Not just a catalog or reference book, but a highly astute, integrative cultural history.
A comprehensive critical analysis of significant Broadway shows from the 18th century to The Lion King and beyond.
Stempel (Music/Fordham Univ.) realized he had a near-impossible task, since early documentation is fragmented and that establishing firm categories for shows is difficult, even foolish. Yet he persevered, producing a volume that is informative, enlightening and entertaining. In the beginning, all American productions came from England; not until the late 19th century did a distinctly American musical-theater tradition began to emerge. The author takes a close look at some early productions—e.g., Uncle Tom’s Cabin—then examines the transition from minstrel shows to vaudeville. He spotlights the careers of some significant partnerships, many of whose names are largely forgotten today—e.g., Edward Harrigan, Tony Hart, Joseph Weber and Lew Fields—and turns his attention to the twin influences of operettas and light opera on popular theater in America. Stempel lingers in the 20th century, an undoubtedly fecund period, revisiting Tin Pan Alley and the careers of the superstars, including Al Jolson, Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Cole Porter, Flo Ziegfeld, the Gershwins, Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Lerner and Loewe. The author establishes useful distinctions between the revue, the musical play, opera on Broadway and the Broadway opera, and he crowns Guys and Dolls (1950) as musical comedy’s “masterpiece.” He takes swift glances at Off Broadway, Off-Off Broadway and alternative musicals, with particular attention to the record-setting The Fantasticks. He examines how Off Broadway productions began moving to Broadway and explores the careers and influences of Sondheim and the so-called “superdirectors” (like Bob Fosse and Michael Bennett). Ending with a consideration of the British invasion and with a category he calls the “movical” (Beauty and the Beast), Stempel stresses that Broadway still has a future.
Not just a catalog or reference book, but a highly astute, integrative cultural history.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-393-06715-6
Page Count: 832
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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