Bernstein meets Broadway : collaborative art in a time of war
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Bernstein meets Broadway : collaborative art in a time of war
（Broadway legacies / Geoffrey Block, series editor）
Oxford University Press, c2014
- : hardcover
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [377]-380) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
A super-star of 20th-century music, Leonard Bernstein is famous for his multi-faceted artistic brilliance. Best-known on Broadway for "West Side Story," a tale of immigrant struggles and urban gang warfare, Bernstein thrived within the theater's collaborative artistic environments, and he forged a life-long commitment to advancing social justice.
In Bernstein Meets Broadway: Collaborative Art in a Time of War, award-winning author Carol J. Oja explores a youthful Bernstein-a twenty-something composer who was emerging in New York City during World War II. Devising an innovative framework, Oja constructs a wide-ranging cultural history that illuminates how Bernstein and his friends violated artistic and political boundaries to produce imaginative artistic results. At the core of her story are the Broadway musical On the Town, the
ballet Fancy Free, and a nightclub act called The Revuers. A brilliant group of collaborators joins Bernstein at center-stage, including the choreographer Jerome Robbins and the writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green. With the zeal of youth, they infused their art with progressive political ideals. On
the Town focused on sailors enjoying a day of shore leave, and it featured a mixed-race cast, contributing an important chapter to the desegregation of American performance. It projected an equitable inter-racial vision in an era when racial segregation was being enforced contentiously in the U.S. military. The show starred the dancer Sono Osato, even as her father was interned together with so many Japanese Americans. Fancy Free amiably encoded its own dissenting narratives. Based on a
controversial painting by Paul Cadmus, it grew out of a complex web of gay relationships.
Rather than chronicling art within like-minded categories, Oja instead explores cross-fertilizations across art forms and high-low divides. She draws on intensive archival research, FBI files, interviews with surviving cast members, and previously untapped criticism in African American newspapers and entertainment-trade journals to shape a compelling story of artistic crossover and wartime exigencies.
Table of Contents
- 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
by "Nielsen BookData"