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“A Gilbert is of no use without a Sullivan”—with those words, W. S. Gilbert summed up his reasons for persisting in his collaboration with Arthur Sullivan despite the combative nature of their relationship. In fact, this book suggests that the pair's success is a direct result of their personality clash, as each partner challenged the other to produce his best work. After research into the D'Oyly Carte collection of documents, the author offers a detailed account of Gilbert and Sullivan's starkly different backgrounds and long working partnership. Having survived an impoverished and insecure childhood, Gilbert flourished as a financially successful theatre professional, married happily, and established himself as a property owner. His sense of proprietorship extended beyond real estate, and he fought tenaciously to protect the integrity of his musical works. Sullivan, the product of a supportive family who nourished his talent, was much less satisfied with stability than his collaborator. His creative self-doubts and self-demands led to nervous and physical breakdowns, but also propelled the team to break the successful mode of their earliest work to produce more ambitious pieces of theatre, including The Mikado and The Yeoman of the Guard. This double biography offers previously unpublished draft librettos and personal letters.

One legacy of the 1960s sexual revolution was the “adult” musical of the 1970s. Influenced by the overwhelming success in 1968 of Hair, as well as by a series of rulings on the nature of obscenity, adult musicals proliferated in New York's theaters at a time when the city was teetering toward bankruptcy and tourism was on the decline. Typically structured like old-fashioned revues, shows like Let My People Come, The Faggot, and the long-running Oh! Calcutta! relied on nudity and simulated sex to attract audiences. Adult musicals disappeared almost entirely by the early 1980s, as the city's economy improved and the country grew more socially conservative; they have since been largely dismissed as a silly fad befitting a silly decade. Yet adult musicals reflect aspects of 1970s American culture at their messiest and thus at their most honest. Specifically, they emulate the country's rapidly changing, often contradictory attitudes about gender and sexuality at a time when the sexual revolution had given way to the gay and women's liberation movements. Hard Times examines adult musicals as reflective of the socioeconomic mood of New York City in the 1970s, the socio-sexual mores of the country in the decade following the sexual revolution, and contemporary debates about obscenity and art.

The widespread presence of jazz and blues in African American visual art has long been overlooked. This book makes the case for recognizing the music's importance, both as formal template and as explicit subject matter. Moving on from the use of iconic musical figures and motifs in Harlem Renaissance art, this collection explores the more allusive—and elusive—references to jazz and blues in a wide range of mostly contemporary visual artists. There are scholarly essays on the painters Rose Piper (Graham Lock), Norman Lewis (Sara Wood), Bob Thompson (Richard H. King), Romare Bearden (Robert G. O'Meally, Johannes Volz) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (Robert Farris Thompson), as well as an account of early blues advertising art (Paul Oliver) and a discussion of the photographs of Roy DeCarava (Richard Ings). These essays are interspersed with a series of in-depth interviews by Graham Lock, who talks to quilter Michael Cummings and painters Sam Middleton, Wadsworth Jarrell, Joe Overstreet, and Ellen Banks about their musical inspirations, and also looks at art's reciprocal effect on music in conversation with saxophonists Marty Ehrlich and Jane Ira Bloom. With numerous illustrations both in the book and on its companion website, this book reaffirms the significance of a fascinating and dynamic aspect of African American visual art that has been too long neglected.

This book tells the story of a boy from Tennessee who, armed with only an 8th grade education, an inexhaustible imagination, and an innate talent for dancing becomes the most prolific and popular choreographer of the glory days of the Hollywood musical. As luck would have it, Pan’s movie career began and ended working with Fred Astaire, the most famous dancer on film. The pair made nearly two dozen movies and television shows together and in Astaire, Pan found an artistic soul mate with whom he would develop a symbiotic relationship for the rest of his life. A devout Roman Catholic, Hermes was interested in perfecting the souls as well as the physical technique of his dancers and the book explores the profound effect he had on the lives of stars such as June Haver, Ann Miller, Rita Hayworth, Linda Darnell, Ginger Rogers, and Betty Grable. The book examines each of Pan’s eighty-nine films offering a panoramic view of Pan’s choreography from Flying Down to Rio in 1933 to Aiutami a sognare (Help Me Dream) in 1980 and comments on the development of Pan’s art throughout his fifty-year career. Although Pan lived what many considered a “blessed” life without scandal or controversy as a Catholic, homosexual, Tennessee gentleman living as one of the “A-List” of Hollywood’s elite, the book explores Pan’s personal conflicts and doubts, his uneasiness with the film community, his spiritual vocation as well as his artistic philosophies.

In this book, the older and less flamboyant of the Gershwin brothers at last steps out of the shadows to claim his due as one of American songwriting's most important and enduring innovators. The book traces the development of Ira Gershwin's lyrical art from his early love of light verse and Gilbert and Sullivan, through his apprentice work in Tin Pan Alley, to his emergence as a prominent writer during the golden era of Broadway and Hollywood musicals. This book reveals how Gershwin took the everyday speech of ordinary Americans and made it sing.

“The mob is always right” was the idea that charged Irving Berlin’s career in American popular music. Taking off from that claim, this book represents a wide-ranging exploration of America’s greatest songwriter and his role in creating twentieth-century musical theater. Drawing on past scholarly efforts and a vast store of recently released archival material, the book strives to break new ground in focusing on Irving Berlin’s half-century of work for the Broadway stage—a career that tracks the development of American musical theater itself. The book traces a fundamental paradigm shift from early twentieth-century values of variety entertainment, manifested in Berlin’s revues and revue-like comedies, to an increasing emphasis on coherent, well-crafted scripts for musical comedy, in which songs were more thoroughly integrated into the plot. Throughout, Berlin maintained a unique balance by fitting musical numbers tightly to their show contexts, and addressing their historical moment, while preserving their integrity as individual songs that could have their own lives in the musical marketplace as jazz and cabaret standards, and as popular classics whose sheet music enjoyed pride of place in the piano benches of American homes. Like Berlin’s songs and shows, the book is designed for a wide readership of musical theater aficionados as well as serious students of music, drama, and popular culture—and anyone interested in the story of a poor immigrant boy whose life and work expressed so well the American dream.

This collection of record notes, interviews, portraits, and reviews recalls the Charlie Parker-Dizzy Gillespie Dial Record sessions, Langston Hughes reading poetry to the sound of jazz, and Thelonius Monk recording for the Library of Congress. In addition, in this book there are profiles of such legendary performers as Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, Duke Ellington, and Fats Waller, and chapters on the importance of jazz history and a jazz-view of The Beatles.

This book presents the public triumphs and personal tragedies of Lorenz Hart, a true genius of the American musical theatre. It is based on many years of research, and interviews with Hart's friends and collaborators one by one, including a remarkable conversation with Richard Rodgers himself. A veritable who's who of Broadway's golden age, including Joshua Logan, Gene Kelly, George Abbott, and many more, recall their uncensored and often hilarious, sometimes poignant memories of the cigar-chomping wordsmith who composed some of the best lyrics ever concocted for the Broadway stage, but who remained forever lost and lonely in the crowds of hangers-on he attracted. A portrait of Hart emerges as a Renaissance and endearing bon vivant conflicted by his homosexuality and ultimately torn apart by alcoholism. This book pulls together the chaotic details of Hart's remarkable life, beginning with his bohemian upbringing in turn-of-the-century Harlem. Here are his first ventures into show business, and the twenty-four-year-old Hart's first meeting with the sixteen-year-old Richard Rodgers. But while success made Rodgers more confident, more musically daring, and more disciplined, for Hart the round of parties, wisecracks, and most of all drinking began to take more and more of a toll on his work. When Hart's unreliability forced Rodgers reluctantly to seek out another lyricist, Oscar Hammerstein II, and their collaboration resulted in the unprecedented artistic and commercial success of “Oklahoma,” Hart never truly recovered.

This book provides a comprehensive discussion of the genesis and performance history of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady. Using more than 500 previously unpublished letters from the papers of the producer Herman Levin, it traces the background of the show, from Shaw’s play Pygmalion to the opening night of the musical on Broadway in 1956. It also uses more than 3,000 archival manuscripts and a rehearsal script to propose a reappraisal of the ambiguous relationship between Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) and Eliza Doolittle (Julie Andrews). Finally, the book explores conflicting aspects of the reception of the show, both in critical writings and in performance.

This book is the most detailed production history to date of the original Broadway version of Cabaret, showing primarily how the show evolved from Christopher Isherwood's Berlin stories (especially the Sally Bowles novella), into John van Druten's stage play, a British film adaptation, and then the Broadway musical, conceived and directed by Harold Prince as an early concept musical or metamusical. The book shows how Prince was able to find his central metaphor that was appropriate to Weimar society as well as to American society in the sixties. It places this cabaret metaphor within a contextual history of cabaret. Tracing the gradual evolution of Joe Masteroff's libretto (through three versions), the book analyzes the musical's main metaphor, structure, music and lyrics (John Kander and Fred Ebb), design (sets by Boris Aronson, lighting by Jean Rosenthal, costumes by Patricia Zipprodt), choreography (Ron Field), casting, and rehearsals, arguing that though the original version was limited by social and political mores of its day, it set a new standard and path for the American musical, drawing attention to its own theatrical artifice (including camp). The book ends with an examination of the first London version (1968), Bob Fosse's 1972 film version, Hal Prince's 1987 Broadway remount, Sam Mendes's stunning 1998 production, Rufus Norris's London reimagining (2006), and Amanda Dehnert's new investigation for the Stratford Festival of Canada (2006), and it speculates on what the future holds for this musical. The book contains forty illustrations, full cast credits, and a bibliography.