Introduction
Section I: Ballet, Nightclubs, Broadway
1.Youthful Celebrity and Progressive Visions: Breaking Out with
Fancy Free
2. From Nightclubs to Broadway: The Revuers, Comedy Skits, and
Progressive Politics
3. Creating a Broadway Musical: The Conception and Debut of On the
Town
Section II: Staging Racial Politics
4. A Japanese American Star on Broadway: Sono Osato and "Exotic Ivy
Smith"
5. Desegregating Broadway: On the Town and Race
6. Biographies on Stage: On the Town's Black Conductor, Dancers,
and Singers
Section III: Musical Style
7. Crossover Composition: The Musical Styles of On the Town
8. On the Town After Dark: The Nightclub Scene
Section IV: Epilogue
Appendices
A. Discography and Videography of Fancy Free, On the Town, and The
Revuers
B. Scenario for Fancy Free
C. Cast List for On the Town on Opening Night
Index
Carol J. Oja is William Powell Mason Professor of Music and American Studies at Harvard University. She is author of Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s (2000), winner of the Irving Lowens Book Award from the Society for American Music.
Winner of the 2015 Music in American Culture Award from the
American Musicological Society
"Oja (Harvard) gives a full history of the musical, from its source
in the Jerome Robbins/Bernstein ballet Fancy Free and the cabaret
skits of the Revuers, a group led by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.
Oja covers the Broadway and road engagements, revivals, and the
film version. Recommended." --Choice
"Carol Oja has given us a vivid portrait of four superbly talented
young artists trying not only to create an exciting work for the
musical theater but, while they were at it, using their art to
'help make a better world'. A valuable and illuminating book."
--Sheldon Harnick
"This adventurously conceived, meticulously researched, elegantly
argued book offers a completely new perspective on Bernstein's
remarkable artistic partnerships as meetings of extraordinary
creativity, progressive politics, and spirited determination.
Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, this is American
musical theatre history at its very best." --Stacy Wolf, Professor
of Theater, Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University and
author of
Changed for Good: A Feminist History of the Broadway Musical
(2011)
"Carol J. Oja is an established and important scholar, and
Bernstein Meets Broadway reflects her characteristic thoroughness,
insight, and clear writing. On the Town is a groundbreaking show
obviously worthy of this excellent book-length study." --Larry
Starr, Ruth Sutton Waters Endowed Professor, University of
Washington
"Bernstein Meets Broadway is an outstanding exemplar of integrated
humanistic arts scholarship. Grounded in exhaustive archival
research, it offers bracing new insights on an important stage work
and its creators. It's also liberal in the best traditional sense
of the term: tolerant and generous and questioning, skeptical of
conventional wisdom and ideological platitudes." --Jeffrey Magee,
author of Irving Berlin's Musical Theater
"This is a book full of the rare joy of artistic creation and
collaboration. In recounting the making of On the Town Carol Oja
weaves wartime history, social mores, gender, racial politics,
dance, comedy and music into a fascinating and immensely
entertaining narrative that percolates with the brashness and
brilliance of the show's creators, Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Betty
Comden and Adoph Green. 'We were all 25 years old,' Bernstein later
said about
it, 'we were nothing but energy then.'" -- John Adams, composer
"Throughout this book Oja demonstrates clarity of thought,
precision of enquiry and meticulous research."--Studies in Theatre
and Performance
"An expert synthesis of traditionally disparate musicological
frameworks. Her text is at once a superlative narrative-one that
weaves together the untold stories and broad cultural contexts of a
seminal work of American musical theatre, On the Town, and its
antecedent, the ballet, Fancy Free-and a thoroughgoing analytical
study in American history, informed by extensive ethnography,
archival research, and the author's keen music-theoretical
sensibility."--American Music Review
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