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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.

This is a study of the life and work of one of America’s most brilliant and inspiring composer-dramatists, Marc Blitzstein (1905–1964). A piano student of Alexander Siloti, and composition student of Rosario Scalero, Nadia Boulanger, and Arnold Schoenberg, Blitzstein innovatively combined serious and popular techniques and traditions in order to reach the large audience for radio, film, and Broadway shows, producing work, conditioned by Marxist perspectives, that spoke to the concerns of workers, immigrants, women, and minorities. His most successful works include the operas The Cradle Will Rock (1937) and Regina (1949, adapted from Lillian Hellman’s 1939 play, The Little Foxes), for which he wrote both the words and music, and his adaptation of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s The Threepenny Opera, which helped popularize that piece in English-speaking countries, and which yielded the hit song “Mack the Knife.” Other notable works include the opera No for an Answer, the Airborne Symphony for soloists, chorus, and orchestra, the ballet The Guests, and two late stage works, Reuben Reuben and Juno. Such works had, according to Leonard Bernstein, an “incalculable” influence on the American musical theater, and remain particularly noteworthy in terms of their musical prosody, their formal novelty, and their amalgam of serious and popular elements. This study considers other aspects of the composer’s life: his Jewish-Russian background and his childhood in Philadelphia; his activities as a pianist, critic, and translator; his marriage to the writer Eva Goldbeck and his relations with friends and colleagues; his involvement with various progressive social causes; his service in the Army as an entertainment specialist during World War II; his brush with anti-communist attacks; and his violent death in Martinique at age fifty-eight.

This book tells the behind-the-scenes story of the songs and scores written for the movie adventures of Ian Fleming's Agent 007 of the British Secret Service. The book looks at many aspects of the 50-year saga including the following: How the “James Bond Theme” was written at the last minute for Dr. No and how it became the subject of controversy, ending in a libel trial 40 years later in London's High Court. How Bond composer John Barry invented a new kind of action-adventure music for movies, and how despite writing immensely popular scores for Goldfinger, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice and eight other Bond films, he never received a single Academy Award nomination for his Bond music. Why Monty Norman preceded Barry, and why Paul McCartney, Marvin Hamlisch, Bill Conti, Michael Kamen, Eric Serra and David Arnold succeeded him as composers (and details of the Burt Bacharach and Michel Legrand scores for the “unofficial” Bond films). How top artists like Shirley Bassey, Tom Jones, Nancy Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Carly Simon, Madonna and others were convinced to record for 007, and how Frank Sinatra and Amy Winehouse almost did. How changes in the Bond sound reflected what was happening in pop and rock circles, from the twangy guitar of the Sean Connery era to a more sedate sound for Roger Moore, synthesizers for George Lazenby and Timothy Dalton, and a more contemporary approach for Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig. Each chapter also contains a “score highlights” box that examines each Bond score in detail, especially as relates to the commercially available soundtrack albums.

Drawing on archival research and including much new information, this book reveals how Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern created the Broadway musical Show Boat in the crucible of the Jazz Age to fit the talents of the show's original 1927 cast. After showing how major figures such as Paul Robeson and Helen Morgan defined the content of the show, the book goes on to detail how Show Boat was altered by later directors, choreographers, and performers to the end of the twentieth century. All the major New York productions are covered, plus five important London productions and four Hollywood versions. Again and again, the story of Show Boat circles back to the power of performers to remake the show. From its beginnings, Show Boat juxtaposed the talents of black and white performers and mixed the conventions of white-cast operetta and the black-cast musical. Bringing black and white onto the same stage—revealing the mixed-race roots of musical comedy—Show Boat stimulated creative artists and performers to renegotiate the color line as expressed in the American musical and, more broadly, with popular music and dance on the national stage during a century of profound social transformations.

This book explores the sonic dimension of film exhibition in Britain, from the emergence of cinema through to the introduction of synchronized sound. With contributions from many of the acknowledged experts on British silent film, as well as specialists on film music, the chapters provide an introduction to diverse aspect of early film sound: vocal performance (from lecturing and reciting to voicing the drama), music (from the forerunners of music for visual spectacle, to the impact of legislation and the development of an aesthetic), and performance in cinemas (from dancing and singalong films to live stage prologues, and even musical performances captured in British Pathé’s early sound shorts). Other topics include the sonic eclecticism of performances at the Film Society, British International Pictures’ first synchronized sound films, and the role of institutions such as the Musicians’ Union and the Performing Right Society in relation to cinema music and musicians.