Packed with fascinating information, this is an impressive labor of love that should appeal to all Broadway fans.
What happens when Broadway’s musicals try to go Hollywood?
Mordden (On Sondheim: An Opinionated Guide, 2015, etc.) is probably the authority on the American musical and the perfect person to write about the important role of American songwriters and composers who looked west to ply their trade in Hollywood. As the author makes clear, these plans didn’t always work out. Hollywood had its mogul, control-freak producers who didn’t necessarily appreciate musicals, forced too many writers to work on a film, frequently cast the wrong people, and were fond of eliminating way too many songs in order to make a “better” movie. When silent films became talking films, they were able to add music and songs, little by little. The Jazz Singer showed it could be done. Irving Berlin’s great songs in films made audiences happy, but they still remained “Berlin-catalogue films” rather than true musicals. Realizing they needed the quality and prestige of the Broadway songwriters, Hollywood started hiring. The Gershwin brothers, George and Ira, brought consummate artistry to these new films. Top Hat, Shall We Dance, and Porgy and Bess showed what could be achieved, almost—Berlin was rarely involved in “planning or executing a project.” Then came Rodgers and Hart, whose Love Me Tonight is one of the great Hollywood musicals, perhaps the “greatest of all.” Here the songwriters’ art merged beautifully with “cinema’s ability to mash time and space together.” Jerome Kern’s Show Boat has both “epic” story and music. In 1962, Hollywood filmed with “respect” to Broadway by keeping Robert Preston for The Music Man. The pace picks up as Mordden describes a series of good film musicals, from Gypsy to The King and I to The Sound of Music. He’s not, however, much impressed by the many bio-musicals made about these songwriters. De-Lovely, about Cole Porter, is an “excrescence.”
Packed with fascinating information, this is an impressive labor of love that should appeal to all Broadway fans.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-19-939540-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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