| ||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Beautiful Mornin': The Broadway Musical in the 1940s for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
As always, Mordden is vastly knowledgeable, witty, and incisive in his judgments. His best writing is as sexy and slangy as a Cole Porter lyric ... Offers a dramatically different viewopoint from other, stodgier theater histories. Mordden is to be congratulated for such gems as his rescue of Cabin in the Sky from undeserved oblivion, and his frank and balanced analysis of muhc-picked-over classics like Annie Get Your Gun and Kiss Me Kate ... An essebtial book on Broadway. (Kirkus Reviews )
Product Description
'Music and girls are the soul of musical comedy,' one critic wrote, early in the 1940s. But this was the age that wanted more than melody and kickline form its musical shows. The form had been running on empty for too long, as a formula for the assembly of spare parts--star comics, generic loves songs, rumba dancers, Ethel Merman. If Rodgers and Hammerstein hadn't existed, Broadway would have had to invent them; and Oklahoma! and Carousel came along just in time to announce the New Formula for Writing Musicals: Don't have a formula. Instead, start with strong characters and atmosphere: Oklahoma!'s murderous romantic triangle set against a frontier society that has to learn what democracy is in order to deserve it; or Carousel's dysfunctional family seen in the context of class and gender war. With the vitality and occasionally outrageous humour that Ethan Mordden's readers take for granted, the author ranges through the decade's classics--Pal Joey, Lady in the Dark, On the Town, Annie Get Your Gun, Finian's Rainbow, Brigadoon, Kiss Me, Kate, South Pacific. He also covers illuminating trivia--the spy thriller The Lady Comes Across, whose star got so into her role that she suffered paranoid hallucinations and had to be hospitalized; the smutty Follow the Girls, damned as 'burlesque with a playbill' yet closing as the longest-run musical in Broadway history; Lute Song, in which Mary Martin and Nancy Reagan were Chinese; and the first 'concept' musicals, Allegro and Love Life. Amid the fun, something revolutionary occurs. The 1920s created the musical and the 1930s gave it politics. In the 1940s, it found its soul.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Reviews
There are no customer reviews yet on Amazon.co.uk.
5 star
4 star
3 star
2 star
1 star
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4 reviews
26 of 30 people found the following review helpful
Another masterpiece, even when walking the edge
22 Oct 1999
Format:Hardcover
Ethan Mordden is my favorite author of all time -- his breadth and depth of knowledge and critical acumen are utterly unsurpassed among writers on vintage American popular culture. In this book as in all of his others, the way he can, in a few quick, masterful strokes, make you feel like you are at an obscure, unrecorded musical which now exists only as yellowing files in a few libraries is nothing less than astounding. His combination of erudtion, wit and insight never fail to take my breath away. The decade-by-decade series of which this book is the third helps make life worth living, this one helping make sense of a particularly challenging ten years in musicals' history. Near the end, Mordden does indulge in some nervy speculations that could use some more backup, though. Was homophobia really the reason WHERE'S CHARLEY didn't get a cast album? If Porter's music for KISS ME, KATE was so good because he knew the score would be preserved on a record, then why didn't he keep writing at this level afterwards? Since SOUTH PACIFIC came at the end of the decade, we'd like it to be an apotheosis of the developments over that time, but would we really say that of this fine but chunky piece of work if it had come along in 1945? If the invention of the cast album was really why shows started running longer, then why have runs continued getting even longer since? Yet Mordden is such a treasure that one simply takes these as questions you wish you could take up with the master. Overall, no one writing in his bailiwick even approaches him; this book, like all of his work, is a national treasure.
A Superb Entry in This Series
3 April 2012
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Ethan Mordden is our greatest author on the history of American musical theatre. Wise, wise-cracking, insightful, historical, and celebratory all of his books on Broadway decades are gems. (Except, maybe, The Happiest Corpse.) Here Mordden explicates with clarity and passion just why the 1940's were so important for Broadway and for America.
4 of 12 people found the following review helpful
The Stars Shone ON Broadway With Songs.
31 Aug 2006
Format:Hardcover
The American musical on Broadway is invented in the 1920s, suffers an artistic setback in the financially oppressed and conservative 1930s, but at last reflowers for good in the 1940s. This is called the Golden Age of drama and music bonded together. Before, it was fit but primitive; it has become rich and sophisticated and has status, a powerful economic base, and became known globally important, like Coca Cola. The musical is American: democratic, fast-moving, and innovative.
They started as "revues" with a multitude of stars, like Jane Froman from Missouri, Ray Bolger, Jimmy Durante, Jackie Gleason, Ilka Chase (seems I remember seeing her on a game show in the 50s), Emmet Kelly, Ed Wynn, and Eddie Cantor. Eddie was in "Banjo Eyes" and was nicknamed such because of his outlandish makeup a la Al Jolson in the minstrels. Eddie was my star member of the Fisher Notes, the Eddie Fisher fanclub. Cantor is the person responsible for discovering Eddie in the Catskills and making him known to the teenbobbers of America. In the early 40s, Carol Channing was Dolly in "Hello Dolly" (one of Chuck's favorite songs to play) and Ethel Merman, the one with the very loud voice, was Gypsy Rose Lee's Mama in "Gypsy." She went from "Girl Crazy" in 1930 to "Gypsy" in 1959. A long career on Broadway and in the movies/
Some of the best songs came from this era: "Wunderbar," "So In Love," "Happy Talk," "This Nearly Was Mine," "Brush Up Your Shakespeare," and "A Cockeyed Optimist" are some examples of the variety in the Broadway musicals. The greatest was "Soliloquy" in 'Carousel,' and "Oh What A Beautiful Morning" from 'Oklahoma,' formerly the drama named "Green Grow the Lilacs." 'South Pacific' won the Pultizer Prize for drama but had some fantastic musical numbers. I loved the Irish 'Brigadoon' of the lost Shangrila which comes alive only one day each year. I loved Howard Keel as he appeared in 'The Vagabond King,' and Gene Kelly in 'On The Town.' 'Finiagan's Rainbow' was another Irish tale with jolly songs. "Only Make Believe" in 'Showboat' was moving and real. And who could ever forget 'Kiss Me Kate." There were black musicals totally like 'Carmen Jones,' and 'Cabin in the Sky.'
Helen Morgan was great in 'Showboat" (Howard Keel was the male star in the movie) and Mary Martin shone as nurse Forbush in 'South Pacific.' These are just a few of the music shows we will always remember, as those songs are still played on the radio today. The Forties on Broadway was just the beginning as things picked up considerably in the Fifties, and these were made into Technicolor movies for us who loved music to enjoy in air-conditioned comfort.
They started as "revues" with a multitude of stars, like Jane Froman from Missouri, Ray Bolger, Jimmy Durante, Jackie Gleason, Ilka Chase (seems I remember seeing her on a game show in the 50s), Emmet Kelly, Ed Wynn, and Eddie Cantor. Eddie was in "Banjo Eyes" and was nicknamed such because of his outlandish makeup a la Al Jolson in the minstrels. Eddie was my star member of the Fisher Notes, the Eddie Fisher fanclub. Cantor is the person responsible for discovering Eddie in the Catskills and making him known to the teenbobbers of America. In the early 40s, Carol Channing was Dolly in "Hello Dolly" (one of Chuck's favorite songs to play) and Ethel Merman, the one with the very loud voice, was Gypsy Rose Lee's Mama in "Gypsy." She went from "Girl Crazy" in 1930 to "Gypsy" in 1959. A long career on Broadway and in the movies/
Some of the best songs came from this era: "Wunderbar," "So In Love," "Happy Talk," "This Nearly Was Mine," "Brush Up Your Shakespeare," and "A Cockeyed Optimist" are some examples of the variety in the Broadway musicals. The greatest was "Soliloquy" in 'Carousel,' and "Oh What A Beautiful Morning" from 'Oklahoma,' formerly the drama named "Green Grow the Lilacs." 'South Pacific' won the Pultizer Prize for drama but had some fantastic musical numbers. I loved the Irish 'Brigadoon' of the lost Shangrila which comes alive only one day each year. I loved Howard Keel as he appeared in 'The Vagabond King,' and Gene Kelly in 'On The Town.' 'Finiagan's Rainbow' was another Irish tale with jolly songs. "Only Make Believe" in 'Showboat' was moving and real. And who could ever forget 'Kiss Me Kate." There were black musicals totally like 'Carmen Jones,' and 'Cabin in the Sky.'
Helen Morgan was great in 'Showboat" (Howard Keel was the male star in the movie) and Mary Martin shone as nurse Forbush in 'South Pacific.' These are just a few of the music shows we will always remember, as those songs are still played on the radio today. The Forties on Broadway was just the beginning as things picked up considerably in the Fifties, and these were made into Technicolor movies for us who loved music to enjoy in air-conditioned comfort.
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
