patient friends who were willing to dance in the rain and dodge wayward basketballs... Like me on facebook: www.facebook.com
http://wn.com/Jeremy_Lin_The_Musical_Comedy_Short
REPOST! An epic musical about the (fictional?) teenaged life of Jeremy Lin. Made in under a week with absolutely no budget... but with talented and patient friends who were willing to dance in the rain and dodge wayward basketballs... Like me on facebook: www.facebook.com
- published: 18 Feb 2012
- views: 62605
- author: kevinyeedotcom
Julie & Carol at Carnegie Hall - History of Musical Comedy
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:43
- Updated: 18 Jan 2013
Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett singing a Medley..I LOVE it :). No copyright infringement intended. This is for the joy of Julie & Carol fans only :).
http://wn.com/Julie_Carol_at_Carnegie_Hall_History_of_Musical_Comedy
Julie Andrews and Carol Burnett singing a Medley..I LOVE it :). No copyright infringement intended. This is for the joy of Julie & Carol fans only :).
- published: 23 Nov 2008
- views: 106742
- author: Fratelliyo
Not The Nine O'Clock News - I Like Trucking
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:39
- Updated: 18 Jan 2013
Musical comedy sketch featuring Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones and Pamela Stephenson. As broadcast from Series 3, Episode 1 (1980).
http://wn.com/Not_The_Nine_O'Clock_News_I_Like_Trucking
Musical comedy sketch featuring Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones and Pamela Stephenson. As broadcast from Series 3, Episode 1 (1980).
- published: 30 Dec 2009
- views: 310052
- author: mwfunnybonez
Prejudice by Tim Minchin
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 6:44
- Updated: 18 Jan 2013
'Prejudice' taken from the Australian 'Ready For This?' DVD.
http://wn.com/Prejudice_by_Tim_Minchin
'Prejudice' taken from the Australian 'Ready For This?' DVD.
- published: 04 Mar 2010
- views: 3794521
- author: timminchin
LearningTown Preview - a new comedy musical starring Paul & Storm
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 1:13
- Updated: 18 Jan 2013
On TUESDAY, JANUARY 15, geek novelty music duo PAUL & STORM ("Write Like The Wind") sing, dance, and slap fight their way into your hearts as they battle villainous hipsters, ghosts who give bad advice and their own incompetence to save the kids' show of their childhoods, "LEARNINGTOWN!" Friendships are tested, tempers are frayed, and we can't stress this enough...puppets will burn. Starring Paul Sabourin, Storm DiCostanzo, Bresha Webb and Mike Phirman. Special guests include James Urbaniak (Venture Bros.), Greg Benson (youtube.com/mediocrefilms), Maurissa Tancharoen (Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog), Weird Al Yankovic and many more! Created by Paul Sabourin, Storm DiCostanzo and Josh Cagan Directed by Sean Becker Original music by Paul & Storm Subscribe to Geek and Sundry: full.sc Join our community at: geekandsundry.com Follow Paul & Storm on twitter! (@paulandstorm) Check out their website! (www.paulandstorm.com) Eat your vegetables!
http://wn.com/LearningTown_Preview_a_new_comedy_musical_starring_Paul_Storm
On TUESDAY, JANUARY 15, geek novelty music duo PAUL & STORM ("Write Like The Wind") sing, dance, and slap fight their way into your hearts as they battle villainous hipsters, ghosts who give bad advice and their own incompetence to save the kids' show of their childhoods, "LEARNINGTOWN!" Friendships are tested, tempers are frayed, and we can't stress this enough...puppets will burn. Starring Paul Sabourin, Storm DiCostanzo, Bresha Webb and Mike Phirman. Special guests include James Urbaniak (Venture Bros.), Greg Benson (youtube.com/mediocrefilms), Maurissa Tancharoen (Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog), Weird Al Yankovic and many more! Created by Paul Sabourin, Storm DiCostanzo and Josh Cagan Directed by Sean Becker Original music by Paul & Storm Subscribe to Geek and Sundry: full.sc Join our community at: geekandsundry.com Follow Paul & Storm on twitter! (@paulandstorm) Check out their website! (www.paulandstorm.com) Eat your vegetables!
- published: 04 Jan 2013
- views: 45333
- author: geekandsundry
Best Actor - Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical: Hugh Jackman - Golden Globe Awards
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:12
- Updated: 19 Jan 2013
Hugh Jackman accepts the award for his role in "Les Miserables." Subscribe now to NBC: full.sc Get more Golden Globe Awards: NBC: www.nbc.com YouTube: bit.ly Like NBC: Facebook.com Follow NBC: Twitter.com NBC Google+: plus.google.com NBC Tumblr: NBCtv.tumblr.com NBC Pinterest: Pinterest.com Instagram: instagram.com Best Actor - Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical: Hugh Jackman - Golden Globe Awards www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/Best_Actor_Motion_Picture,_Comedy_or_Musical_Hugh_Jackman_Golden_Globe_Awards
Hugh Jackman accepts the award for his role in "Les Miserables." Subscribe now to NBC: full.sc Get more Golden Globe Awards: NBC: www.nbc.com YouTube: bit.ly Like NBC: Facebook.com Follow NBC: Twitter.com NBC Google+: plus.google.com NBC Tumblr: NBCtv.tumblr.com NBC Pinterest: Pinterest.com Instagram: instagram.com Best Actor - Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical: Hugh Jackman - Golden Globe Awards www.youtube.com
- published: 14 Jan 2013
- views: 303109
- author: NBC
Best Actress - TV Series, Comedy or Musical: Lena Dunham - Golden Globe Awards
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:29
- Updated: 19 Jan 2013
Lena Dunham accepts the award for her performance in "Girls." Subscribe now to NBC: full.sc Get more Golden Globe Awards: NBC: www.nbc.com YouTube: bit.ly Like NBC: Facebook.com Follow NBC: Twitter.com NBC Google+: plus.google.com NBC Tumblr: NBCtv.tumblr.com NBC Pinterest: Pinterest.com Instagram: instagram.com Best Actress - TV Series, Comedy or Musical: Lena Dunham - Golden Globe Awards www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/Best_Actress_TV_Series,_Comedy_or_Musical_Lena_Dunham_Golden_Globe_Awards
Lena Dunham accepts the award for her performance in "Girls." Subscribe now to NBC: full.sc Get more Golden Globe Awards: NBC: www.nbc.com YouTube: bit.ly Like NBC: Facebook.com Follow NBC: Twitter.com NBC Google+: plus.google.com NBC Tumblr: NBCtv.tumblr.com NBC Pinterest: Pinterest.com Instagram: instagram.com Best Actress - TV Series, Comedy or Musical: Lena Dunham - Golden Globe Awards www.youtube.com
- published: 14 Jan 2013
- views: 241809
- author: NBC
Best Motion Picture - Comedy or Musical: "Les Miserables" - Golden Globe Awards
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:48
- Updated: 19 Jan 2013
"Les Miserables" wins Best Motion Picture - Comedy or Musical. Subscribe now to NBC: full.sc Get more Golden Globe Awards: NBC: www.nbc.com YouTube: bit.ly Like NBC: Facebook.com Follow NBC: Twitter.com NBC Google+: plus.google.com NBC Tumblr: NBCtv.tumblr.com NBC Pinterest: Pinterest.com Instagram: instagram.com Best Motion Picture - Comedy or Musical: "Les Miserables" - Golden Globe Awards www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/Best_Motion_Picture_Comedy_or_Musical_Les_Miserables_Golden_Globe_Awards
"Les Miserables" wins Best Motion Picture - Comedy or Musical. Subscribe now to NBC: full.sc Get more Golden Globe Awards: NBC: www.nbc.com YouTube: bit.ly Like NBC: Facebook.com Follow NBC: Twitter.com NBC Google+: plus.google.com NBC Tumblr: NBCtv.tumblr.com NBC Pinterest: Pinterest.com Instagram: instagram.com Best Motion Picture - Comedy or Musical: "Les Miserables" - Golden Globe Awards www.youtube.com
- published: 14 Jan 2013
- views: 71182
- author: NBC
WRONG HOLE: THE UNTOLD STORY (feat Taryn Southern, DJ Lubel, & Dennis Haskins)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:34
- Updated: 17 Jan 2013
I post new videos every Tuesday - thank you so much for subscribing/liking/playlisting!! TWEET THE VID HERE: clicktotweet.com DOWNLOAD THE SONG: bit.ly SUBSCRIBE: bit.ly SEE ME LIVE: bit.ly Behind the Scenes (Deep Inside): bit.ly Infamous Celebrity Players: http Tickets for my tour in Australia: bit.ly Music by: Will Forbes - www.twitter.com arkatonemusic.com Starring DJ LUBEL'S Channel: www.youtube.com DENNIS HASKIN'S Channel: www.youtube.com JASON HORTON'S Channel: www.youtube.com BLACKNERD'S Channel (Andre): www.youtube.com BEAU RYAN'S Channel: http:///www.youtube.com/radnerdtv KENT NICHOL'S Channel: www.youtube.com Directed by the amazing Michael Alan Hoy - www.michaelalanhoy.com http Director of Photography: Rohan Chitaker - www.rohanchitrakar.com and Brad Etter - http Edited by: Hugo Jordan Colored by: Brad Etter - twitter.com Still Photographer/PA: Kayte Methven - kmethven.tumblr.com Special Thanks Robert Adamson - www.twitter.com WRONG HOLE LYRICS TAGS: taryn southern, dennis haskins, beau ryan, jason horton, blacknerd, dj lubel, wrong hole, the untold story, hott4hill, tarynsouthern, musical comedy,
http://wn.com/WRONG_HOLE_THE_UNTOLD_STORY_feat_Taryn_Southern,_DJ_Lubel,_Dennis_Haskins
I post new videos every Tuesday - thank you so much for subscribing/liking/playlisting!! TWEET THE VID HERE: clicktotweet.com DOWNLOAD THE SONG: bit.ly SUBSCRIBE: bit.ly SEE ME LIVE: bit.ly Behind the Scenes (Deep Inside): bit.ly Infamous Celebrity Players: http Tickets for my tour in Australia: bit.ly Music by: Will Forbes - www.twitter.com arkatonemusic.com Starring DJ LUBEL'S Channel: www.youtube.com DENNIS HASKIN'S Channel: www.youtube.com JASON HORTON'S Channel: www.youtube.com BLACKNERD'S Channel (Andre): www.youtube.com BEAU RYAN'S Channel: http:///www.youtube.com/radnerdtv KENT NICHOL'S Channel: www.youtube.com Directed by the amazing Michael Alan Hoy - www.michaelalanhoy.com http Director of Photography: Rohan Chitaker - www.rohanchitrakar.com and Brad Etter - http Edited by: Hugo Jordan Colored by: Brad Etter - twitter.com Still Photographer/PA: Kayte Methven - kmethven.tumblr.com Special Thanks Robert Adamson - www.twitter.com WRONG HOLE LYRICS TAGS: taryn southern, dennis haskins, beau ryan, jason horton, blacknerd, dj lubel, wrong hole, the untold story, hott4hill, tarynsouthern, musical comedy,
- published: 13 Nov 2012
- views: 530581
- author: Taryn Southern
Jack Black, Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly sing at the Oscars®
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:06
- Updated: 19 Jan 2013
Jack Black, Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly sing at the Oscars - 79th Annual Academy Awards®.
http://wn.com/Jack_Black,_Will_Ferrell,_John_C_Reilly_sing_at_the_Oscars®
Jack Black, Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly sing at the Oscars - 79th Annual Academy Awards®.
- published: 20 Feb 2008
- views: 6835901
- author: Oscars
Backstage with Jennifer Lawrence, best actress comedy/musical
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:40
- Updated: 19 Jan 2013
Jennifer Lawrence, star of The Silver Linings Playbook, talks about being "confused and happy" after winning the Golden Globe for best actress in a comedy or musical motion picture.
http://wn.com/Backstage_with_Jennifer_Lawrence,_best_actress_comedy_musical
Jennifer Lawrence, star of The Silver Linings Playbook, talks about being "confused and happy" after winning the Golden Globe for best actress in a comedy or musical motion picture.
- published: 14 Jan 2013
- views: 99951
- author: GoldenGlobes
Rent-A-Person
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 12:34
- Updated: 17 Jan 2013
SEE THE TRAILER FOR "SHUFFLE", THE NEW FEATURE FILM FROM THE DIRECTOR OF "RENT-A-PERSON" and "VALIDATION", IN RELEASE THIS SUMMER! youtu.be www.shufflethemovie.com http "Rent-A-Person" is a romantic musical comedy about a men's room attendant who founds an organization which revolutionizes rush hour traffic. Starring James Haven Writer/Director/Composer -- Kurt Kuenne Winner of Audience Awards at 2004 Cinequest, MethodFest, Marco Island Film Festival and Dam Short Film Festival. Winner - Best Narrative Short, Atlanta Film Festival. Winner - Visual Excellence Award, Cleveland Film Festival. Winner - Best Score, 1 Reel Film Festival. Winner - Gold Special Jury Award, Houston Worldfest. Winner - Best of Fest Comedy, Breckenridge Festival of Film.
http://wn.com/Rent-A-Person
SEE THE TRAILER FOR "SHUFFLE", THE NEW FEATURE FILM FROM THE DIRECTOR OF "RENT-A-PERSON" and "VALIDATION", IN RELEASE THIS SUMMER! youtu.be www.shufflethemovie.com http "Rent-A-Person" is a romantic musical comedy about a men's room attendant who founds an organization which revolutionizes rush hour traffic. Starring James Haven Writer/Director/Composer -- Kurt Kuenne Winner of Audience Awards at 2004 Cinequest, MethodFest, Marco Island Film Festival and Dam Short Film Festival. Winner - Best Narrative Short, Atlanta Film Festival. Winner - Visual Excellence Award, Cleveland Film Festival. Winner - Best Score, 1 Reel Film Festival. Winner - Gold Special Jury Award, Houston Worldfest. Winner - Best of Fest Comedy, Breckenridge Festival of Film.
- published: 15 Nov 2006
- views: 220389
- author: Kurt Kuenne
Best Actress - Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical: Jennifer Lawrence - Golden Globe Awards
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:21
- Updated: 19 Jan 2013
Jennifer Lawrence accepts the award for her role in "Silver Linings Playbook." Subscribe now to NBC: full.sc Get more Golden Globe Awards: NBC: www.nbc.com YouTube: bit.ly Like NBC: Facebook.com Follow NBC: Twitter.com NBC Google+: plus.google.com NBC Tumblr: NBCtv.tumblr.com NBC Pinterest: Pinterest.com Instagram: instagram.com Best Actress - Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical: Jennifer Lawrence - Golden Globe Awards www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/Best_Actress_Motion_Picture,_Comedy_or_Musical_Jennifer_Lawrence_Golden_Globe_Awards
Jennifer Lawrence accepts the award for her role in "Silver Linings Playbook." Subscribe now to NBC: full.sc Get more Golden Globe Awards: NBC: www.nbc.com YouTube: bit.ly Like NBC: Facebook.com Follow NBC: Twitter.com NBC Google+: plus.google.com NBC Tumblr: NBCtv.tumblr.com NBC Pinterest: Pinterest.com Instagram: instagram.com Best Actress - Motion Picture, Comedy or Musical: Jennifer Lawrence - Golden Globe Awards www.youtube.com
- published: 14 Jan 2013
- views: 325796
- author: NBC
Best TV Series - Comedy or Musical: "Girls" - Golden Globe Awards
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:21
- Updated: 19 Jan 2013
HBO's "Girls" wins the award for Best TV Series - Comedy or Musical. Subscribe now to NBC: full.sc Get more Golden Globe Awards: NBC: www.nbc.com YouTube: bit.ly Like NBC: Facebook.com Follow NBC: Twitter.com NBC Google+: plus.google.com NBC Tumblr: NBCtv.tumblr.com NBC Pinterest: Pinterest.com Instagram: instagram.com Best TV Series - Comedy or Musical: "Girls" - Golden Globe Awards www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/Best_TV_Series_Comedy_or_Musical_Girls_Golden_Globe_Awards
HBO's "Girls" wins the award for Best TV Series - Comedy or Musical. Subscribe now to NBC: full.sc Get more Golden Globe Awards: NBC: www.nbc.com YouTube: bit.ly Like NBC: Facebook.com Follow NBC: Twitter.com NBC Google+: plus.google.com NBC Tumblr: NBCtv.tumblr.com NBC Pinterest: Pinterest.com Instagram: instagram.com Best TV Series - Comedy or Musical: "Girls" - Golden Globe Awards www.youtube.com
- published: 14 Jan 2013
- views: 81966
- author: NBC
Best Actor - TV Series, Comedy, or Musical: Don Cheadle - Golden Globe Awards
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:08
- Updated: 19 Jan 2013
Don Cheadle accepts the award for his role in "House of Lies." Subscribe now to NBC: full.sc Get more Golden Globe Awards: NBC: www.nbc.com YouTube: bit.ly Like NBC: Facebook.com Follow NBC: Twitter.com NBC Google+: plus.google.com NBC Tumblr: NBCtv.tumblr.com NBC Pinterest: Pinterest.com Instagram: instagram.com Best Actor - TV Series, Comedy, or Musical: Don Cheadle - Golden Globe Awards www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/Best_Actor_TV_Series,_Comedy,_or_Musical_Don_Cheadle_Golden_Globe_Awards
Don Cheadle accepts the award for his role in "House of Lies." Subscribe now to NBC: full.sc Get more Golden Globe Awards: NBC: www.nbc.com YouTube: bit.ly Like NBC: Facebook.com Follow NBC: Twitter.com NBC Google+: plus.google.com NBC Tumblr: NBCtv.tumblr.com NBC Pinterest: Pinterest.com Instagram: instagram.com Best Actor - TV Series, Comedy, or Musical: Don Cheadle - Golden Globe Awards www.youtube.com
- published: 14 Jan 2013
- views: 42639
- author: NBC
photo: US Army / Staff Sgt. Michael R. Noggle
18 Jan 2013
“For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction” is Newton’s third law of physics. Its counterpart in geopolitics is “blowback,” when military action in one sphere produces an unintended and undesirable consequence in another. September 11, 2001, was blowback. George H.W. Bush had sent an army of half a million to hurl Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, a triumph ... bases in Saudi Arabia ... Patrick J....(size: 5.8Kb)
photo: GFDL
17 Jan 2013
TOKYO. Aviation regulators on Thursday grounded most of the world's 787 Dreamliner fleet until a fire risk linked to the plane's batteries can been fixed, deepening a crisis for its US manufacturer Boeing. Regulators in Japan, India and Chile followed the lead of the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in ordering an indefinite halt to all operations, after a Japanese Dreamliner on Wednesday was forced into an emergency landing ... ....(size: 4.5Kb)
photo: Creative Commons / Gage Skidmore
18 Jan 2013
Angelina Jolie likes being a sex symbol. The Oscar-winning actress is regarded as one of the world's most beautiful women and she enjoys being told she looks good as it's important to feel sexy ... ....(size: 1.0Kb)
photo: White House / Pete Souza
17 Jan 2013
AMY TEIBEL. Associated Press= JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel's premier on Wednesday dismissed President Barack Obama's reported displeasure with his hard-line policies toward the Palestinians, a sisgn that the two could be headed for a showdown. Polls suggest Benjamin Netanyahu is poised to win Israel's elections next week and continue in office ... could suffer in unprecedented ways if the Israeli government doesn't change its policies....(size: 10.2Kb)
photo: AP / BP
18 Jan 2013
The twin crises unfolding either side of the Sahara Desert in Mali and Algeria are closely interlinked - the Islamist groups in Mali have their roots in Algeria, while the kidnappers who have just struck in Algeria say they are acting in revenge for France's intervention against their allies to the south ... Continue reading the main story “Start Quote ... Natural target ... Continue reading the main story Mokhtar Belmokhtar ... ....(size: 6.7Kb)
Music News
19 Jan 2013
Elvis Costello says he would happily quit music to go into radio comedy ... He said comedy is the one thing he would give up music for. 'That was a comedy version of my character,' Elvis told Noise11 ... Also the Prairie Radio Show where they do comedy sketches ... I would quit music and do that. I want to be a radio comedy actor ... Stay updated with your free Music News daily newsletter....(size: 2.5Kb)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
19 Jan 2013
The Grammys ceremony honoring the best in music will be telecast live by CBS on Sunday, Feb ... 24 ... Cast members' musical backgrounds explored ... Winner, best musical or comedy; Hugh Jackman, best actor; Anne Hathaway, best supporting actor ... Jennifer Lawrence wins best actress, musical or comedy ... "Argo" (drama) and "Les Miserables" (musical or comedy) were the big movie winners; "Girls" (comedy) and "Homeland" (drama) took top TV honors ... ....(size: 2.9Kb)
Starpulse
19 Jan 2013
Jack Black's band Tenacious D is set to team up with songwriting comedy duo Flight Of The ... And the star insists he plans to pull in a host of comedy acts renowned for the musical abilities....(size: 1.0Kb)
The Examiner
19 Jan 2013
In 1961, Reiner and Van Dyke collaborated together on “The Dick Van Dyke Show.” Reiner created the show, based on his experiences as a comedy writer ... The comedy about writer Rob Petrie was about the his life at home and the office ... Robin Crusoe, USN,” “Divorce American Style,” “Fitzwilly,” “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang” and “The Comic” (directed by Carl Reiner),"The Runner," "Dick Tracy" and the Ben Stiller comedy "Night at the Museum."...(size: 3.5Kb)
noodls
19 Jan 2013
(Source ... an Agatha Christie mystery; "Buddy! The Buddy Holly Musical" a rock and roll 1950's musical; "The Full Monty", a contemporary musical; "The 1940's Radio Hour" a play with music featuring music from the 30's and 40's; "Shipwrecked. An Entertainment", a comedy/drama; "I'll Be Back Before Midnight", a comedy/thriller ... Prepare 16 measures of an uptempo and/or ballad to be considered for the musicals ... Bring your own sheet music....(size: 4.3Kb)
Skiddle
19 Jan 2013
Experience an explosive cocktail of comedy and burlesque at London's most prestigious variety night hosted by the sensational Lady Alex ... Taking place all under one roof in Londons signature Café de Paris, dive into the seductive world of Cabaret with the most exciting names in comedy, magic, music and of course burlesque! ... Music Genres.....(size: 2.5Kb)
The Guardian
19 Jan 2013
LOCO London Comedy Film Festival ... Other female comedians are celebrated too, including Anna Sten, heroine of 1927 Russian classic The Girl With The Hatbox; American silent star Colleen Moore; June Whitfield (who receives the festival's inaugural Comedy Legend award); and Victoria Wood, who hosts a silent comedy gala with Méliès, Keaton and live music ... Various venues, Sat to 27 JanLOCO London Comedy Film Festival, London....(size: 3.9Kb)
Tulsa World
19 Jan 2013
Ticketing information has been announced for Jay Leno's March 30 comedy stop at The Joint inside the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino Tulsa ... When not in the host's seat in Hollywood, he's touring the world with his stand-up act, something he's loved doing since his earliest days in comedy clubs in the mid-'70s ... Other Tulsa World Music Stories Riverfield Rocks the Cains....(size: 4.0Kb)
Dayton Daily News
19 Jan 2013
The actresses who portrayed Elphaba and Glinda in the Broadway production of Stephen Schwartz’s megahit musical “Wicked” are the “Wicked Divas” of the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra’s latest SuperPops concert ... The SuperPops series spotlights musical theater ... “Portraying Elphaba is the closest that I, a musical theater nerd, will ever come to having been any kind of athlete,” she said....(size: 3.8Kb)
The Times of India
19 Jan 2013
Other highlights of Infusion '13 include a live rock concert by the Delhi-based Aagman band, stand-up comedy act by Nitin Gupta and a fashion show ... this will be followed by interaction with the star cast of "Listen-Amaya" Star Cast Interaction, fashion show and the comedy show....(size: 1.4Kb)
The Hollywood Reporter
19 Jan 2013
share. "Argo". "Magic Mike" and "The Paperboy" tie for campy film of the year ... Best Editing Oscar ... Girls won TV comedy of the year, while Modern Family and The New Normal tied for LGBT TV show of the year. Campy TV show of the year honors went to the biopic Liz & Dick, and the unsung TV show award was given to comedy Happy Endings ... Keep the Lights On (Music Box) ... Asylum (FX) ... TV COMEDY OF THE YEAR ... TV MUSICAL PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR....(size: 6.4Kb)
Skiddle
19 Jan 2013
This classic of the silent era stars the master of comedy Buster Keaton as a train engineer in during the American civil war ... This classic of the silent era stars the master of physical comedy Buster Keaton as a train engineer in during the American civil war ... accompaniment provided by Costas Fotopoulos, an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music....(size: 2.0Kb)
The Examiner
19 Jan 2013
The 44th Annual NAACP Awards will celebrate the accomplishments of people of color in the fields of television, music, literature and film ... 1 (8 ET live/PT tape-delayed) on NBC ... { Click Here to see exclusive NAACP Image Award interviews } ... Outstanding Comedy Series ... Outstanding Actor in a Comedy Series ... Outstanding Actress in a Comedy Series ... Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series ... Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series....(size: 6.1Kb)
Musical theatre is a form of theatre that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The story and emotional content of the piece – humor, pathos, love, anger – are communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an integrated whole. Although musical theatre overlaps with other theatrical forms like opera and dance, it may be distinguished by the equal importance given to the music as compared with the dialogue, movement and other elements of the works. Since the early 20th century, musical theatre stage works have generally been called, simply, musicals.
Although music has been a part of dramatic presentations since ancient times, modern Western musical theatre emerged during the 19th century, culminating with the works of Gilbert and Sullivan in Britain and those of Harrigan and Hart in America, followed by the numerous Edwardian musical comedies and the works of American creators like George M. Cohan. Early in the 20th century, the Princess Theatre musicals and other smart shows like Of Thee I Sing were artistic steps forward beyond revues and other frothy entertainments and led to such groundbreaking works as Show Boat and Oklahoma!. Some of the most famous and iconic musicals through the decades that followed include West Side Story, The Fantasticks, Hair, A Chorus Line, Les Misérables, The Phantom of the Opera, Rent, The Producers and Wicked.
Musicals are performed all around the world. They may be presented in large venues, such as big budget West End and Broadway theatre productions in London and New York City, or in smaller fringe theatre, Off-Broadway or regional theatre productions, on tour, or by amateur groups in schools, theatres and other performance spaces. In addition to Britain and North America, there are vibrant musical theatre scenes in many countries in Europe, Latin America, Australasia and Asia.
Contents
|
[edit] Definitions and scope
Book musicals[link]
Since the 20th century, the "book musical" has been defined as a musical play where songs and dances are fully integrated into a well-made story with serious dramatic goals that is able to evoke genuine emotions other than laughter.[2][3] The three main components of a book musical are its music, lyrics and book. The book or script of a musical refers to the story, character development, and dramatic structure, including the spoken dialogue and stage directions, but it can also refer to the dialogue and lyrics together, which are sometimes referred to as the libretto (Italian for “little book”). The music and lyrics together form the score of a musical but the interpretation of a musical by its creative team heavily influences the way in which a musical is presented. That team includes a director, a musical director, usually a choreographer and sometimes an orchestrator. A musical's production is also creatively characterized by technical aspects, such as set design, costumes, stage properties (props), lighting and sound, which generally change from the original production to succeeding productions. Some famous production elements, however, may be retained from the original production; for example, Bob Fosse's choreography in Chicago.
There is no fixed length for a musical. While it can range from a short one-act entertainment to several acts and several hours in length (or even a multi-evening presentation), most musicals range from one and a half to three hours. Musicals are usually presented in two acts, with one short intermission and the first act frequently longer than the second. The first act generally introduces nearly all of the characters and most of the music, and often ends with the introduction of a dramatic conflict or plot complication while the second act may introduce a few new songs but usually contains reprises of important musical themes and resolves the conflict or complication. A book musical is usually built around four to six main theme tunes that are reprised later in the show, although it sometimes consists of a series of songs not directly musically related. Spoken dialogue is generally interspersed between musical numbers, although "sung dialogue" or recitative may be used, especially in so-called "sung-through" musicals such as Jesus Christ Superstar, Les Misérables, and Evita. Several shorter musicals on Broadway and in the West End have been presented in one act in recent decades.
Moments of greatest dramatic intensity in a book musical are often performed in song. Proverbially, "when the emotion becomes too strong for speech you sing; when it becomes too strong for song, you dance." In a book musical, a song is ideally crafted to suit the character (or characters) and their situation within the story; although there have been times in the history of the musical (e.g. from the 1890s to the 1920s) when this integration between music and story has been tenuous. As New York Times critic Ben Brantley described the ideal of song in theatre when reviewing the 2008 revival of Gypsy: "There is no separation at all between song and character, which is what happens in those uncommon moments when musicals reach upward to achieve their ideal reasons to be."[4] Typically, many fewer words are sung in a five-minute song than are spoken in a five-minute block of dialogue therefore there is less time to develop drama in a musical than in a straight play of equivalent length, since a musical usually devotes more time to music than to dialogue. Within the compressed nature of a musical, the writers must develop the characters and the plot.
The material presented in a musical may be original, or it may be adapted from novels (Wicked and Man of La Mancha), plays (Hello, Dolly!), classic legends (Camelot), historical events (Evita) or films (The Producers and Hairspray). On the other hand, many successful musical theatre works have been adapted for musical films, such as The Sound of Music, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, and Chicago.
Comparisons with opera[link]
Musical theatre is closely related to the theatrical form of opera, but the two are usually distinguished by weighing a number of factors. Musicals generally have a greater focus on spoken dialogue (though some musicals are entirely accompanied and sung through; and on the other hand, some operas, such as Die Zauberflöte, and most operettas, have some unaccompanied dialogue); on dancing (particularly by the principal performers as well as the chorus); on the use of various genres of popular music (or at least popular singing styles); and on the avoidance of certain operatic conventions. In particular, a musical is almost always performed in the language of its audience. Musicals produced in London or New York, for instance, are invariably sung in English, even if they were originally written in another language (e.g. Les Misérables was originally written in French). While an opera singer is primarily a singer and only secondarily an actor (and rarely needs to dance), a musical theatre performer is often an actor first and then a singer and dancer. Someone who is equally accomplished at all three is referred to as a "triple threat". Composers of music for musicals often consider the vocal demands of roles with musical theatre performers in mind. Today, large theatres staging musicals generally use amplification of the actors' singing voices in a way that would generally be disapproved of in an operatic context.
Some works (e.g. by George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim) have received both "musical theatre" and "operatic" productions.[5][6] Similarly, some older operettas or light operas (such as The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan) have had modern productions or adaptations that treat them as musicals. For some works, production styles are almost as important as the work's musical or dramatic content in defining into which art form the piece falls.[7] Sondheim said, "I really think that when something plays Broadway it's a musical, and when it plays in an opera house it's opera. That's it. It's the terrain, the countryside, the expectations of the audience that make it one thing or another."[8] Although this article primarily concerns musical theatre works that are "non-operatic", the overlap remains between lighter operatic forms and more musically complex or ambitious musicals. In practice, it is often difficult to distinguish among the various kinds of musical theatre, including "musical play", "musical comedy", "operetta" and "light opera".
Other forms[link]
This article concerns the Western tradition of musical theatre. There are various Eastern traditions of theatre that include music, such as Chinese Opera, Taiwanese opera, Noh and Musical theatre in India, including Sanskrit drama, Classical Indian dance and Yakshagana.[9] These are treated elsewhere in this encyclopedia. India has, since the 20th century, produced numerous musical films, referred to as "Bollywood" musicals, and in Japan a series of musicals based on popular Anime and Manga comics has developed in recent decades. Shorter or simplified "junior" versions of many musicals are available for schools and youth groups, and very short works created or adapted for performance by children are sometimes called minimusicals,[10][11] but these are not separately considered here at length.
History[link]
Antecedents of musical theatre[link]
Antiquity to Middle Ages[link]
Musical theatre in Europe dates back to the theatre of ancient Greece where music and dance was included in stage comedies and tragedies during the 5th century BCE.[12] The dramatists Aeschylus and Sophocles composed their own music to accompany their plays and choreographed the dances of the chorus. The 3rd-century BCE Roman comedies of Plautus included song and dance routines performed with orchestrations. The Romans also introduced technical innovations. For example, to make the dance steps more audible in large open air theatres, Roman actors attached metal chips called "sabilla" to their stage footwear – the first tap shoes.[13] By the Middle Ages, theatre in Europe consisted mostly of travelling minstrels and small performing troupes of performers singing and offering slapstick comedy.[14] In the 12th and 13th centuries, religious dramas, such as The Play of Herod and The Play of Daniel taught the liturgy, set to church chants. Later "mystery plays" were created that told a biblical story in a sequence of entertaining parts. Several pageant wagons (stages on wheels) would move about the city, and a group of actors would tell their part of the story. Once finished, the group would move on with their wagon, and the next group would arrive to tell its part of the story. These plays developed into an autonomous form of musical theatre, with poetic forms sometimes alternating with the prose dialogues and liturgical chants. The poetry was provided with modified or completely new melodies.[15]
Renaissance to the 1700s[link]
The European Renaissance saw older forms evolve into commedia dell'arte, an Italian tradition where raucous clowns improvised their way through familiar stories, and from there, opera buffa. In England, Elizabethan and Jacobean plays frequently included music, with performances on organs, lutes, viols and pipes for up to an hour before and during the performance.[16] Plays, perhaps particularly the heavier histories and tragedies, were frequently broken up with a short musical play, perhaps derived from the Italian intermezzo, with music, jokes and dancing, or were followed by an afterpiece known as a jigg, often consisting of scandalous or libellous dialogue set to popular tunes (anticipating the Ballad Opera).[17] Court masques also developed during the Tudor period that involved music, dancing, singing and acting, often with expensive costumes and a complex stage design, sometimes by a renowned architect such as Inigo Jones, presented a deferential allegory flattering to a noble or royal patron.[18] Ben Jonson wrote many masques, often collaborating with Jones. William Shakespeare often included masque-like sections in many of his plays.[19]
The musical sections of masques developed into sung plays that are recognizable as English operas, the first usually being thought of as William Davenant's The Siege of Rhodes (1656), originally given in a private performance.[20] In France, meanwhile, Molière turned several of his farcical comedies into musical entertainments with songs (music provided by Jean Baptiste Lully) and dance in the late 17th century. His Psyche was the model for an English opera by Thomas Shadwell, The Miser produced in 1672.[21] Davenant produced The Tempest in 1667, which was the first Shakespeare plot set to music, and which was then adapted by Shadwell into an opera in 1674 (composed by Matthew Locke and others).[21] About 1683, John Blow composed Venus and Adonis, often considered the first true English-language opera.[22] Blow was followed by Henry Purcell and a brief period of English opera. After the death of Charles II in 1685, English opera began to fall out of fashion.[20]
By the 18th century, two forms of musical theatre were popular in Britain: ballad operas, like John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), that included lyrics written to the tunes of popular songs of the day (often spoofing opera), and comic operas, with original scores and mostly romantic plot lines, like Michael Balfe's The Bohemian Girl (1845). Meanwhile, on the continent, singspiel, comédie en vaudeville, opéra comique and other forms of light musical entertainment were emerging. Other musical theatre forms developed by the 19th century, such as music hall, melodrama, burlesque and vaudeville. Melodramas and burlettas, in particular, were popularized partly because most London theatres were licensed only as music halls and not allowed to present plays without music. In any event, what a piece was called did not necessarily define what it was. The Broadway extravaganza The Magic Deer (1852) advertised itself as "A Serio Comico Tragico Operatical Historical Extravaganzical Burletical Tale of Enchantment."[14]
The first recorded long running play of any kind was The Beggar's Opera, which ran for 62 successive performances in 1728. It would take almost a century before the first play broke 100 performances, with Tom and Jerry, based on the book Life in London (1821), and the record soon reached 150 in the late 1820s.[23] Colonial America did not have a significant theatre presence until 1752, when London entrepreneur William Hallam sent a company of twelve actors to the colonies with his brother Lewis as their manager.[24] They established a theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia and opened with The Merchant of Venice and The Anatomist. The company moved to New York in the summer of 1753, performing ballad-operas such as The Beggar’s Opera and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida.[24] By the 1840s, P.T. Barnum was operating an entertainment complex in lower Manhattan.[25] Theatre in New York moved from downtown gradually to midtown from around 1850, seeking less expensive real estate prices, and did not arrive in the Times Square area until the 1920s and 1930s. Broadway's first "long-run" musical was a 50 performance hit called The Elves in 1857. New York runs continued to lag far behind those in London, but Laura Keene's "musical burletta" Seven Sisters (1860) shattered previous New York records with a run of 253 performances.[26]
Development of musical comedy[link]
1850s to 1880s[link]
Around 1850, the French composer Hervé was experimenting with a form of comic musical theatre that came to be called opérette.[27] The best known composers of operetta were Jacques Offenbach from the 1850s to the 1870s and Johann Strauss II in the 1870s and 1880s. Offenbach's fertile melodies, combined with his librettists' witty satire, formed a model for the musical theatre that followed. In 1957, Mark Lubbock traced the development of musical theatre from Offenbach to Gilbert and Sullivan and eventually to Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hammerstein, writing: "Offenbach is undoubtedly the most significant figure in the history of the 'musical'.[28] In the mid-19th century in England, musical theatre consisted of mostly of music hall, adaptations of the French operettas (played in bad, risqué translations) and musical burlesques (the culmination of which were seen at the Gaiety Theatre beginning in 1868). In reaction to these, a few family-friendly entertainments were created, such as the German Reed Entertainments.[29]
In America, the first original theatre piece in English that conforms to the modern conception of a musical, adding dance and original music that helped to tell the story, is generally considered to be The Black Crook, which premiered in New York on September 12, 1866. The production was a staggering five-and-a-half hours long, but despite its length, it ran for a record-breaking 474 performances. The same year, The Black Domino/Between You, Me and the Post was the first show to call itself a "musical comedy." Comedians Edward Harrigan and Tony Hart produced and starred in musicals on Broadway between 1878 (The Mulligan Guard Picnic) and 1885, with book and lyrics by Harrigan and music by his father-in-law David Braham. These musical comedies featured characters and situations taken from the everyday life of New York's lower classes and represented a significant step from burletta, minstrel shows, music hall and burlesque, towards a more legitimate theatrical form. They starred high quality singers (Lillian Russell, Vivienne Segal, and Fay Templeton) instead of the ladies of questionable repute who had starred in earlier musical forms.
The length of runs in the theatre changed rapidly around the same time that the modern musical emerged. As transportation improved, poverty in London and New York diminished, and street lighting made for safer travel at night, the number of potential patrons for the growing number of theatres increased enormously. Plays could run longer and still draw in the audiences, leading to better profits and improved production values. The first play to achieve 500 consecutive performances was the London (non-musical) comedy Our Boys, opening in 1875, which set an astonishing new record of 1,362 performances.[23] This run was not equaled on the musical stage until World War I, but musical theatre soon broke the 500 performance mark in London, most notably by the series of more than a dozen long-running Gilbert and Sullivan family-friendly comic opera hits, including H.M.S. Pinafore in 1878 and The Mikado in 1885. These were sensations on both sides of the Atlantic[30] and, along with the other changes in the theatre, raised the standard for what was considered a successful run. Only a few 19th century musical pieces exceeded the run of the Mikado: The Chimes of Normandy (Les Cloches de Corneville) ran for 705 performances in 1878 in London, and Alfred Cellier and B. C. Stephenson's 1886 hit, Dorothy (a show midway between comic opera and musical comedy), set a new record with 931 performances.
Gilbert and Sullivan's influence on later musical theatre was profound, creating examples of how to "integrate" musicals so that the lyrics and dialogue were designed to advance a coherent story.[31][32] Their works were admired and copied by early authors and composers of musicals such as Ivan Caryll, Lionel Monckton, P. G. Wodehouse,[33][34] and Victor Herbert, and later Jerome Kern, Ira Gershwin, Lorenz Hart, Alan Jay Lerner,[30] Yip Harburg,[35] Irving Berlin, Ivor Novello, Oscar Hammerstein II and Andrew Lloyd Webber.[36] Other British composers of the 1870s and 1880s included Edward Solomon and F. Osmond Carr. The most popular British shows, beginning with the Savoy operas, also enjoyed profitable New York productions and tours of Britain, America, Europe, Australasia and South Africa. These shows were fare for "respectable" audiences, a marked contrast from the risqué burlesques, melodramas, minstrel shows, bawdy music hall shows and French operettas that dominated the stage prior to Gilbert and Sullivan and drew a sometimes seedy crowd looking for less wholesome entertainment.[29]
1890s to the new century[link]
Charles Hoyt's A Trip to Chinatown (1891) was Broadway's long-run champion (until Irene in 1919), running for 657 performances. Gilbert and Sullivan's comic operas were both pirated and imitated in New York by productions such as Reginald de Koven's Robin Hood (1891) and John Philip Sousa's El Capitan (1896). A Trip to Coontown (1898) was the first musical comedy entirely produced and performed by African Americans in a Broadway theatre (largely inspired by the routines of the minstrel shows), followed by the ragtime-tinged Clorindy, or the Origin of the Cakewalk (1898), and the highly successful In Dahomey (1902). Hundreds of musical comedies were staged on Broadway in the 1890s and early 20th century composed of songs written in New York's Tin Pan Alley by composers such as Gus Edwards, John Walter Bratton and George M. Cohan (Little Johnny Jones (1904)). Still, New York runs continued to be relatively short, with a few exceptions, compared with London runs, until the 1920s.[23] Tours, however, were often extensive, beginning with the original Broadway cast.[37]
Meanwhile, musicals had spread to the London stage by the Gay Nineties. George Edwardes had left the management of Richard D'Oyly Carte's Savoy Theatre. He took over the Gaiety Theatre and, at first, he improved the quality of the old burlesques. He perceived that audiences wanted a new alternative to the Savoy-style comic operas and their intellectual, political, absurdist satire. He experimented with a modern-dress, family-friendly musical theatre style, with breezy, popular songs, snappy, romantic banter, and stylish spectacle at the Gaiety, Daly's Theatre and other venues. These drew on the traditions of comic opera and also used elements of burlesque and of the Harrigan and Hart pieces. He replaced the bawdy women of burlesque with his "respectable" corps of dancing, singing Gaiety Girls to complete the musical and visual fun. The success of the first of these, In Town in 1892 and A Gaiety Girl in 1893, confirmed Edwardes on the path he was taking. These "musical comedies", as he called them, revolutionized the London stage and set the tone for the next three decades.
Edwardes' early Gaiety hits included a series of light, romantic "poor maiden loves aristocrat and wins him against all odds" shows, usually with the word "Girl" in the title, including The Shop Girl (1894) and A Runaway Girl (1898), with music by Ivan Caryll and Lionel Monckton. These shows were immediately widely copied at other London theatres (and soon in America), and the Edwardian musical comedy swept away the earlier musical forms of comic opera and operetta. At Daly's Theatre, Edwardes presented slightly more complex comedy hits. The Geisha (1896) by Sidney Jones with lyrics by Harry Greenbank and Adrian Ross and then Jones' San Toy (1899) each ran for more than two years and also found great international success, for example in Australian productions by J. C. Williamson.
The British musical comedy Florodora (1899) by Leslie Stuart and Paul Rubens made a splash on both sides of the Atlantic, as did A Chinese Honeymoon (1901), by British lyricist George Dance and American-born composer Howard Talbot, which ran for a record setting 1,074 performances in London and 376 in New York. The story concerns couples who honeymoon in China and inadvertently break the kissing laws (shades of The Mikado). The Belle of New York (1898) ran for 697 performances in London after a brief New York run, becoming the first American musical to run for over a year in London. After the turn of the 20th century, Seymour Hicks (who joined forces with American producer Charles Frohman) wrote popular shows with composer Charles Taylor and others, and Edwardes and Ross continued to churn out hits like The Toreador (1901), A Country Girl (1902), The Orchid (1903), The Girls of Gottenberg (1907) and Our Miss Gibbs (1909). Other Edwardian musical comedy hits included The Arcadians (1909) and The Quaker Girl (1910).[38]
Operetta and World War I[link]
Virtually eliminated from the English-speaking stage by competition from the ubiquitous Edwardian musical comedies in the 1890s, operettas returned to London and Broadway in 1907 with The Merry Widow, and operettas and musicals became direct competitors for a time. In the early years of the 20th century, English-language adaptations of 19th century continental operettas, as well as operettas by a new generation of European composers, such as Franz Lehár and Oscar Straus, among others, spread throughout the English-speaking world. In America, Victor Herbert produced a string of famous operettas (The Fortune Teller (1898), Babes in Toyland (1903), Mlle. Modiste (1905), The Red Mill (1906) and Naughty Marietta (1910)), often with librettist Harry B. Smith, as well as some intimate musical plays with modern settings. In English-speaking countries, during World War I, German-language operetta lost its popularity.[39]
Among other British and American composers and librettists of the 1910s, the team of P. G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton and Jerome Kern stood out. Following in the footsteps of Gilbert and Sullivan, their "Princess Theatre shows" paved the way for Kern's later work by showing that a musical could combine light, popular entertainment with continuity between its story and songs:[40]
"These shows built and polished the mold from which almost all later major musical comedies evolved. ... The characters and situations were, within the limitations of musical comedy license, believable and the humor came from the situations or the nature of the characters. Kern's exquisitely flowing melodies were employed to further the action or develop characterization. The integration of song and story is periodically announced as a breakthrough in ... musical theater. Great opera has always done this, and it is easy to demonstrate such integration in Gilbert and Sullivan or the French opera bouffe. However, early musical comedy was often guilty of inserting songs in a hit-or-miss fashion. The Princess Theatre musicals brought about a change in approach. P. G. Wodehouse, the most observant, literate, and witty lyricist of his day, and the team of Bolton, Wodehouse, and Kern had an influence which can be felt to this day.[41]
The theatre-going public needed escapist entertainment during the dark times of World War I, and they flocked to the theatre. Harry Tierney and Joseph McCarthy's 1919 hit musical Irene ran for 670 performances – a Broadway record that held until 1938's Hellzapoppin. The British public supported far longer runs like that of Maid of the Mountains (1,352 performances) and especially Chu Chin Chow. Its run of 2,238 performances was more than twice as many as any previous musical, setting a record that stood for nearly forty years until Salad Days. Revues like The Bing Boys Are Here in Britain, and the reviews of Florenz Ziegfeld and his imitators in America, were also extraordinarily popular. A new generation of composers of operettas emerged in the 1920s, such as Rudolf Friml and Sigmund Romberg.[14]
The primacy of British musical theatre from the 19th century through 1920 was gradually replaced by American innovation in the 20th century. Edwardes' competitor and counterpart in the U.S. was Charles Frohman and his Theatrical Syndicate. George M. Cohan's and Herbert's musical entertainments after the turn of the century gave way to the Princess Theatre shows and a profusion of other musicals as Kern and other Tin Pan Alley composers began to bring new musical styles such as ragtime and jazz to the theatres. Florenz Ziegfeld's popular revues spawned imitators. The Shubert Brothers took control of the Broadway theatres after the war as new writers like the Gershwin brothers (George and Ira), Irving Berlin and Rodgers and Hart began to produce shows. Musical theatre writer Andrew Lamb notes, "The triumph of American works over European in the first decades of the twentieth century came about against a changing social background. The operatic and theatrical styles of nineteenth-century social structures were replaced by a musical style more aptly suited to twentieth-century society and its vernacular idiom. It was from America that the more direct style emerged, and in America that it was able to flourish in a developing society less hidebound by nineteenth-century tradition."[42]
[edit] The Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression
The musicals of the Roaring Twenties, borrowing from vaudeville, music hall and other light entertainments, tended to emphasize star actors and actresses, big dance routines, and popular songs, at the expanse of plot. Typical of the decade were lighthearted productions like Sally; Lady Be Good; Sunny; No, No, Nanette; Oh, Kay!; and Funny Face. While the books of these shows may have been forgettable, they featured stars such as Marilyn Miller and Fred Astaire and produced dozens of enduring popular songs ("standards") by, most notably, Jerome Kern, the Gershwin brothers, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, Vincent Youmans, and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, popular music was dominated by musical theatre composers and lyricists. These musicals and the standards they produced, including "Fascinating Rhythm", "Tea for Two", and "Someone to Watch Over Me", became popular on both sides of the Atlantic ocean.
Many shows were revues, series of sketches and songs with little or no connection between them. The best-known of these were the annual Ziegfeld Follies, spectacular song-and-dance revues on Broadway featuring extravagant sets, elaborate costumes, and beautiful chorus girls. In London, the Aldwych Farces were similarly successful, and stars such as Ivor Novello were popular. These spectacles also raised production values, and mounting a musical generally became more expensive. Meanwhile, operettas, which had been nearly absent from the English-speaking stage since World War I, regained popularity; works by continental European composers were successful, as were those by Sigmund Romberg and Rudolf Friml in America, which included Rose-Marie and The Student Prince respectively.
Progressing far beyond the comparatively frivolous musicals and sentimental operettas of the decade, Show Boat, which premiered on December 27, 1927 at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York, represented an even more complete integration of book and score than the Princess Theatre musicals, with dramatic themes told through the music, dialogue, setting and movement. This was accomplished by combining the lyricism of Kern's music with the skillful craft of Oscar Hammerstein II, who adapted Edna Ferber's novel and wrote lyrics for the show. One historian wrote, "Here we come to a completely new genre – the musical play as distinguished from musical comedy. Now ... the play was the thing, and everything else was subservient to that play. Now ... came complete integration of song, humor and production numbers into a single and inextricable artistic entity."[43] However, Bordman argues, "Show Boat is certainly an operetta with its many arioso passages, its musical depth and seriousness, and its romantic story set, in typical operetta fashion, in the long ago and far away."[41] Nevertheless, as the Great Depression set in during the post-Broadway national tour of Show Boat, the public turned back to light, brassy, escapist entertainment, and no follow-up was produced so seriously treating serious social themes until Oklahoma! in 1943.[41]
The motion picture mounted a challenge to the stage. At first, films were silent and presented only limited competition to theatre. But by the end of the 1920s, films like The Jazz Singer could be presented with synchronized sound. "Talkie" films at low prices effectively killed off vaudeville by the early 1930s. Historian John Kenrick commented: "Top vaudeville stars filmed their acts for one-time pay-offs, inadvertently helping to speed the death of vaudeville. After all, when 'small time' theatres could offer 'big time' performers on screen at a nickel a seat, who could ask audiences to pay higher amounts for less impressive live talent?"[44]
1930s[link]
The Great Depression affected theatre audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, as people had little money to spend on entertainment. Only a few stage shows exceeded a run on Broadway or in London of 500 performances during the decade.
Many shows continued the lighthearted song-and-dance style of their 1920s predecessors. The revue The Band Wagon (1931) starred dancing partners Fred Astaire and his sister Adele, while Cole Porter's Anything Goes (1934) confirmed Ethel Merman's position as the First Lady of musical theatre – a title she maintained for many years. British writers such as Noël Coward and Ivor Novello continued to deliver old fashioned, sentimental musicals, such as The Dancing Years. Similarly, Rodgers & Hart returned from Hollywood to churn out a series of Broadway hits, including On Your Toes (1936, with Ray Bolger, the first Broadway musical to make dramatic use of classical dance), Babes In Arms (1937), and The Boys From Syracuse (1938), and Cole Porter wrote a similar string of hits, including Anything Goes (1934) and DuBarry Was a Lady (1939). The longest-running piece of musical theatre of the 1930s was Hellzapoppin (1938), a revue with audience participation, which played for 1,404 performances, setting a new Broadway record that was finally beaten by Oklahoma! five years later.
However, a few creative teams began to build on Show Boat's innovations, experimenting with musical satire, topical books and operatic scope. Of Thee I Sing (1931), a political satire with music by George Gershwin and lyrics by Ira Gershwin and Morrie Ryskind, was the first musical to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize.[45] As Thousands Cheer (1933), a revue by Irving Berlin and Moss Hart in which each song or sketch was based on a newspaper headline, marked the first Broadway show in which an African-American, Ethel Waters, starred alongside white actors. Waters' numbers included "Supper Time", a woman's lament for her husband who has been lynched.[46] Porgy and Bess (1935), by the Gershwin brothers and DuBose Heyward, featured an all African-American cast and blended operatic, folk, and jazz idioms. It has entered the permanent opera repertory and, in some respects, it foreshadowed such "operatic" musicals as West Side Story and Sweeney Todd. The Cradle Will Rock (1937), with a book and score by Marc Blitzstein and direction by Orson Welles, was a highly political pro-union piece that, despite the controversy surrounding it, managed to run for 108 performances. Richard Rodgers and Larry Hart's I'd Rather Be Right (1937) was a political satire with George M. Cohan as President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Kurt Weill's Knickerbocker Holiday, based on source writings by Washington Irving, depicted New York City's early history while good-naturedly satirizing the good intentions of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Despite the economic woes of the decade and the competition from film, the musical survived. In fact, the move towards political satire in Of Thee I Sing, I'd Rather Be Right and Knickerbocker Holiday, together with the musical sophistication of the Gershwin, Kern, Rodgers and Weill musicals and the fast-paced staging and naturalistic dialogue style created by director George Abbott, showed that musical theatre was beginning to evolve beyond the gags and showgirls musicals of the Gay Nineties and Roaring Twenties and the sentimental romance of operetta.
[edit] The Golden Age (1940s to 1960s)
1940s[link]
The 1940s would begin with more hits from Porter, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, Weill and Gershwin, some with runs over 500 performances as the economy rebounded, but artistic change was in the air.
Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! completed the revolution begun by Show Boat, by tightly integrating all the aspects of musical theatre, with a cohesive plot, songs that furthered the action of the story, and featured dream ballets and other dances that advanced the plot and developed the characters, rather than using dance as an excuse to parade scantily clad women across the stage.[3] Rodgers and Hammerstein hired ballet choreographer Agnes de Mille, who used everyday motions to help the characters express their ideas. It defied musical conventions by raising its first act curtain not on a bevy of chorus girls, but rather on a woman churning butter, with an off-stage voice singing the opening lines of Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin' unaccompanied. It drew rave reviews, set off a box-office frenzy and received a Pulitzer Prize. Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times that the show's opening number changed the history of musical theater: “After a verse like that, sung to a buoyant melody, the banalities of the old musical stage became intolerable."[47] It was the first "blockbuster" Broadway show, running a total of 2,212 performances, and was made into a hit film. It remains one of the most frequently produced of the team's projects. William A. Everett and Paul R. Laird wrote that this was a "show, that, like Show Boat, became a milestone, so that later historians writing about important moments in twentieth-century theatre would begin to identify eras according to their relationship to Oklahoma!"[48]
"After Oklahoma!, Rodgers and Hammerstein were the most important contributors to the musical-play form... The examples they set in creating vital plays, often rich with social thought, provided the necessary encouragement for other gifted writers to create musical plays of their own".[43] The two collaborators created an extraordinary collection of some of musical theatre's best loved and most enduring classics, including Carousel (1945), South Pacific (1949), The King and I (1951), and The Sound of Music (1959). Some of these musicals treat more serious subject matter than most earlier shows: the villain in Oklahoma! is a suspected murderer and psychopath with a fondness for lewd post cards; Carousel deals with spousal abuse, thievery, suicide and the afterlife; South Pacific explores miscegenation even more thoroughly than Show Boat; and the hero of The King and I dies onstage.
The show's creativity stimulated Rodgers and Hammerstein's contemporaries and ushered in the "Golden Age" of American musical theatre.[47] Americana was displayed on Broadway during the "Golden Age", as the wartime cycle of shows began to arrive. An example of this is On the Town (1944), written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, composed by Leonard Bernstein and choreographed by Jerome Robbins. The story is set during wartime and concerns three sailors who are on a 24 hour shore leave in New York City, during which each falls in love. The show also gives the impression of a country with an uncertain future, as the sailors and their women also have.
Oklahoma! inspired others to continue the trend. Irving Berlin used sharpshooter Annie Oakley's career as a basis for his Annie Get Your Gun (1946, 1,147 performances); Burton Lane, E. Y. Harburg, and Fred Saidy combined political satire with Irish whimsy for their fantasy Finian's Rainbow (1947, 725 performances); and Cole Porter found inspiration in William Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew for Kiss Me, Kate (1948, 1,077 performances). The American musicals overwhelmed the old-fashioned British Coward/Novello-style shows, one of the last big successes of which was Novello's Perchance to Dream (1945, 1,021 performances).
1950s[link]
Damon Runyon's eclectic characters were at the core of Frank Loesser's and Abe Burrows' Guys and Dolls, (1950, 1,200 performances); and the Gold Rush was the setting for Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's Paint Your Wagon (1951). The relatively brief seven-month run of that show didn't discourage Lerner and Loewe from collaborating again, this time on My Fair Lady (1956), an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion starring Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews, which at 2,717 performances held the long-run record for many years. Popular Hollywood movies were made of all of these musicals. The Boy Friend (1954) ran for 2,078 performances in London, briefly becoming the third longest-running musical in West End or Broadway history (after Chu Chin Chow and Oklahoma!), until it was demoted by Salad Days. It marked Julie Andrews' American debut.
Another record was set by The Threepenny Opera, which ran for 2,707 performances, becoming the longest-running off-Broadway musical until The Fantasticks. The production also broke ground by showing that musicals could be profitable off-Broadway in a small-scale, small orchestra format. This was confirmed in 1959 when a revival of Jerome Kern and P. G. Wodehouse's Leave It to Jane ran for more than two years. The 1959–1960 Off-Broadway season included a dozen musicals and revues including Little Mary Sunshine, The Fantasticks and Ernest in Love, a musical adaptation of Oscar Wilde's 1895 hit The Importance of Being Earnest.[49]
As in Oklahoma!, dance was an integral part of West Side Story (1957), which transported Romeo and Juliet to modern day New York City and converted the feuding Montague and Capulet families into opposing ethnic gangs, the Jets and the Sharks. The book was adapted by Arthur Laurents, with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by newcomer Stephen Sondheim. It was embraced by the critics but failed to be a popular choice for the "blue-haired matinee ladies," who preferred the small town River City, Iowa of Meredith Willson's The Music Man to the alleys of Manhattan's Upper West Side. Apparently Tony Award voters were of a similar mind, since they favored the former over the latter. West Side Story had a respectable run of 732 performances (1,040 in the West End), while The Music Man ran nearly twice as long, with 1,375 performances. However, the film of West Side Story was extremely successful.[50]
Laurents and Sondheim teamed up again for Gypsy (1959, 702 performances), with Jule Styne providing the music for a backstage story about the most driven stage mother of all-time, stripper Gypsy Rose Lee's mother Rose. The original production ran for 702 performances, and was given four subsequent revivals, with Angela Lansbury, Tyne Daly, Bernadette Peters and Patti LuPone later tackling the role made famous by Ethel Merman.
The formula for the Golden Age musicals reflected four myths of the "American dream":
- Romance: stability and worth derives from a love relationship sanctioned and restricted by Protestant ideals of marriage;
- Hometown: a married couple should make a moral home with children away from the city in a suburb or small town.
- Woman as Homemaker:
- Pioneer: [51]
During the Golden Age, automotive companies and other large corporations began to hire Broadway talent to write corporate musicals, private shows which were only seen by their employees or customers.[52][53] The 1950s ended with Rodgers and Hammerstein's last hit, The Sound of Music, which also became another hit for Mary Martin. It ran for 1,443 performances and shared the Tony Award for Best Musical. Together with its extremely successful 1965 film version, it has become one of the most popular musicals in history.
1960s[link]
In 1960, The Fantasticks was first produced off-Broadway. This intimate allegorical show would quietly run for over 40 years at the Sullivan Street Theatre in Greenwich Village, becoming by far the longest-running musical in history. Its authors produced other innovative works in the 1960s, such as Celebration and I Do! I Do!, the first two-character Broadway musical. The 1960s would see a number of blockbusters, like Fiddler on the Roof (1964; 3,242 performances), Hello, Dolly! (1964; 2,844 performances), Funny Girl (1964; 1,348 performances), and Man of La Mancha (1965; 2,328 performances), and some more risqué pieces like Cabaret, before ending with the emergence of the rock musical. Two men had considerable impact on musical theatre history beginning in this decade: Stephen Sondheim and Jerry Herman.
File:Peters in 08.jpg
Bernadette Peters (shown in 2008) has starred in several Sondheim shows
The first project for which Sondheim wrote both music and lyrics was A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962, 964 performances), with a book based on the works of Plautus by Burt Shevelove and Larry Gelbart, and starring Zero Mostel. Sondheim moved the musical beyond its concentration on the romantic plots typical of earlier eras; his work tended to be darker, exploring the grittier sides of life both present and past. Other early Sondheim works include Anyone Can Whistle (1964, which ran only nine performances, despite having stars Lee Remick and Angela Lansbury), Company (1970), Follies (1971), and A Little Night Music (1973). Later, Sondheim found inspiration in unlikely sources—the opening of Japan to Western trade for Pacific Overtures (1976), a legendary murderous barber seeking revenge in the Industrial Age of London for Sweeney Todd (1979), the paintings of Georges Seurat for Sunday in the Park with George (1984), fairy tales for Into the Woods (1987), and a collection of presidential assassins in Assassins (1990).
While some critics have argued that some of Sondheim’s musicals lack commercial appeal, others have praised their lyrical sophistication and musical complexity, as well as the interplay of lyrics and music in his shows. Some of Sondheim's notable innovations include a show presented in reverse (Merrily We Roll Along) and the above-mentioned Anyone Can Whistle, in which the first act ends with the cast informing the audience that they are mad.
Jerry Herman played a significant role in American musical theatre, beginning with his first Broadway production, Milk and Honey (1961, 563 performances), about the founding of the state of Israel, and continuing with the blockbuster hits Hello, Dolly! (1964, 2,844 performances), Mame (1966, 1,508 performances), and La Cage aux Folles (1983, 1,761 performances). Even his less successful shows like Dear World (1969) and Mack & Mabel (1974) have had memorable scores (Mack & Mabel was later reworked into a London hit). Writing both words and music, many of Herman's show tunes have become popular standards, including "Hello, Dolly!", "We Need a Little Christmas", "I Am What I Am", "Mame", "The Best of Times", "Before the Parade Passes By", "Put On Your Sunday Clothes", "It Only Takes a Moment", "Bosom Buddies", and "I Won't Send Roses", recorded by such artists as Louis Armstrong, Eydie Gorme, Barbra Streisand, Petula Clark and Bernadette Peters. Herman's songbook has been the subject of two popular musical revues, Jerry's Girls (Broadway, 1985), and Showtune (off-Broadway, 2003).
 |
|
| Problems listening to this file? See media help. | |
The musical started to diverge from the relatively narrow confines of the 1950s. Rock music would be used in several Broadway musicals, beginning with Hair, which featured not only rock music but also nudity and controversial opinions about the Vietnam War, race relations and other social issues.[54]
Social themes[link]
After Show Boat and Porgy and Bess, and as the struggle in America and elsewhere for minorities' civil rights progressed, Hammerstein, Harold Arlen, Yip Harburg and others were emboldened to write more musicals and operas which aimed to normalize societal toleration of minorities and urged racial harmony. Early Golden Age works that focused on racial tolerance included Finian's Rainbow, South Pacific, and The King and I. Towards the end of the Golden Age, several shows tackled Jewish subjects and issues, such as Fiddler on the Roof, Milk and Honey, Blitz! and later Rags. The original concept that became West Side Story was set in the Lower East Side during Easter-Passover celebrations; the rival gangs were to be Jewish and Italian Catholic. The creative team later decided that the Polish (white) vs. Puerto Rican conflict was fresher.[55]
Tolerance as an important theme in musicals has continued in recent decades. The final expression of West Side Story left a message of racial tolerance. By the end of the 1960s, musicals became racially integrated, with black and white cast members even covering each others' roles, as they did in Hair.[56] Homosexuality has been explored in musicals, beginning with Hair, and even more overtly in La Cage aux Folles, Falsettos and others. The 1998 musical Parade is a sensitive exploration of both anti-Semitism and historical American racism.
1970s to present[link]
1970s[link]
After the success of Hair, rock musicals flourished in the 1970s, with Jesus Christ Superstar, Godspell, The Rocky Horror Show and Two Gentlemen of Verona. Some of these rock musicals began with "concept albums" and then moved to film or stage, such as Tommy. Others had no dialogue or were otherwise reminiscent of opera, with dramatic, emotional themes; these sometimes started as concept albums and were referred to as rock operas. The musical also went in other directions. Shows like Raisin, Dreamgirls, Purlie, and The Wiz brought a significant African-American influence to Broadway. More varied musical genres and styles were incorporated into musicals both on and especially off-Broadway.
1975 brought one of the great contemporary musicals to the stage, called "tremendous" by the New York Times reviewer, Clive Barnes.[57] A Chorus Line emerged from recorded group therapy-style sessions Michael Bennett conducted with Gypsies — those who sing and dance in support of the leading players —from the Broadway community. From hundreds of hours of tapes, James Kirkwood, Jr. and Nick Dante fashioned a book about an audition for a musical, incorporating into it many of the real-life stories of those who had sat in on the sessions — and some of whom eventually played variations of themselves or each other in the show. With music by Marvin Hamlisch and lyrics by Edward Kleban, A Chorus Line first opened at Joseph Papp's Public Theater in lower Manhattan. Advance word-of-mouth— that something extraordinary was about to explode — boosted box office sales, and after critics ran out of superlatives to describe what they witnessed on opening night, what initially had been planned as a limited engagement eventually moved to the Shubert Theatre on Broadway for a run of 6,137 performances, becoming the longest-running production in Broadway history up to that time. The show swept the Tony Awards and won the Pulitzer Prize, and its hit song, What I Did for Love, became an instant standard.
Broadway audiences welcomed musicals that varied from the usual style and substance. John Kander and Fred Ebb explored the rise of Nazism in Germany in Cabaret and Prohibition-era Chicago, which relied on old vaudeville techniques to tell its tale of murder and the media. Pippin, by Stephen Schwartz, was set in the days of Charlemagne. Federico Fellini's autobiographical film 8½ became Maury Yeston's Nine. At the end of the decade, Evita gave a more serious political biography than audiences were used to at musicals, and Sweeney Todd was the precursor to the darker, big budget musicals of the 1980s like Les Misérables, Miss Saigon, and The Phantom of the Opera, that depended on dramatic stories, sweeping scores and spectacular effects. But during this same period, old-fashioned values were still embraced in such hits as Annie, 42nd Street, My One and Only, and popular revivals of No, No, Nanette and Irene.
1980s and 1990s[link]
The 1980s and 1990s saw the influence of European "mega-musicals" or "pop operas," which typically featured a pop-influenced score and had large casts and sets and were identified as much by their notable effects—a falling chandelier (in Phantom), a helicopter landing on stage (in Miss Saigon)—as they were by anything else in the production. Many were based on novels or other works of literature. The most important writers of mega-musicals include the French team of Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil, responsible for Les Misérables, which became the longest-running international musical hit in history. The team, in collaboration with Richard Maltby, Jr., continued to produce hits, including Miss Saigon (inspired by the Puccini opera Madame Butterfly).
The British composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, saw similar mega-success with Evita, based on the life of Argentina's Eva Perón, and Cats, derived from the poems of T. S. Eliot, both of which musicals originally starred Elaine Paige. Other Lloyd Webber musical successes include Starlight Express, performed on roller skates; The Phantom of the Opera, derived from the Gaston Leroux novel, "Le Fantôme de l'Opéra"; and Sunset Boulevard (from the classic film of the same name). Several of these works ran (or are still running) for decades in both New York and London. The 1990s also saw the influence of large corporations on the production of musicals. The most important has been The Walt Disney Company, which began adapting some of its animated movie musicals for the stage, such as Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. Disney also created original stage productions like Aida, with music by Elton John.
With the growing scale (and cost) of musicals, style was sometimes emphasized in favor of substance during the last two decades of the 20th century. At the same time, however, many writers broke from this pattern and began to create smaller scale, but critically acclaimed and financially successful musicals, such as Falsettoland, Passion, Little Shop of Horrors, Bat Boy: The Musical, and Blood Brothers. The topics vary widely, and the music ranges from rock to pop, but they often are produced off-Broadway (or for smaller London theatres) and feature smaller casts and generally less expensive productions. Some of these have been noted as imaginative and innovative.[58]
The cost of tickets to Broadway and West End musicals was escalating beyond the budget of many theatregoers, and the trend was for these musicals to be viewed by a smaller and smaller audience. Jonathan Larson's musical Rent (based on the opera La Bohème) was marketed to increase the popularity of musicals among a younger audience. It featured a young cast, and the score is heavily rock-influenced. The musical became a hit. Its young fans, many of them students, calling themselves RENTheads, lined up at the Nederlander Theatre hours early in hopes of winning the lottery for $20 front row tickets, and some have seen the show more than 50 times. Other writers who have attempted to bring a taste of modern rock music to the stage include Jason Robert Brown. Also, a majority of shows on Broadway have now followed Rent's lead by offering heavily discounted day-of-performance or standing-room tickets, although often the discounts are offered only to students.[59]
2000s[link]
- Trends
In the new century, familiarity has been embraced by producers and investors anxious to guarantee that they recoup their considerable investments, if not show a healthy profit. Some took (usually modest-budget) chances on the new and unusual, such as Urinetown (2001), Avenue Q (2003), Caroline or Change (2004), The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005), Spring Awakening (2006), In the Heights (2007) and Next to Normal (2009). But most took a safe route with revivals of familiar fare, such as Fiddler on the Roof, A Chorus Line, South Pacific, Gypsy, Hair, West Side Story and Grease, or with other proven material, such as films (The Producers, Spamalot, Hairspray, The Color Purple, Xanadu, Billy Elliot and Shrek) or well-known literature (The Scarlet Pimpernel and Wicked) hoping that the shows would have a built-in audience as a result. The reuse of film plots, especially those from Disney (such as Mary Poppins and The Little Mermaid), has been considered by some critics to be a redefinition of Broadway and West End musicals as, rather than a creative outlet, a tourist attraction.[14]
It is less likely today that a sole producer, such as David Merrick or Cameron Mackintosh, backs a production. Corporate sponsors dominate Broadway, and often alliances are formed to stage musicals which require an investment of $10 million or more. In 2002, the credits for Thoroughly Modern Millie listed ten producers, and among those names were entities composed of several individuals.[60] Typically, off-Broadway and regional theatres tend to produce smaller and therefore less expensive musicals, and development of new musicals has increasingly taken place outside of New York and London or in smaller venues. For example, Spring Awakening and Grey Gardens were developed off-Broadway before being launched on Broadway.
Several musicals returned to the spectacle format that was successful in the 1980s in such shows as Phantom of the Opera and Starlight Express, recalling extravaganzas that have been presented at times, throughout theatre history, since the ancient Romans staged mock sea battles. Examples are seen in the musical adaptations of Gone With the Wind (2008) and The Lord of the Rings (2007), the latter of which was billed as the biggest stage production in musical theatre history. The expensive productions lost money. Conversely, The Drowsy Chaperone, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, Xanadu and others are part of a Broadway trend to present musicals uninterrupted by an intermission, with short running time of less than two hours. The latter two, together with works like Avenue Q, also represent a trend towards presenting smaller-scale, smaller-cast musicals that are able to show a good profit in a smaller house.
- Jukebox musicals
Another trend has been to create a minimal plot to fit a collection of songs that have already been hits. Following the earlier success of Buddy - The Buddy Holly Story, these have included Movin' Out (2002, based on the tunes of Billy Joel), Jersey Boys (2006, The Four Seasons), Rock of Ages (2009, featuring classic rock of the 1980s) and many others. This style is often referred to as the "jukebox musical". Similar but more plot-driven musicals have been built around the canon of a particular pop group including Mamma Mia! (1999, based on the songs of ABBA), Our House (2002, based on the songs of Madness), and We Will Rock You (2002, based on the songs of Queen).
- Film and TV musicals
After the 1996 film of Evita, the first successful live-action movie musical in nearly two decades, Baz Luhrmann continued the revival of the movie musical with Moulin Rouge! (2001). This was followed by a series of film musicals, including Chicago in 2002; Phantom of the Opera in 2004; Dreamgirls in 2006; Hairspray, Across the Universe, Enchanted and Sweeney Todd all in 2007; Mamma Mia! in 2008; Nine in 2009; and Burlesque in 2010. Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (2000) and The Cat in the Hat (2003), turned children's books into live-action movie musicals. After the immense success of Disney and other houses with animated film musicals beginning with The Little Mermaid in 1989 and running throughout the 1990s (including some more adult-themed films, like South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut (1999)), fewer animated movie musicals were released in the first decade of the 21st century. The genre made a comeback beginning in 2010 with Tangled (2010) and Rio (2011). In Asia, India continues to produce numerous "Bollywood" film musicals, and Japan produces "Anime" and "Manga" film musicals.
Made for TV musical movies were popular in the 1990s, such as Gypsy (1993), Cinderella (1997) and Annie (1999). Several made for TV musicals in the first decade of the 21st century were adaptations of the stage version, such as South Pacific (2001), The Music Man (2003) and Once Upon A Mattress (2005), and a televised version of the stage musical Legally Blonde in 2007. Additionally, several musicals were filmed on stage and broadcast on Public Television, for example Contact in 2002 and Kiss Me, Kate and Oklahoma! in 2003. The made-for-TV musical High School Musical, and its several sequels, enjoyed particular success and were adapted for stage musicals and other media.
Some television shows have set episodes as a musical. Examples include episodes of Ally McBeal, Xena, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode Once More, with Feeling, That's So Raven, Daria, Oz, Scrubs (one episode was written by the creators of Avenue Q), Batman: The Brave and the Bold, episode "Mayhem of the Music Meister", and the 100th episode of That '70s Show, called That '70s Musical. Others have included scenes where characters suddenly begin singing and dancing in a musical-theatre style during an episode, such as in several episodes of The Simpsons, 30 Rock, Hannah Montana, South Park and Family Guy. The television series Cop Rock extensively used the musical format, as do the series Flight of the Conchords, Glee and "Smash".
There have also been musicals made for the internet, including Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, about a low-rent super-villain played by Neil Patrick Harris. It was written during the WGA writer's strike.[61] Several reality TV shows have been used to help market musical revivals by holding a competition to cast leads. Examples of these are How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?, Grease: You're the One that I Want!, Any Dream Will Do and Legally Blonde - The Musical: The Search for Elle Woods.
International musicals[link]
The U.S. and Britain were the most active sources of book musicals from the 19th century through much of the 20th century (although Europe produced various forms of popular light opera and operetta, for example Spanish Zarzuela, during that period and even earlier). However, the light musical stage in other countries has become more active in recent decades.
Musicals from other English-speaking countries (notably Australia and Canada) often do well locally, and occasionally even reach Broadway or the West End (e.g., The Boy from Oz and The Drowsy Chaperone). South Africa has an active musical theatre scene, with revues like African Footprint and Umoja and book musicals, such as Kat and the Kings and Sarafina! touring internationally. Locally, musicals like Vere, Love and Green Onions, Over the Rainbow: the all-new all-gay... extravaganza and Bangbroek Mountain and In Briefs – a queer little Musical have been produced successfully.
Successful musicals from continental Europe include shows from (among other countries) Germany (Elixier and Ludwig II), Austria (Tanz der Vampire, Elisabeth, Mozart! and Rebecca), Czech Republic (Angelika), France (Notre Dame de Paris, Les Misérables, Angélique, Marquise des Anges and Romeo & Juliette) and Spain (Hoy No Me Puedo Levantar).
Japan has recently seen the growth of an indigenous form of musical theatre, both animated and live action, mostly based on Anime and Manga, such as Kiki's Delivery Service and Tenimyu. The popular Sailor Moon metaseries has had twenty-nine Sailor Moon musicals, spanning thirteen years. Beginning in 1914, a series of popular revues have been performed by the all-female Takarazuka Revue, which currently fields five performing troupes. Elsewhere in Asia, the Indian Bollywood musical, mostly in the form of motion pictures, is tremendously successful. Hong Kong's first modern musical, produced in both Mandarin and Cantonese, is Snow.Wolf.Lake.
Other countries with an especially active musicals scene include the Netherlands, Italy, Sweden, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Russia, Turkey and China.[citation needed]
Relevance[link]
The Broadway League announced that in the 2007–08 season, 12.27 million tickets were purchased for Broadway shows for a gross sale amount of almost a billion dollars.[62] The League further reported that during the 2006–07 season, approximately 65% of Broadway tickets were purchased by tourists, and that foreign tourists were 16% of attendees.[63] (These figures do not include off-Broadway and smaller venues.) The Society of London Theatre reported that 2007 set a record for attendance in London. Total attendees in the major commercial and grant-aided theatres in Central London were 13.6 million, and total ticket revenues were £469.7 million.[64] Also the international musicals scene has been particularly active in recent years. However, as Stephen Sondheim has noted:
You have two kinds of shows on Broadway – revivals and the same kind of musicals over and over again, all spectacles. You get your tickets for The Lion King a year in advance, and essentially a family... pass on to their children the idea that that's what the theater is – a spectacular musical you see once a year, a stage version of a movie. It has nothing to do with theater at all. It has to do with seeing what is familiar.... I don't think the theatre will die per se, but it's never going to be what it was.... It's a tourist attraction."[65]
The success of original material like Urinetown, Avenue Q, Spelling Bee and In the Heights, as well as creative re-imaginings of film properties, including Thoroughly Modern Millie, Hairspray, Billy Elliot and The Color Purple, and plays-turned-musicals, such as Spring Awakening, prompts theatre historian John Kenrick to write: "Is the Musical dead? ...Absolutely not! Changing? Always! The musical has been changing ever since Offenbach did his first rewrite in the 1850s. And change is the clearest sign that the musical is still a living, growing genre. Will we ever return to the so-called 'golden age,' with musicals at the center of popular culture? Probably not. Public taste has undergone fundamental changes, and the commercial arts can only flow where the paying public allows."[14]
See also[link]
File:Yakshaganads.jpg
Yakshagana, a form of musical drama from India that involves dance, songs and dialogue
- Related forms
- Cast recording
- Chinese Opera
- Classical Indian dance
- Show tunes
- Industrial musical
- Yakshagana (Indian art form)
- General
- Theatre
- List of musicals
- List of musicals by composer
- List of the longest-running Broadway shows
- Long-running musical theatre productions
- List of Tony Award and Olivier Award winning musicals
- AFI's Greatest Movie Musicals
Notes[link]
- ^ Morley 1987, p.15.
- ^ Everett 2002, p. 137
- ^ a b Rubin, Don; [[Carlos Solórzano |Solórzano, Carlos]], eds. (2000). The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre: The Americas. New York City: Routledge. p. 438. ISBN 0-415-05929-1.
- ^ Brantley, Ben (March 28, 2008). "Curtain Up! It’s Patti’s Turn at ‘Gypsy’". The New York Times. http://theater2.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/theater/reviews/28gyps.html?pagewanted=all. Retrieved May 26, 2009.
- ^ "Porgy and Bess: That old black magic", The Independent, October 27, 2006, accessed November 1, 2009
- ^ Lister, David. "The Royal Opera opens a window on Sondheim", The Independent, April 5, 2003, accessed November 1, 2009
- ^ Teachout, Terry. "Sweeney Todd", National Endowment for the Arts website, accessed November 1, 2009
- ^ White, Michael (December 15, 2003). "Something for the weekend, sir?". London: The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/something-for-the-weekend-sir-576691.html. Retrieved May 26, 2009.
- ^ Gokulsing, 2004, p. 98.
- ^ "Mini Musicals", labyrinth.net.au, Cenarth Fox, 2001, accessed 22 January 2010
- ^ "Theatre Latte Da takes foray into mini-musical form". Star Tribune. March 30, 2002. http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=MN&p_theme=mn&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&p_topdoc=1&p_text_direct-0=11E2D982E50C11E0&p_field_direct-0=document_id&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&s_trackval=GooglePM. Retrieved 15 January 2010. (registration required)
- ^ Thornton, Shay (2007). "A Wonderful Life" (PDF). Houston, TX: Theatre Under the Stars. p. 2. Archived from the original on November 27, 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20071127051412/http://www.tuts.com/season07/wonderful_study.pdf. Retrieved May 26, 2009.
- ^ Flinn 1997, p. 22.
- ^ a b c d e Kenrick, John (2003). "History of Stage Musicals". http://www.musicals101.com/erastage.htm. Retrieved May 26, 2009.
- ^ Hoppin 1978, pp. 180–181.
- ^ Lord 2003, p. 41
- ^ Lord 2003, p. 42
- ^ Buelow 2004, p. 26
- ^ Shakespeare 1998, p. 44.
- ^ a b Buelow 2004, p. 328
- ^ a b Carter and Butt 2005, p. 280
- ^ Parker 2001, p. 42.
- ^ a b c Gillan, Don (2007). "Longest Running Plays in London and New York". Stage Beauty. http://www.stagebeauty.net/th-frames.html?http&&&www.stagebeauty.net/th-longr.html. Retrieved May 26, 2009.
- ^ a b Wilmeth and Miller, p. 182.
- ^ Wilmeth and Miller, p. 56.
- ^ Allen 1991, p. 106.
- ^ Lubbock, Mark. "The Music of 'Musicals'". The Musical Times, Vol. 98, No. 1375 (September, 1957), pp. 483–85, Musical Times Publications Ltd., accessed 17 August 2010
- ^ Lubbock, Mark. "The Music of 'Musicals'", The Musical Times, Vol. 98, No. 1375 (September 1957), pp. 483–485 (Subscription required)
- ^ a b Bond, Jessie. Introduction to The Life and Reminiscences of Jessie Bond, reprinted at The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, accessed March 4, 2011
- ^ a b Kenrick, John. "G&S in the USA" at the musicals101 website The Cyber Encyclopedia of Musical Theatre, TV and Film (2008). Retrieved on 4 May 2012.
- ^ Jones, J. Bush. Our Musicals, Ourselves, pp. 10–11, 2003, Brandeis University Press: Lebanon, N.H. (2003) 1584653116
- ^ Bargainnier, Earl F. "W. S. Gilbert and American Musical Theatre", pp. 120–33, American Popular Music: Readings from the Popular Press by Timothy E. Scheurer, Popular Press, 1989 ISBN 0-87972-466-8
- ^ PG Wodehouse (1881–1975), guardian.co.uk, Retrieved on 21 May 2007
- ^ "List of allusions to G&S in Wodehouse". Home.lagrange.edu. http://home.lagrange.edu/arobinson/wodehousegilbert.htm. Retrieved 27 May 2009.
- ^ Meyerson, Harold and Ernest Harburg Who Put the Rainbow in the Wizard of Oz?: Yip Harburg, Lyricist, pp 15-17 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993, 1st paperback edition 1995)
- ^ Bradley (2005), p. 9
- ^ Mark Evan Swartz's Oz Before the Rainbow describes the enormous train trips required of the cast of the 1903 smash hit, The Wizard of Oz, which tour ran for nine years, including on the road. See Swartz, Mark Evan. "Oz Before the Rainbow: L. Frank Baum's 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' on Stage and Screen to 1939". The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000 ISBN 0-8018-6477-1
- ^ See, generally, Index to The Gaiety, a British musical theatre publication with articles about Victorian and Edwardian musical theatre. Accessed February 25, 2011
- ^ Kenrick, John. Basil Hood, Who's Who in Musicals: Additional Bios XII, Musicals101.com, 2004, accessed May 7, 2012
- ^ Jones 2003, pp. 10–11
- ^ a b c Bordman, Gerald. "Jerome David Kern: Innovator/Traditionalist", The Musical Quarterly, 1985, Vol. 71, No. 4, pp. 468–73
- ^ Lamb, Andrew (Spring, 1986). "From Pinafore to Porter: United States-United Kingdom Interactions in Musical Theater, 1879–1929". American Music (Chicago: University of Illinois Press) 4 (British-American Musical Interactions): 47. ISSN 07344392. JSTOR 3052183.
- ^ a b Lubbock 2002.
- ^ Kenrick, John. "History of Musical Film, 1927–30: Part II". Musicals101.com, 2004, accessed May 17, 2010
- ^ Information from the Pulitzer.org website
- ^ Connema, Richard (2000). "San Francisco: As Thousands Cheer and Dear World". TalkinBroadway.Org, Inc.. http://www.talkinbroadway.com/regional/sanfran/s75.html. Retrieved May 26, 2009.
- ^ a b Gordon, John Steele. Oklahoma'!'. Retrieved June 13, 2010
- ^ Everett 2002, p. 124.
- ^ Suskin, Steven (August 10, 2003). "On the Record: Ernest In Love, Marco Polo, Puppets and Maury Yeston". Playbill, Inc.. http://web.playbill.com/news/article/81129-ON_THE_RECORD_Ernest_In_Love_Marco_Polo_Puppets_and_Maury_Yeston. Retrieved May 26, 2009.
- ^ Rich, Frank (March 12, 2000). "Conversations with Sondheim". New York Times Magazine. http://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20000312mag-sondheim.html?scp=1&sq=conversations%20with%20sondheim&st=cse. Retrieved May 26, 2009.
- ^ World Encyclopedia, pp. 439–40
- ^ John Kander in conversation with Frank J. Oteri, April 7, 2010 NewMusicBox
- ^ Ward, Jonathan. "Recruit, Train and Motivate: The History of the Industrial Musical," March 2002, Perfect Sound Forever
- ^ Wollman, p. 12.
- ^ Laurents, Arthur (August 4, 1957). "The Growth of an Idea". New York Herald Tribune (Primate, LLC). Archived from the original on December 12, 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20071212040338/http://www.leonardbernstein.com/studio/element.asp?FeatID=8&AssetID=18. Retrieved May 26, 2009.
- ^ Horn 1991, p. 134.
- ^ Barnes, Clive. "Theater Review": A Chorus Line". The New York Times, May 22, 1975
- ^ Shaw, Pete (2006). "A glorious musical romp – with bite!". Broadway Baby. Archived from the original on September 28, 2007. http://web.archive.org/web/20070928043409/http://www.broadwaybaby.com/edinburgh/fringe/reviews/batboy. Retrieved May 26, 2009.
- ^ Blank, Matthew (March 1, 2011). "Broadway Rush, Lottery and Standing Room Only Policies". PlayBill. http://www.playbill.com/celebritybuzz/article/82428-Broadway-Rush-Lottery-and-Standing-Room-Only-Policies. Retrieved March 1, 2011.
- ^ Thoroughly Modern Millie at the IBDB database
- ^ Roush, Matt (June 30, 2008). "Exclusive: First Look at Joss Whedon's "Dr. Horrible"". TVGuide.com. http://www.tvguide.com/roush/Exclusive-Look-Joss-9886.aspx. Retrieved May 26, 2009.
- ^ "The Broadway League Announces 2007–2008 Broadway Theatre Season Results" (Press release). Broadway League. May 28, 2008. http://www.broadwayleague.com/index.php?url_identifier=press-releases&news=the-broadway-league-announces-2007-2008-broadway-theatre-season&type=news. Retrieved May 26, 2009.
- ^ "League Releases Annual "Demographics of the Broadway Audience Report" for 06-07" (Press release). Broadway League. November 5, 2007. http://www.broadwayleague.com/index.php?url_identifier=press-releases&news=league-releases-annual-demographics-of-the-broadway-audience-report&type=news. Retrieved May 26, 2009.
- ^ "Record Attendances as Theatreland celebrates 100 Years" (PDF) (Press release). Society of London Theatre. January 18, 2008. http://www.solt.co.uk/downloads/pdfs/pressroom/SOLT_180108.pdf. Retrieved May 26, 2009.
- ^ Rich, Frank. "Conversations with Sondheim". New York Times Magazine, March 12, 2000
References[link]
- Allen, Robert C. (c1991). Horrible prettiness: burlesque and American culture. University of North Carolina. p. 350. ISBN 978-0-8078-1960-9. http://books.google.com/?id=4IoXcZyKKJoC.
- Bradley, Ian (2005). Oh Joy! Oh Rapture! The Enduring Phenomenon of Gilbert and Sullivan. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-516700-7.
- Buelow, George J. (2004). A history of baroque music. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. p. 701. ISBN 978-0-253-34365-9.
- Carter, Tim; Butt, John, eds. (2005). The Cambridge history of seventeenth-century music. The Cambridge History of Music. 1. Cambridge University Press. p. 591. ISBN 978-0-521-79273-8. http://histories.cambridge.org/uid=12021/extract?id=chol9780521792738_CHOL9780521792738_root.
- Everett, William A.; Laird, Paul R., eds. (2002). The Cambridge companion to the musical. Cambridge companions to music. Cambridge University Press. p. 310. ISBN 978-0-521-79189-2.
- Flinn, Denny M. (c1997). Musical! : a grand tour : the rise, glory and fall of an American institution. New York: Schirmer Books. p. 556. ISBN 978-0-02-864610-7.
- Gokulsing, K. Moti; Dissanayake, Wimal (2004) [1998]. Indian popular cinema : a narrative of cultural change (Revised and updated ed.). Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham. p. 161. ISBN 978-1-85856-329-9.
- Hoppin, Richard H., ed. (1978). Anthology of medieval music. Norton introduction to music history. New York, NY: Norton. p. 177. ISBN 978-0-393-09080-2.
- Horn, Barbara Lee (1991). The age of Hair: evolution and impact of Broadway’s first rock musical. New York, NY: Greenwood Press. p. 166. ISBN 978-0-313-27564-7.
- Jones, John B. (2003). Our Musicals, Ourselves. Hanover: University Press of New England. p. 411. ISBN 978-1-58465-311-0. http://books.google.com/?id=WqQH31qkYNoC.
- Lord, Suzanne (2003). Brinkman, David. ed. Music from the age of Shakespeare : a cultural history. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. p. 236. ISBN 978-0-313-31713-2. http://books.google.com/?id=JLCJLjHoQ2gC.
- Lubbock, Mark (2002) [1962]. "American musical theatre: an introduction". The Complete Book of Light Opera . (1st ed.). London: Putnam. pp. 753–56. http://www.theatrehistory.com/american/musical030.html.
- Morley, Sheridan (c1987). Spread a little happiness : the first hundred years of the British musical. London: Thames and Hudson. p. 224. ISBN 978-0-500-01398-4.
- Parker, Roger, ed. (2001). The Oxford illustrated history of opera. Oxford illustrated histories (illustrated ed.). Oxford University Press. p. 541. ISBN 978-0-19-285445-2. http://books.google.com/?id=ffXPHfhaWksC.
- Shakespeare, William (1998) [First published 1623]. Orgel, Stephen. ed. The tempest. The Oxford Shakespeare. Oxford University Press. p. 248. ISBN 978-0-19-283414-0.
- Wilmeth, Don B.; Miller, Tice L., eds. (1996). Cambridge guide to American theatre (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-56444-1.
- Wollman, E. L. (2006). The Theater Will Rock: a History of the Rock Musical: From Hair to Hedwig. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. ISBN 0-472-11576-6.
Further reading[link]
- Bauch, Marc. The American Musical. Marburg, Germany: Tectum Verlag, 2003. ISBN 3-8288-8458-X
- Bauch, Marc. Themes and Topics of the American Musical after World War II. Marburg, Germany: Tectum Verlag, 2001. ISBN 3-8288-1141-8
- Bloom, Ken; Frank Vlastnik (2004-10-01). Broadway Musicals : The 101 Greatest Shows of All Time. New York, New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers. ISBN 1-57912-390-2.
- Botto, Louis (2002-09-01). Robert Viagas. ed. At This Theatre. Applause Books. ISBN 1-55783-566-7.
- Ganzl, Kurt. The Encyclopedia of Musical Theatre (3 Volumes). New York: Schirmer Books, 2001.
- Kantor, Michael; Laurence Maslon (2004). Broadway: the American musical. New York, New York: Bulfinch Press. ISBN 0-8212-2905-2.
- Mordden, Ethan (1999). Beautiful Mornin': The Broadway Musical in the 1940s. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-512851-6.
- Stempel, Larry. Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater (W.W. Norton, 2010) 826 pages; comprehensive history since the mid-19th century.
- Traubner, Richard. Operetta: A Theatrical History. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1983
External links[link]
- Internet Broadway Database – Cast and production lists, song lists and award lists
- Guidetomusicaltheatre.com – synopses, cast lists, song lists, etc.
- Musicals at the Yahoo! Directory
- Castalbumdb – Musical Cast Album Database
- Early musical theatre site with links to midi files and other information
- Playbill.com
- Aussietheatre.com Australia's leading musical theatre website
- "TIME Magazine" collection of Broadway's evolution
- "A History of Musicals". Theatre & Performance. Victoria and Albert Museum. http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/theatre_performance/features/history_of_musicals/index.html. Retrieved 2011-03-24.
http://wn.com/Musical_theatre
Related pages:
http://it.wn.com/Musical
http://cs.wn.com/Muzikál
http://id.wn.com/Teater musikal
http://es.wn.com/Musical
http://ru.wn.com/Мюзикл
http://nl.wn.com/Musical
http://pl.wn.com/Musical
http://fr.wn.com/Comédie musicale
http://de.wn.com/Musical
http://pt.wn.com/Teatro musical
This page contains text from Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_theatre
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
