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Showtime: A History of the Broadway Musical Theater
Showtime brings the history of Broadway musicals to life in a narrative as engaging as the subject itself. Beginning with the scandalous Astor Place Opera House riot of 1849, Larry Stempel traces the growth of musicals from minstrel shows and burlesques, through the golden age of Show Boat and Oklahoma!, to such groundbreaking works as Company and Rent.
Stempel describes t...more
Stempel describes t...more
Hardcover, 826 pages
Published
September 6th 2010
by W. W. Norton & Company
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Interesting stuff about the evolution of that quintessential American innovation, the Broadway musical, from Florence Ziegfield to Rogers and Hammerstein, Lerner and Loewe to Bernstein and Sondheim, on to the British invasion of Cameron Macintosh and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Stempel does a really comprehensive job of putting it all in context. A lot of deja vu for me personally, as in:
Hair has come to be viewed as a watershed in the history of American musicals. It opened up Broadway theater music t...more
Hair has come to be viewed as a watershed in the history of American musicals. It opened up Broadway theater music t...more
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Really enjoyed this book, read most of it on a cruise. Appreciated the analysis of American culture as well as the shows themselves. Missed any reference to Forbidden Broadway.
Prima
Fun book, if only to see how my favorite musicals fit into the history of Broadway. Of more interest to me was how Broadway "evolved", and Stempel was up to the task.
Meh. I found this to be a little dry in some areas. It's a good book for skimming through and picking out the interesting parts of the book.
Mar 14, 2012
Seniorprojectbooks
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
People interested in the history of theater
I read this about six months ago. Learning about the history of Broadway was very interesting, and it helped a lot with my senior project.
Really interesting read, super-comprehensive (sometimes too much so) historical account of the musical.
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Larry Stempel, an associate professor of music at Fordham University and a recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, was a member of Lehman Engel's BMI Musical Theater Workshop. He lives in Mount Vernon, New York.
More about Larry Stempel...
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